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My Presidential Musings

E

Elektronaut

Effectively Stood Down
Location
The Legendarium of Gentleman Julius
Pronouns
He/Him
POD: Bush, rather than Dukakis gets the flu just before the second debate. Bush is at his worst, rambling, stumbling over lines, dropping the odd few good ole Bush Clan Gaffes. Dukakis somehow - some fucking how, children - manages to actually deliver his lines in response to 'that' question, the nation knows that the Dukakis family has suffered from crime and tragedy. On the whole he's on top form, he even manages to drop a few jokes. The press declares him the clear winner, Dukakis is totally energised going into the final weeks, the campaign finally gets its shit together, John Glenn gets really fucking angry about Bush pulling that shit, everybody cheers, Bush is left in a tailspin. It's not enough, but it's very respectable. Given the closeness though, Democrats are left feeling this is one that got away, and 'if only'. Like, if only Dukakis had ran a campaign before the final month.

Dukakis happily goes back to riding the T to work the day after.

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(Alternatively)

All of that, plus Dukakis just makes it over the line by a few thousand in Connecticut, while Bush in a Michigan campaign stop makes a Gary Hart-in-New Jersey 1984-style++ gaffe about the state.

The morning after the election, Dukakis wants to ride the T to work while a massive national media war erupts over the Michigan and Connecticut recounts - but they won't let him. Sasso and Estrich finally convince him after an hour that because he has a realistic shot at being president now, other things are more important. Recounts begin, everyone lawyers up, it takes ages to sort out - and then everyone realises that even if the results are certified it has to go to the House anyway.

Dukakis just wants to be governor and ride the T to work. It was Kitty and Jack Corrigan and Sasso who talked him into this.

The White House is a working palace, and he won't have to take mass transit to work, and that's not good.

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Bush's DUI is self-leaked by Rove at the back of the primary season, in the dead of the night. No October surprise, Bush wins a more decisive EC victory, and probably wins the popular vote as well. (10% of voters reported it making them reconsider their vote; both small and huge, considering the margins)

Post-1900 is even more convinced that Gore was three times an imbecile, and that he should have made more use of corrupt perjuring alleged rapist Bill Clinton, that unambiguous electoral asset. Christmas is cancelled. OTOH, without Bush coming into office with his legitimacy poisoned, maybe the politics of the noughties are a little less brittle. Right? Right? Well, okay, it's a faint hope.

(Interestingly, though this seems a commanding EC win relative to OTL, the numbers are actually only 301-237, which still makes it the closest race since Carter-Ford)

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Elektronaut said:
Bush's DUI is self-leaked by Rove at the back of the primary season, in the dead of the night. No October surprise, Bush wins a more decisive EC victory, and probably wins the popular vote as well. (10% of voters reported it making them reconsider their vote; both small and huge, considering the margins)

Post-1900 is even more convinced that Gore was three times an imbecile, and that he should have made more use of corrupt perjuring alleged rapist Bill Clinton, that unambiguous electoral asset. Christmas is cancelled. OTOH, without Bush coming into office with his legitimacy poisoned, maybe the politics of the noughties are a little less brittle. Right? Right? Well, okay, it's a faint hope.

(Interestingly, though this seems a commanding EC win relative to OTL, the numbers are actually only 301-237, which still makes it the closest race since Carter-Ford)

genusmap.php
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I imagine Nader would probably be targeted for backlash like OTL to an extent as well, as I think Bush won some states by a margin smaller than Nader's votes here--Oregon springs to mind.
 
Thande said:
I imagine Nader would probably be targeted for backlash like OTL to an extent as well, as I think Bush won some states by a margin smaller than Nader's votes here--Oregon springs to mind.
Click to expand...

What I was thinking about was whether the dissection of the Nader vote has a slower, longer burn than OTL. Without the microscope plunging immediately onto the ins and outs of the Florida vote, and associated recriminations, whether it's an issue which instead is more a steadier part of commentariat backs and forths in 2000-2003. I don't know how that influences the Dem invisible primary, but I can't see there being an automatic assumption that vote will come home without OTL's stark demonstration of the effect of voting third party. I feel like that all pushes things in a Deanesque direction, but I'm not sure.

I'm also wondering how much credit the 2004 nominee gets for (potentially) winning back all of WI, NH, IA, NM and Oregon, and how close they can take the popular vote. I guess this is just a 'shit happens' rumination, but given the underlying close polarisation, it's possible we get the 2004 nominee inhabiting a Gore-like rockstar martyr role and coming back in 2008. (As Kerry tried to do)
 
Elektronaut said:
What I was thinking about was whether the dissection of the Nader vote has a slower, longer burn than OTL. Without the microscope plunging immediately onto the ins and outs of the Florida vote, and associated recriminations, whether it's an issue which instead is more a steadier part of commentariat backs and forths in 2000-2003. I don't know how that influences the Dem invisible primary, but I can't see there being an automatic assumption that vote will come home without OTL's stark demonstration of the effect of voting third party. I feel like that all pushes thing in a Deanesque direction, but I'm not sure.
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Yes, that is a good point. The other consequence of course is we don't end up with red Republicans and blue Democrats being fixed as party colours without the laser-like focus on Florida and election maps for weeks.
 
Thande said:
Yes, that is a good point. The other consequence of course is we don't end up with red Republicans and blue Democrats being fixed as party colours without the laser-like focus on Florida and election maps for weeks.
Click to expand...

