That made no sense as Mondale was the vice president to Jimmy Carter who was very unpopular and was voted out in a landslide. So you would think that they would try to go to someone who wasnt associated with Carter to run vs Reagan in 1984. Yah they would still lose big but it would be more like 1988 then 1984.
While he was Carter's VP, he still had strong ties to the Democratic coalition. I think that coalition had buyers remorse after the failed Carter presidency (they never trusted him but fell in line in 1976 against Ford) there was a feeling to return to business as usual. That combination of old & stale Democratic ideas vs. a "morning in America" of Reagan combined to doom Mondale.
Mondale's problems stemmed from his open advocacy of raising taxes, his poor pick of a VP candidate, his being stuck as the candidate of "special interests" and the rise of Jesse Jackson during the primaries, who never failed to remind swing voters of what they didn't like about the Democratic party.
The main issue that sunk Mondale, however, was the embracing of a unilateral Nuclear Freeze. This was a bad idea that Mondale endorsed because the liberal Democratic base (who was extremely far out from the mainstream in 1984) wanted to just stop increasing our nuclear arsenal, regardless of what the Soviets did. This was not where America was at, and this was, oddly enough, an area where Reagan was proven right and where his legacy was shaped.
