WI: Bush Sr. Wins in 1992

[zaffre]

1996 was such smooth sailing because Clinton was a fairly canny judge of the national mood and an incumbent besides - and even a cursory look at the Republican primary that year should tell people that their bench was really very bad. The US is also not the UK and generally not prone to opposition parties playing dead for over a decade.

So the main thing that could defeat the Democrats is themselves, which is where the *how* of losing 1992 becomes crucial. If it’s because Tsongas or Brown faceplanted, a southern moderate rebuilds the Clinton coalition in the ‘96 primaries and wins, handily.

If Clinton won the nomination and *then* lost, I’d be curious about the circumstances and the party would be in a much more uncertain place. The DLC might get a do over, but they might not - parties that have tried everything and still lost tend to get a bit agitated. I think most of the ’90s Great Liberal Hopes turned out to be paper tigers, running-for-president-wise, but even a tiger wins occasionally.

 

[History Learner]

1996 was such smooth sailing because Clinton was a fairly canny judge of the national mood and an incumbent besides - and even a cursory look at the Republican primary that year should tell people that their bench was really very bad. The US is also not the UK and generally not prone to opposition parties playing dead for over a decade.

So the main thing that could defeat the Democrats is themselves, which is where the *how* of losing 1992 becomes crucial. If it’s because Tsongas or Brown faceplanted, a southern moderate rebuilds the Clinton coalition in the ‘96 primaries and wins, handily.

Arguably because of the first paragraph. 1996 was bare for the same reason why 1992 was for the Dems; everyone expected an easy election victory for Clinton given the fundamentals, same way a lot of Dems wrote off challenging Bush in 1992.

 

[Simon]

… and it's not clear whether he even wanted to be President.

"Why do you want to be President?"

 

[Elektronaut]

The good economy in the UK didn't save the Tories in 1997, they still lost in a landslide.

Well, yes. Because the Tories had presided over a financial crisis, the remnant effects of the recession I.E with the likes of negative equity, jacked up taxes, and then had subsequently lost all cohesion as a governing force and firmly and doggedly stayed that way for literally a full 4 and a half years. At the same time as the opposition had initially fully matured as an alternative, and then later got very aggressive about vote-maximisation. Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong, to the point that the economic situation didn't loom large because people had tuned out years before by 1997.

The US is indeed not the UK, and there's been maybe, maybe, one (1) open (I.E without a sitting president running) presidential election in the last thirty-four years which you could say turned out to be a possible write-off for one of the two main parties. And that was against the backdrop of a very unpopular foreign war, an incumbent who was polling in the 20s% approval, and after the economy had crashed. All the other three open contests in that time have been competitive, two of them extremely competitive.

Unless you're anticipating things are as bad for the Republicans in the ATL 1996 as they were in OTL 2008, believing that they have absolutely no chance whatsoever is just either partisan bias or timeline logic.