I'm interested in how people who do wikiboxes which chart PODs decades before that never vary the colours. I guess it's reader accessibility, I imagine most of the people consuming wikiboxes now were born after 2000, let alone have any chance of remembering it.
 
Elektronaut said:
I'm interested in how people who do wikiboxes which chart PODs decades before that never vary the colours. I guess it's reader accessibility, I imagine most of the people consuming wikiboxes now were born after 2000, let alone have any chance of remembering it.
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A few people do, but not many. I remember Archangel Michael had orange Democrats and blue Republicans, and @Turquoise Blue does it sometimes.
 
Thande said:
A few people do, but not many. I remember Archangel Michael had orange Democrats and blue Republicans, and @Turquoise Blue does it sometimes.
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Weirdly, I often use Blue Democrats and Orange Republicans.

one of my favourites is a wikibox I saw where someone had done Silver Democrats and Gold Republicans which just tickled me
 
Mumby said:
Weirdly, I often use Blue Democrats and Orange Republicans.

one of my favourites is a wikibox I saw where someone had done Silver Democrats and Gold Republicans which just tickled me
Click to expand...
Which was almost an actual thing in the era when that was the big question, of course, although obviously in most media at the time it would have just been done with black and speckled or whatever--this is a rarity.

brm2136-silver-dog-with-golden-tail-2000x1527.jpg


Also note that apparently Ontario votes Democratic.
 
Thande said:
Which was almost an actual thing in the era when that was the big question, of course, although obviously in most media at the time it would have just been done with black and speckled or whatever--this is a rarity.

Also note that apparently Ontario votes Democratic.
Click to expand...

and west virginia has a coast
 
1984: Reagan fluffs his lines in the second debate, and the actual OTL inattentiveness of that debate is not erased by 'youth and inexperience'. The issue of the president's competence, a question arising from the first debate, is re-affirmed going into the final stretch. It isn't remotely enough to change the result but it does result in what the first debate broo-hah-hah seemed to indicate in a narrowing race. (I went with about a four point uniform swing just to keep the college a bit more interesting, though I think that's at the ambitious end of the narrowing. Wisconsin has the strange honour of being a genuinely close toss of the coin state here. I gave it to Mondale because Divergence!)

The eighties farm crisis will be a bit more obvious with this map and 1988, and the Reagan Democrat phenomenon probably seems a bit less monolithic. (I think this map would make Reagan the first GOP president to lose both New York and Pennsylvania)

I guess it's possible that whoever is nominated in 1988 doesn't have such a pie-in-the-sky view of the electoral college as the Dukakis campaign did until very late in the day.

Mitch McConnell loses his senate race, Jesse Helms possibly does as well. Jim Hunt potentially becomes a very viable contender for both the 1988 and 1992 nominations if so, though I'm not sure I get a sense he's particularly that way inclined.

418-120 and a ten point loss in the popular vote. It's still pretty comfortable but this is more of an OTL 1988 replication than another McGovern. TTL won't have a complete looking glass onto our reality but this is still some way below what the polling indicated (As the OTL result was relative to some polls taken during the campaign) and not what the Reagan campaign were really expecting.

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Thande said:
I like how your scenarios aren't just about crash bang OTL loser wins because shut up reasons. Politics can be changed a lot by a race having the same overall outcome but by the campaign and margins being rather different.
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Thanks. I think there's a lot of scope for different psychological impacts in even fairly mildly diverged results, and that can have potentially significant effects. People also forget the knock-ons shifting the race a little can have.

I don't think Reagan was hugely vulnerable in 84 but I think the result could have been a little closer. There's a risk in believing the OTL margin was set in stone from today's perspective, because that is completely outside our frame of reference, but we're dealing with a time when the electorate was a lot more politically loose and prone to bigger swings than now - and the electoral college reflects that as well. You had LBJ's landslide, Nixon's landslide, Reagan's landslides, and the relatively close 68 and 76 elections all within the space of twenty years. Reagan demolished Mondale with under-thirties. So it's more useful to regard the margin as indicative but not insoluble. In alternate timelines I think it's possible you get old-style Democratic landslides as late as the eighties as well.

The economy was better than 1980 but not hugely. Inflation and growth had turned around but unemployment was still pretty electorally awful by historical standards. The perspective though was one of relative improvement considering this was an electorate which had lived through the entirety of the seventies. You can tell that absolutely nobody wanted to go back to the Carter years and this was one of Mondale's big drag factors.

Then you add in an exhausting and financially draining primary season in which Mondale could have lost the nomination, should really have lost the nomination, and then barely hauled his backside over the line via superdelegates. And then Mondale's almost complete lack of tactical nous.

So yeah I don't think it's too surprising Reagan ran away with it. But polling at the start of the year had indicated a slightly closer race, almost touching on it being a competitive one.

I'm not sure what the psychological effects are here. On the one hand, Mondale hasn't totally disgraced himself and he's not been McGoverned or Goldwatered. The issue is of course that the closer you get the more belief there is that things could have gone differently with better decision-making/candidates. Though the polling we have suggests Hart would have done a little better than Mondale but not meaningfully, it's all too easy for low-info types or partisan narrative merchants to claim 'If only'*, particularly given how bad Mondale was as a nominee. As such I can see people believing what they want to believe from this result - New Dem types will think 'If only', and liberals will think 'If only Mondale had been a liberal Reagan'. The one thing they might share is in being less cowed by the Reagan mythology, but I'm not sure how that would play out in practical terms.

*Post-1900, for example, clearly believes that if Hart had been the nominee he would have won ITTL.
 
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