WI Mitt Romney Nominated in 2008

[Ol'GarryBoldwater]

As for who would be nominated in 2012 maybe Mitch Daniels. Solid Conservative, fiscally and socially, passed Right to work legislation and was supported by many who found OTL Romney uninspiring. Also for Mitt's VP you could have someone like Pawlenty, as was mentioned earlier, maybe some Southern Evangelical. Huck is the obvious choice however there are others.

 

[President Farrakhan]

Mitch Daniels, on paper, should have been a serious contender in 2012. In reality, he couldn't even touch the poll support of jokers like Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Santorum. He floated the ideas of downplaying a losing culture war for pragmatism's sake and ignoring Bill Kristol's stupid foreign policy advice. This trial balloon went over like a ton of bricks.

His sober temperament is completely wrong for a voter base hermetically sealed in a hysterical Drudge/Fox News bubble. If it was a party of Daniel Larisons, he'd be the front runner.

 

[Whanztastic]

Does everyone forget about Mitch Daniels's marital history - divorce, messy divorce, remarriage to his ex? No way he wants to expose that to the scrutiny of a run for President.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

Without Palin as his VP, McCain would have done much worse. IIRC, there were polls showing him losing Montana and the Dakotas before he chose her. The base did not like McCain, and she fired them up like nothing else.

And Romney could easily have some sort of "47%"-type statement during the financial collapse that would be worse than anything McCain said.

That's all true. But McCain demonstrated such erratic behavior that it really undermined confidence in his judgement. Seriously, he "suspended" his campaign to return to Washington. No gravitas or composure whatsoever. Further, even though the hardcore base might have liked Palin, everything she did after the convention really undermined the perception of her competence. Think about her statements regarding Russia back then.

Ultimately this is a race to the bottom about who is less bad. Debating who is better between McCain and Romney is like debating whose fart smells better. They both stink.

 

[SlideAway]

McCain had respectability across the board. Albeit he did end up squandering it. He was a moderate, had an honorable service record, could work with others (there's a word for that which I can't recall given we've had nearly eight years of a Washington militantly without it), and enticed Republicans, Independents and Democrats. He was seen as who we should have had instead of Bush for most of those eight years of the Bush administration. The part where he squandered it was by going hard to the Right to win the election and totally undermining all that.

The thing about 2008 is that any Republican that years is like a Republican running in 1928. It doesn't matter who ran, nor how respectable a candidate. The Democrat is going to win thoroughly; it was totally an issue of whoever won the Democratic nomination was (but maybe not) going to win the presidency. And this was a time when even the people who would become Tea Party people would support Obama or Clinton (before the news/political sphere made everyone think they were living in some kind of movie version of reality). Not to say the seed of that type of Conservative movement wasn't already there; I recall people losing their minds, and "redistributing the wealth", "Socialist" and talking about "he's gonna be shot anyway" and all that. But it wasn't so loud and widespread and serious.

Romney honestly had none of whatever McCain had. He won't inspire the base, and he'll be seen as a sign of what was wrong at the moment; the extremely rich who tanked the economy, and how the Republican party is in that camp. That is what the election will become. You can cry "Socialist" all you want, and it will stick because that whole socio-political sphere is what it is in America (which is a hell of a lot of people who have opinions but not the cognition to properly form them) but that image of Romney as ultra-wealthy, privileged and out of touch is going to stick. And what is Romney going to say? He can't connect with the concerns of America in 2008, which is the economy and a major recession. He can't connect to people worried about their jobs and their economic well beings, or who already lost their jobs. He has to and will fail at doing so miserably.

The part about McCain squandering a lot of goodwill — between the Palin nomination and his erratic response to the financial crisis — is why I actually don't think Romney would have done much worse than McCain in the end. Despite McCain's high favorability numbers, he wound up losing independents and moderates to Obama by nearly 2 to 1. There just isn't a whole lot less for Romney to shed.

Plus a lot of Romney's polling weakness was with Republican voters, most of whom would eventually have come home due to partisan polarization. As a result, I don't think Romney's loss is that much more severe — probably loses by about the same margin. Maybe a point or two more at worst (something like 54-44-2 — larger share going to third party candidacies).

However, even if Romney did similarly to McCain in the popular vote, he would probably have done somewhat worse in the Electoral College. Romney would probably have lost Missouri and Arizona. Maybe Montana as well, though in the popular vote he might have offset this with somewhat better performance in northeastern suburbs and among Mormon voters in the West.

 

[SLCer]

Which is why McCain led or tied every single Florida poll after Palin's nomination until mid-September? And even then he still won most polls until late September?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State...ed_States_presidential_election,_2008#Florida

Look at the rest of that page. McCain kept his polling numbers up until late September in Ohio and Virginia. He kept it close in Pennsylvania until late September. He dominated North Carolina and Indiana as well until that point.

Beyond the financial meltdown, what else happened in September? You had Palin's meltdown. She brought initial success and then became a huge liability in a lot of swing states.

 

[Seleucus]

Frankly, it's hard to distinguish the effect of Palin (or any vice presidential candidate) on an election just because there are so many interwoven factors interacting with one another. We won't ever know how much of an impact Palin actually had. It is clear however the Palin is electoral poison *today*, but that's not necessarily true for 2008. (Just like Dick Cheney was actually very popular back in 2000. Polling consistently showed that he was more popular than Lieberman as a VP, in fact.)


It's only in TLs that we're able to see if certain VP picks were electoral poison or not thanks to having a basis for comparison.

 

[Sanderford]

I do agree that Romney being massacred in 2008 would have led to a conservative being nominated in 2012. Look at the situation in '80 when the recent memory of Ford, a moderate Republican being defeated by a milquetoast like Carter drove Republican leaders to actually look seriously at Ronald Reagan, whom they had done everything to keep out in the previous election because he was not a party man.