I wasn't old enough to vote yet in 1980 but I sure was aware of the election. At church camp that summer the counselor had solemnly warned us that if Reagan was elected we would not live to graduate high school. The Sunday before, the pastor had openly endorsed Carter after telling us that Reagan could "postpone the Second Coming indefinitely" by defeating "Gog and Magog" (which in that church were believed to be the USSR and China) before they could invade Israel. Of course, the press was walloping us every day with Reagan=bad, Carter=good rhetoric. But my dad and I were rooting for Reagan. I recall that I was building a model of the U.S.S. Missouri when the newsers unexpectedly called it for Reagan. I don't think it was even 8:00 yet.
The only sad person in the house was my granddad, an old union man who thought every Democrat was JFK (he'd have dropped dead if he'd lived to see Zero; he was an unrepentant segregationist). But he celebrated with us anyway. Those were good times!
Mondale made a laugh line out of asking rhetorically if his audience could imagine waking up the day after the election to a President Ronald Reagan, but the laugh was on him. A lot of people could imagine that, they just weren’t telling the pollsters.