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WI: Bush Sr. Wins in 1992

TheKennedyMachine

TheKennedyMachine

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The 1992 election was one of the most significant elections of the 20th century. It had marked the end of a period of Republican dominance in American politics that began in 1968, as well as the end of the Greatest Generation's 32-year American rule.

It also brought the rise of the New Democrat and the introduction of neoliberalism into the Democratic Party.

What if it hadn’t?

What if, in some bizarre upset, George HW Bush had won a second term to the White House?
 
How big a win and what do the Congressional elections look like?

There were four Senate races where a 4 point swing would have seen Republican gains, but that just means a 53-47 Democrat majority instead of a 57-43 Democrat majority.

Stuff like the Defense of Marriage Act and Religious Freedom Restoration Act would still happen. The budget surpluses had as much to do with the Penny-Kasich budget stuff that got HW in trouble with the right than anything Clinton did; so the country's fiscal situation will still be positive.

It's not impossible the GOP gets a fifth term. There would be fatigue after 16 years, but the economy was strong, inflation was low, and unemployment was low.

Bush would be a more engaged foreign policy president than Clinton.

Some kind of welfare and entitlement reform probably happens still. There was broad bipartisan support for the idea.

Neoliberalism predated Bill Clinton. You already had the Atari Democrats in the 80s and fiscal hawks going back to the 70s. Even if a progressive president comes into office in 1996 or 2000, there won't be much of a stomach for sweeping progressive policy. There'd just be a defense of status quo programs.

No Clinton delays much of the emergence of administrative state creativity. The growth of the executive's oversight of agencies kicked off under Carter with the creation of OIRA (Office of Internal Regulatory Affairs) and started rolling under Reagan, but the practice of agencies 'reinterpreting' ambiguities in decades old statutes to find big new grants of authority in order to avoid having to get congressional approval started under Bill Clinton.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
How big a win and what do the Congressional elections look like?

There were four Senate races where a 4 point swing would have seen Republican gains, but that just means a 53-47 Democrat majority instead of a 57-43 Democrat majority.

Stuff like the Defense of Marriage Act and Religious Freedom Restoration Act would still happen. The budget surpluses had as much to do with the Penny-Kasich budget stuff that got HW in trouble with the right than anything Clinton did; so the country's fiscal situation will still be positive.

It's not impossible the GOP gets a fifth term. There would be fatigue after 16 years, but the economy was strong, inflation was low, and unemployment was low.

Bush would be a more engaged foreign policy president than Clinton.

Some kind of welfare and entitlement reform probably happens still. There was broad bipartisan support for the idea.

Neoliberalism predated Bill Clinton. You already had the Atari Democrats in the 80s and fiscal hawks going back to the 70s. Even if a progressive president comes into office in 1996 or 2000, there won't be much of a stomach for sweeping progressive policy. There'd just be a defense of status quo programs.

No Clinton delays much of the emergence of administrative state creativity. The growth of the executive's oversight of agencies kicked off under Carter with the creation of OIRA (Office of Internal Regulatory Affairs) and started rolling under Reagan, but the practice of agencies 'reinterpreting' ambiguities in decades old statutes to find big new grants of authority in order to avoid having to get congressional approval started under Bill Clinton.
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Who do we think would succeed Bush on January 20th, 1997? It’s obviously a Democrat, but who?

I lean to Biden?
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
Who do we think would succeed Bush on January 20th, 1997? It’s obviously a Democrat, but who?

I lean to Biden?
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I don't see why it's so obvious a Democrat beats Bush. Inflation was 2.95%, unemployment was 5.4%, and HW probably has an approval rating between the mid 50s and 60% based on Clinton's OTL figures.

Biden won the 2020 primary by default, as the only candidate not running for the left-flank of the party. Most Democrats are still self-identified moderates or conservatives, so he just soaked that all up. Plus he had the star power of already being VP. By contrast, every other time Biden considered running for President it went badly for him.

Ann Richards probably won't get beat in 1994 without the GOP landslide that year. She could run in 1996.
Mario Cuomo doesn't get beat in 1994 without the GOP landslide that year. He could run in 1996.
Al Gore, Tom Harkin, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerry, Jerry Brown, and Dick Gephardt could all try for the nomination too.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
I don't see why it's so obvious a Democrat beats Bush. Inflation was 2.95%, unemployment was 5.4%, and HW probably has an approval rating between the mid 50s and 60% based on Clinton's OTL figures.

Biden won the 2020 primary by default, as the only candidate not running for the left-flank of the party. Most Democrats are still self-identified moderates or conservatives, so he just soaked that all up. Plus he had the star power of already being VP. By contrast, every other time Biden considered running for President it went badly for him.

Ann Richards probably won't get beat in 1994 without the GOP landslide that year. She could run in 1996.
Mario Cuomo doesn't get beat in 1994 without the GOP landslide that year. He could run in 1996.
Al Gore, Tom Harkin, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerry, Jerry Brown, and Dick Gephardt could all try for the nomination too.
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Eeh, the ten year itch is a powerful thing and a party getting six terms in power seems pretty astonishing in the modern period-even FDR+Truman only pulled it off because of the whole Depression+WWII thing. And it seems a bit odd to seem that HW would have the same economy and performance ratings as Clinton.
 
