What if Raymond Lee Harvey had in fact assassinated Jimmy Carter on May 5, 1979? Walter Mondale becomes President in 1979? What would be the effects? How would Mondale handle Carter's OTL term? For one thing no crisis of confidence speech, Mondale argued to Carter it was not a crisis of confidence ailing America but an inflation crisis. How would America be effected by Carter being assassinated? What would Carter's reputation be? How would the 1980 election be effected? Would Ronald Reagan still be elected and the Reagan Revolution still happen? What if?
 
Mondale may get a boost in the polls but I believe Reagan will still win in a landslide,the Reagan Revolution might happen slower or to less of an extent.

However,one good thing for Carter's reputation is that he doesn't get hit with being ineffective during the Iran Hostage Crisis,that will go to Mondale and hurt him hard.
 
A few thoughts on this:

May 1979 was the beginning of a particularly pivotal few months in the Carter Administration. There are a few obvious butterflies that come from this. The first is that this is going to make it really awkward for Ted Kennedy to jump into the race. I'm not saying that he won't necessarily, but it won't look good if he does. The second is that this may well keep Paul Volcker out of the Fed Chair job, which was the result of a Carter Cabinet shuffle that summer. The third is that the public anger at the Iranian hostage situation, if that still happens, is going to be all that much more intense.

Mondale is going to enter office with a huge reservoir of public goodwill and his approval rating is going to be north of 75%. Now, that can certainly disappear over the next 18 months, and it well may, but he will be in a superior political position than Carter was by a very substantial margin. He will be viewed as a man thrust into a very difficult position by a public mourning a martyred President and the instinct will be to rally around the new President and avoid criticism for some interval. If this forces Kennedy to refrain from running, he will have a united party behind him and no or token primary opposition.

The absence of Volcker from the Fed will help Mondale politically. While one can argue that the 1980 interest rate hikes were necessary to combat inflation, they were not politically helpful to Carter. Without them, things could seem a bit better to voters, who might then be a bit more reluctant to swallow the Reagan medicine.

If Mondale does manage to win in 1980 and 1984 (he'd be eligible), you could be looking at almost a 10 year presidency, the longest since FDR. If the economy manages to right itself and the Soviet Union collapses within roughly the same time frame, Mondale could go down as a great President.
 
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