1996: Bill Clinton vs. Colin Powell vs. Ross Perot

Lets say General Colin Powell runs for and wins the 1996 republican nomination. How does the ‘96 election go?
 
Buchanan runs third party as Powell is pro choice. Perot does worse, Clinton does better in the south while doing worse in the north, but still wins the election. In a two man race, Powell has a legit chance IMHO, something no other Republican Politician in 1996 had.
 
Powell wins.

Man was a war hero, a political maverick, and as Trump proves, pro-choice is no deal breaker so long as the VP nominee is deeply pro-life, and the opponent is a loathed liberal Democrat. Toss in the fact that he's the first black presidential candidate - Republican or not, there would be some splitting of the African American vote - and Powell has close to a lock on it.

Clinton, at this point, is unpopular - the economy was just starting to pick up, and the memories of Hillarycare had just been enough to see the GOP take control of Congress in 94.

Perot, like in OTL 1996, is dead in the water.
 
Powell was pro-choice on abortion, pro-gun-control, and pro-affirmative action. Anyone who thinks he could have won the GOP nomination in 1996 "because he was a war hero" IMO totally misunderstands the modern Republican Party. (This is even overlooking outright racism which while not prevalent in the party was by no means negligible.) He called himself a "Rockefeller Republican"--and to conservatives Nelson Rockefeller was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the "old" Republican Party. Ever since Goldwater's nomination in 1964, GOP presidential candidates (and even vice-presidential candidates!) have had to be acceptable to the Right. Not necessarily their first choice, but at least acceptable. Powell was not acceptable on the Right except to the "national greatness conservatives" (David Brooks, Bill Kristol) at the Weekly Standard and theirs was very much a minority viewpoint among conservatives. Pat Buchanan threatened to run as a third- (or fourth?) party candidate if Powell were even nominated for vice-president.

I agree that if somehow Powell gets the nomination, he could win. An exit poll in 1996 showed Powell: 50 percent, Clinton: 38 percent, Perot: 9 percent. https://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2007/02/1996_exit_poll_.html This sort of poll has to be interpreted with caution. First of all, it doesn't have a hypothetical right-wing fourth party candidate who would presumably take conservative Republican votes from Powell. Second, as the article I cited indicates "Bill Clinton and Bob Dole had just been through bruising year-long campaigns and exposed to more than $100 million of take-no-prisoners advertising. Colin Powell had not. He was still being acclaimed for his role as the country’s top soldier in its only clear victory since World War II." Of course you're going to get high poll rankings when everyone is praising you and nobody attacking you!

Nevertheless, with all these qualifications, I still think Powell could win if nominated. But I am deeply skeptical that he could have been nominated. Even though his views on social issues had not yet been subject to serious attack (as would have happened had he actually entered the race) he was far from an overwhelming favorite in the polls among Republicans (despite his strength in general-election polls). Even at the height of Powell-mania in late 1995 (just before he announced his decision not to run) "his support among party members was equal to that of Dole." https://books.google.com/books?id=8vvXm-fQeDIC&pg=PA22 And it's not hard to imagine where Republicans who backed some white conservative candidate to the right of Dole would have voted in the primaries if it came down to a Dole vs. Powell match.
 
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Yep. All of this. The idea of Powell being nominated in a post-Lee Atwater Republican primary is farfetched.

The war hero thing is just not gonna be enough. You guys remember what happened in South Carolina in 2000? A bunch of conservatives who were Definitely In No Way Working For Karl Rove absolutely smeared John McCain in the primary. A massive blitz of innuendo, dogwhistles, outright lies, and race-baiting destroyed John McCain’s numbers there. They said he had fathered a “negro” child out of wedlock. That his wife Cindy was a drug addict. He gave VD to his previous wife. In addition to that, he was gay, and supported a “F*g Army.” He was a "Manchurian Candidate.” The war had messed up his brain. He’d abandoned Vietnam vets and POWs.

Colin Powell is black, pro-choice, and has a wife who publicly talked about her struggles with mental illness. Any Republican primary candidate who needed a boost in the polls knew exactly where in the playbook to draw from. And it would work. Especially on abortion, it would devastate his chances. McCain had to move significantly to the right to win in 2008, and he was already more conservative than Powell.

The other problem is that I don’t think Powell would have a base in the Republican primary — there’d be a number of people who liked or respected him, but it’s 1996, foreign policy is not a priority, and while the modern Republicans have always identified as a pro-military party, there’s not really a steadfast Military Guy lane. There’s a Lower Taxes lane. There’s a Stop Abortion lane, etc. But I don’t think Powell would get much first-choice passionate support in a ‘96 primary as a National Defense Republican, and he certainly won’t as a Social Liberal Republican.

But in a general election, he’d do well, much better than Bob Dole, I think. Probably not to the extent of the polls but he could win. It’s nominating him that’s so improbable.
 
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