Don't think 1992 was very consequential; can see it being lost by Tsongas, who was a charisma vacuum and was basically running on a very uninspiring ultra-centrism platform of our old friend a nice, clean balance sheet. When you look at where Tsongas was strong in the primaries it really feels like a failure ticket for a national election.

Most of the names mentioned for 1996 on the Democratic side in this scenario are just fandom picks IMO.
 
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Vidal said:
Wasn’t DOMA momentum due at least in part to Clinton trying to push gay servicemen serving openly and the subsequent passage of DADT?

without that bringing the argument up I’m not confident we get DOMA
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The trigger event for DOMA is usually cited as the Hawaii supreme court's fairly equivocal decision on the concept of legalising SSM in 1993.

The wider issues had absolutely been ongoing for some time before the attempt to abolish the military ban, which was precisely in response to the growing mainstreaming of gay rights within the Democratic Party. By the mid-nineties the plethora of state and local-level gay activism and anti-gay activism which the anti-gay activists could see would not be going entirely in their favour long-term makes a DOMA or something equivalent highly likely.
 
And yes, it's not at all a given that a Democrat will win in 1996. In an open contest with the economy in a much better shape than it was in 1992 there's absolutely no reason to write it off for the incumbent party. And the Republicans have some potentially strong nominees.

I would give the Democrats a mild edge but only because of this: four more years of Bush senior is going to continue to seriously discombobulate the Republican coalition, and make it more difficult for someone to thread the needle of the emergent nineties electoral college, and I think after four loses the Democrats would be absolutely laser-focused on electability; which is why most of the fandom picks (Ann Richards etc) are not very likely nominees.
 
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yea I mean I'm going off @Thande's correct IMO observation that the shelf life of of a typical government in a democracy is approximately a decade or a bit over, and the general gut instinct that there is only so long you can stay in government before you piss enough people off or something goes wrong
 
Roger II said:
yea I mean I'm going off @Thande's correct IMO observation that the shelf life of of a typical government in a democracy is approximately a decade or a bit over, and the general gut instinct that there is only so long you can stay in government before you piss enough people off or something goes wrong
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I think you can only take shit happens so far with a POD four or five years earlier. 1996 is remembered as a very boring election IOTL because the economy had been taken off the table and there was little of any major import happening domestically. That isn't the stuff that massive anti-incumbency mood is made of.

You can shovel some coal into the big divergence engine of course, but you're going to have to put your back into it if you want to get into 'the election can be written off for the Republicans' territory.
 
Elektronaut said:
I think you can only take shit happens so far with a POD four or five years earlier. 1996 is remembered as a very boring election IOTL because the economy had been taken off the table and there was little of any major import happening domestically. That isn't the stuff that massive anti-incumbency mood is made of.

You can shovel some coal into the big divergence engine of course, but you're going to have to put your back into it if you want to get into 'the election can be written off for the Republicans' territory.
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The good economy in the UK didn't save the Tories in 1997, they still lost in a landslide.
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
I can see the Democrats saying "fuck it" and nominating Ted Kennedy.

Bradley seems like a great option. Liberal, from the East Coast, great with working class voters.
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After Chapaquiddick, there was no chance of Ted Kennedy ever winning the nomination and it's not clear whether he even wanted to be President.
 
Elektronaut said:
Don't think 1992 was very consequential; can see it being lost by Tsongas, who was a charisma vacuum and was basically running on a very uninspiring ultra-centrism platform of our old friend a nice, clean balance sheet. When you look at where Tsongas was strong in the primaries it really feels like a failure ticket for a national election.

Most of the names mentioned for 1996 on the Democratic side in this scenario are just fandom picks IMO.
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Tsongas could have won Perot voters as he was a deficit hawi. Also, while pro-NAFTA, Tsongas was an economic nationalist with a hostile stance towards Japan.
 
Elektronaut said:
I think you can only take shit happens so far with a POD four or five years earlier. 1996 is remembered as a very boring election IOTL because the economy had been taken off the table and there was little of any major import happening domestically. That isn't the stuff that massive anti-incumbency mood is made of.

You can shovel some coal into the big divergence engine of course, but you're going to have to put your back into it if you want to get into 'the election can be written off for the Republicans' territory.
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The flip side of this is taht an extra four years of bush is *not* a guarantee of an equally boring election
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
I can see the Democrats saying "fuck it" and nominating Ted Kennedy.

Bradley seems like a great option. Liberal, from the East Coast, great with working class voters.
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always thought so as a New Herseyan growing up. But his 2000 campaign turned into a nothingburger.

the stakes in the Bradley Gore primary seemed low enough in 2000 I took advantage of Virginias open primary system to cross over for once to the Republicans who seemed to be like Canute against the tide of Gingrich-ism.
 
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