I was there and I can tell you two things with absolute truth:

• He was a real piece of shit President from the start, no one except the GOP base was fooled, same as today
• In the absence of “her emails” or a russian-backed influence and money campaign, the GOP literally asked Iran to hold the hostages from the American embassy until the election was over to hurt Carter. “Nightline” ran every night saying how much Carter sucked. And it did hurt his election tremendously. If that didn’t tell you what you needed to know, then the next several decades’ worth of slide-into-abject-fascism was not going to be noticed either. (And, as we can plainly see, it wasn’t)