By 4% swing they mean a shift of 8 points. So Bush 54, Cuomo 46 becomes 50-50. A 4% swing for one side is an 8 point move in a two party system.
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AHC: Cuomo vs Bush in 1988
- Thread starter Amadeus
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Bentsen is the logical choice for any Northeastern liberal: he is a well-respected moderate Democrat from Bush's home state. He even beat Bush himself in a 1970 Senate race. If not Bentsen, Cuomo might choose Gore. But Gore did poorly in the 1988 primaries and he's even younger than Quayle. Clinton is probably out of the running given his issues with women, which weren't politically dealt with at this point (the reason he didn't run in 1988).
Even with Bentsen, Dukakis lost TX by 12.60 points and LA by 10.21--well beyond his national margin of 7.73 percent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1988
I know, I know. Fundamentals mean nothing, and "a better campaign" can magically turn double-digit losses into victories. Political scientists may disagree, but what do they know?...
So? Bush loses in 1964 when LBJ made the Democrats unbeatable in Texas and in 1970 when he has to face a moderately conservative Democrat in what was still basically a moderately conservative Democratic state. Things had changed a lot by 1988, as is shown not only by Bush's OTL victory by over 12 points over Dukakis-Bentsen but also by the fact that Bush carried the state by better than three points in 1992 even though Perot (in Texas at least) almost certainly took more votes from him than from Clinton. Also, the fact that Clements had twice won election as governor shows that even on a non-presidential level, Texans were getting less attached to the Democratic Party.
True, as late as 1990, Ann Richards was able to win the governorship but that was against a guy making jokes about rape... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Williams
The fact is that in every single ex-Confederate state Dukakis did at least 2.5 points worse than his national average, and there is no reason to think that the same would not be true of Cuomo. At least with Dukakis, the choice of Bentsen could help him draw comparisons with JFK-LBJ in 1960. But really it would probably be a mistake for either Dukakis or Cuomo to choose a southern running mate if they thought that thereby they could carry any southern states.
I'm going to ignore your asinine attitude and say that without the South, and without both Ohio and New Jersey which Dukakis lost by just about as much as he did TX and Louisiana, no Democrat has a chance of cracking 300 electoral votes in 1988. And any electoral college victory would come by the skin of his teeth not unlike Bush Jr's victory in 2000. The fact is the mood of the country was very conservative by 1988, and while many people wanted to move on from Reagan they didn't want that much of a change so as to enable a Democrat by a large margin.
One thing that's often forgotten is that except in 1986, Cuomo wasn't that great a vote-getter even in New York politics. In 1990 the ease with which he won re-election (against divided opposition) has tended to obscure the fact that he got only 53 percent of the vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_gubernatorial_election,_1990 Yet people here assume he would have done much better than Dukakis, something for which I find little evidence.
Here, I have Cuomo lose every single Southern state - unless you count West Virginia and Maryland - but pick up South Dakota. (It's hard to believe that Dukakis did better in SD than in Texas and Louisiana, but he did). That gives him 280 to Bush's 258, making 1988 the narrowest election since 1960.
Regardless of a new president and probably some new committee chairs in Congress come Jan. ‘89, how much of the 1991 recession is already in the works?
Most of it, but given how mild the early '90's recession was, as long as Cuomo addresses the problem and makes it look like he gives a damn, I think he can win a second term, especially if Dole is the GOP nominee four years earlier than OTL. Bush had very little interest in domestic policy and was not a skilled politician, it was that that cost him in '92.
One big reason was that the Fed raised interest rates, in part to help alleviate the deficit. If Cuomo and the Democratic Congress take actions in 1989-90 that result in a smaller deficit, and perhaps if Greenspan is replaced at the Fed, then the recession is either butterflied or mitigated to the extent that it looks more like OTL 2001.
53% of the vote - against token opposition, it's worth emphasising. But I think this is more relevant to 1992 discussions and beyond than this question. (Seriously, that was his last nomination opportunity, Cuomo is a busted flush for an alt1996; the popularity of him as such a choice on this board is a very bad reading.)
In 1986 he had a perfectly good re-election. There's no doubt he'd cruise to the nomination in 1988 if he wanted it. He might actually win Iowa and New Hampshire and have the nomination done by Super Tuesday, because the field would be relatively cleared. Simon absolutely won't run if Cuomo does, Dukakis is also about 70/30 likely to not run also; Sasso was working off Cuomo's refusal, they recognised they weren't really viable with Cuomo in the mix. It's likely Sasso gets freed up to work on Cuomo's campaign. (He had good contacts with the NY gubnor)
The fundamentals really do favour Bush but I think the point about Dukakis running an abysmal campaign and still getting 46% is a good one. It's hard to see Cuomo doing worse, so the race can be potentially competitive if Bush slips up. And 1988 has obscured how bad a candidate Bush actually was.
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A 4% swing gives Cuomo the electoral college, and a victory in the popular vote by only .2%. IMO this reinforces the comparison to 1960 that I and other have made earlier. That said, it's worth questioning what will happen to Bush after 1988. Perhaps like Nixon he'll face calls to run for Governor in 1990 then face Cuomo in a rematch, or he'll retire from politics and George W. is elected Governor of Texas in 1990 - making him the Republican frontrunner in 1996.
To me, economics is almost biologically complex and I mean that as a compliment of the field. As an example of biology and medicine, consider Lyme disease in which some people don't get sick, others get medium sick, and some get really sick, and very, very hard to predict in advance. (As an interesting aside about Lyme, most humans get infected from the smaller and harder-to-see nymphal stage of the ticks, in which the ticks can remain undetected and attached to the body for longer.)
So, yes, I'm open to the idea that too abrupt deficit reduction may have been one contributing cause. But then, booms and busts are semi-cyclical in a hard to predict way. There's a lot on the table.
I very much disagree.
The '91 recession was the fall from grace, and when "downsizing" become a trendy corporate word, and the feeling was that it could very much affect your job, too.
This book talks about multiple waves of downsizing, including during the rather weak recovery from the '91 recession.
It was mild compared to most post war recessions. Only 2001 and maybe 1969 were more mild.
And of course, George W. Bush and Nixon were re-elected anyway. If Cuomo and Congress take action that either directly or indirectly result in mitigating the recession, Cuomo won't be facing the same uphill climb to re-election that Bush tried and failed to overcome in 1992.
The early nineties recession is what spawned the term 'jobless recovery'. It was also preceded by sluggish growth and the 'jobless' aspect took a while to recover from, so for a lot of people it felt longer than the growth stats suggest; a lot of people at the 1994 mid-terms still thought the country was in recession. You can say it was mild - a lot of voters at the time clearly disagreed. It was also regionally severe, which is masked by the national picture - there's a reason Buchanan did so well in New Hampshire and why Perot did so poorly in the South. For the purposes of this thread, there is no doubt it was an electorally consequential recession.
It also started this dreadful corporate trend which was almost a breaking of the social contract. It’s like CEOs and top management decided, the hell with our employees, the hell with the future, we’re just going to focus on stock price for this quarter. And Wall Street, I think rather bizarrely, rewarded this kind of behavior.