He'd never be nominated though. Way too liberal.
Couldn't you make the same argument about John McCain in 2008? Seen as too liberal but a vet who could draw in people who might not usually vote Republican.
He'd never be nominated though. Way too liberal.
Trump had populism and was a New Yorker and he didn't put NY in play, and the big tent stuff is (as far as I understand it, I'm not the biggest expert on Jack Kemp), the same thing as Bush's compassionate conservatism more or less, and Bush also didn't put NY in play.
Yep, you're right. Too strong, like Reagan in '84 and Obama in '12, to be beaten.
Agree on Obama in ‘12, Reagan in ‘84, and even Nixon in ‘72, but not Clinton in ‘96. Clinton was seen as a dead duck after the ‘94 midterms and was helped a lot by the Republicans shutting the government down in 1995. If the GOP doesn’t overreach, Clinton would have a tougher time getting a second term, and with the right Republican candidate and campaign, Clinton could narrowly lose in 1996.It's funny, I do have a counter-intuitive belief that with the right PODs both Reagan 84 and Obama 12 could be beaten. I think the only two elections where altering the winner is nearly impossible in the US since World War II are 1972 and 1996.
Agree on Obama in ‘12, Reagan in ‘84, and even Nixon in ‘72, but not Clinton in ‘96. Clinton was seen as a dead duck after the ‘94 midterms and was helped a lot by the Republicans shutting the government down in 1995. If the GOP doesn’t overreach, Clinton would have a tougher time getting a second term, and with the right Republican candidate and campaign, Clinton could narrowly lose in 1996.
It's funny, I do have a counter-intuitive belief that with the right PODs both Reagan 84 and Obama 12 could be beaten. I think the only two elections where altering the winner is nearly impossible in the US since World War II are 1972 and 1996.
Carroll A. Campbell Jr.
Carroll A. Campbell Jr.
Republican electorates vote for the candidate who speaks to the issues that they are focusing on at the moment.Couldn't you make the same argument about John McCain in 2008? Seen as too liberal but a vet who could draw in people who might not usually vote Republican.
Couldn't you make the same argument about John McCain in 2008? Seen as too liberal but a vet who could draw in people who might not usually vote Republican.
McCain, though, despite his maverick reputation, had a generally conservative voting record--and above all on abortion. (It is not impossible for someone who has had a pro-choice past to get the GOP nomination--but he *must* say that this was in the past and he is *now* pro-life. That's one reason Giuliani wasn't nominated--he never clearly repudiated his past pro-choice position.) It is simply not possible to compare McCain with the self-identified "Rockefeller Republican" Powell ideologically.
To put it another way: For years now, it has been customary for some people on the Right to refer to Republicans with quite conservative voting records as "liberals" because of disagreement on one issue or another (sometimes one like immigration, which was hardly a litmus test for conservatives in the past, as Reagan shows--or sometime for favoring very mild gun control measures that the NRA itself once favored). But there was a time when actual liberal Republicans did exist--and Powell was one of the last of them.