I respectfully disagree that Reagan did nothing to help Ford. I attended a Reagan-Dole event at the New Haven Park Plaza in ‘76, and while Reagan mostly attacked Carter, he also told us to vote fir the Eepublican ticket. The net effect was an assist to Ford.
With similar respect, I did not attend that event. My recollection of the 1976 Kansas City GOP national convention was that the delightfully noisy and disruptive Reagan delegates made it impossible for Ford to give his acceptance speech unless Reagan was allowed to speak to the convention first and that Reagan took to the podium to thank his delegates and to urge them to go home and work to elect their US senators and congressman, governors and state legislators and win a big victory-—nary a word about Ford on national TV. That was the equivalent of “Screw Ford and his pals and I’ll be back in four years.” If Reagan just said Republican ticket, I believe that what he meant did not include Ford or Dole. It doesn’t matter now but many of us who had led his effort took it that way and I am ashamed to say I voted for Ford in November, 1976, on the usual excuse that the Demonrat candidate Jimmuh Cahtuh was the boogie man and we just HAD to vote for yet another RINO that one LAST time-—at least according to the usual gang of DC Insiders/GOP-E suspects.