AHC: Make Walter Mondale president but not in '84.

Your challenge is to make Walter Mondale president but not in 1984. You can use any method to get him there but he must get there not in 1984.
 

CalBear

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Need to find a way that prevents anyone not living in the State of Minnesota and Washington DC from voting.
 
Need to find a way that prevents anyone not living in the State of Minnesota and Washington DC from voting.
I mean you don't have to do that. I'm just saying not to make him president after the 1984 election. OTL results would still work. You could have Minnesota go to Canada and DC not being able to vote for president.
 
Not all that implausible.

1) If Ford defeats Carter in 1976, Mondale being the Democratic nominee in 1980, and the winner that year is plausible.

2) If Carter is assassinated by John Hinckley in October 1980, Mondale becomes president, and the sympathy vote plus the crisis atmosphere might well carry him to a victory over Reagan.

3) Have Carter win reelection, which isn't as far-fetched as people sometimes assume. Either Eagle Claw succeeds or, better yet, no Hostage Crisis or no Khomeini-led takeover of Iran. Maybe the Revolution peters out, or the army stages a coup in the fall of 1978. The revolution as it happened also bore a lot of responsibility for the economic problems of Carter's last two years, as the oil shock it caused caused inflation to skyrocket. Carter's response, appointing Volcker, led to interest rates being jacked up, which induced a recession and caused a spike in unemployment right around the election. Butterly that away and the economy may continue to grow fairly strongly, as it did OTL until early 1979. Under those conditions, Carter wins reelection and if Volcker is appointed after 1980 and kills inflation before 1984, then Mondale may be the beneficiary of the 1984 economic upswing.

4) Alternately, have Mondale sit out the 1984 race for whatever reason. Maybe with the hostages brought home earlier Carter loses less badly and tries to make a 1984 comeback which fails. Gary Hart loses to Reagan that year. Mondale decides instead to run for the Senate in Minnesota, and then decides to run in 1992 when it appears nobody is willing to run. He defeats George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot that year.
 
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Have Carter's administration be better, and have fears of Reagan being too right-wing be more prevalent, and you have a Carter victory in 1980. Then in March of 1981 Carter is killed by Hinckley and Mondale becomes president.
 
Air Force One has a cockpit bird strike that disables both pilots and crashes, tragically killing Jimmy Carter. Mondale becomes POTUS. Easy as pie.
 
McGovern asked Mondale to be his VP. Have him accept. McGovern still loses, but probably by not quite so much. Assuming he acquits himself well he's a frontrunner going into the 76 primaries. He'll have the stench on 72 on him, but he'll be in a fairly strong position.
 
Your challenge is to make Walter Mondale president but not in 1984. You can use any method to get him there but he must get there not in 1984.

Well, having Carter die in office is too easy, so here are two alternatives I have posted about in the past:

(1) Ford wins in 1976, and things go so badly for the country in 1977-1980 that nobody (including Reagan) can save the GOP brand in 1980 against any plausible Democratic candidate (including Mondale).

(2) In OTL, Mondale runs for the Senate in 1982 (Durenberger was vulnerable and IMO Mondale would have been a stronger candidate than the young Mark Dayton, despite the latter's money), skips the 1984 and 1988 presidential races (feeling that it will be hard for a Democrat to win the presidency given peace and prosperity), gets re-elected in 1988 (a good year for Democrats in the Upper Midwest) and then runs for president in 1992, sensing that GHW Bush is vulnerable. (And even if he isn't, Mondale would still after all be able to keep his Senate seat, at least until 1994.)

Why do I think he might get the nomination in 1992? Because all the other major Democratic candidates in 1992 (Clinton, Tsongas, Brown) were trying to show they were in some way or other "different" from traditional Democrats. Mondale can be "different" simply by *not* being different--by being an old-fashioned New Deal labor-liberal. (I am of course assuming that Mario Cuomo again decides not to run.) There are enough such voters in the Democratic primaries in 1992 to give him a real chance of winning against divided opposition. Remember that a Mondale who had not run against Reagan would not have any particular reputation as a "loser"; that the Carter-Mondale ticket lost so badly in 1980 would be blamed mostly on Carter.

Could he win the general election (which we'll assume will still be a three-way race)? No doubt he would be more vulnerable ideologically than Clinton but (a) he would not be vulnerable on the "character issue", and (b) he could win even if he lost every one of the Southern states Clinton carried. In fact, let's say he not only loses Arkansas (6 electoral votes), Georgia (13), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), and Tennessee (11) but that by doing worse in rural and small-town areas of Ohio than Clinton did in OTL, he also loses that state (21). Also have him lose four other narrow Clinton states: Nevada (4), New Hampshire (4), Montana (3) and New Jersey (15). He would still have 276 electoral votes, six more than necessary to win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992
 
. . . and if Volcker is appointed after 1980 and kills inflation before 1984, . . .
I understand there's a weirder type of early '70s stagflation. But mid and late '70s stagflation, the cause is clear. An abrupt rise in the price of oil shifts the supply curve inward. There's nothing to correct. With the rise in price of as major an input of oil, the overall economy is simply able to do less.

Paul Volcker's treatment is as inappropriate as a 1700s doctor "bleeding" or "purging" a patient who is already dehydrated!

One aspect does give me pause. Enough members of the business community might believe in the evils of excess inflation, that you might need to overdo the remedy. I'm not personally convinced of this at this time, just put it forward as a possibility.
 
with the "swamp rabbit" incident, I think Jimmy was accused of being mean to an animal,

because he used his canoe paddle to slap at it, or maybe just splash water at it.
 
I mean you don't have to do that. I'm just saying not to make him president after the 1984 election. OTL results would still work. You could have Minnesota go to Canada and DC not being able to vote for president.
So if Minnesota’s in Canada, Mondale wouldn’t be born in the US of A. Maybe we can have Mondale as PM of Canada
 
This looked like it may turn into an edition of "Get Carter!"

Glad that was not totally the case

If he skips 1984

What if he runs in '88 vs Bush instead of Dukakis
 
What about his running in 1976? One problem is that there were so many liberals running to the left of Carter (Bayh, Harris, Udall, Church) but if Mondale could do well in the Iowa caucus (and after all IA and MN are neighbors...) and then either win in NH or at least come in second place behind Carter (and ahead of Udall and Harris), he might become *the* candidate of the anti-Carter liberals, and he might have a chance for the nomination. Admittedly, in November, he is going to do much worse than Carter in the South, but there is just a chance he could win enough northern and western states Carter narrowly lost (NJ, IL, CA, IA, OR, ME, NM--maybe WA if he picks Scoop Jackson as his running mate) to defeat Ford. I would say the odds are against him, though; for example, even if he does better than Carter in the Chicago area that could be offset by his doing worse in southern Illinois.
 
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