Best Realistic 1996 GOP Candidate

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.

Kemp and Trump are two wildly different individuals, though. For one, Kemp wouldn't have about half of America vehemently opposed to him as though he's literally the devil incarnate. He was an all-American football player turned Congressman, who basically sold Reagan on supply-side economics. His record on race was fairly solid, and had a somewhat libertarian stance on immigration. Two, by this time, Giuliani is mayor in New York City. With a New Yorker on the head of the ticket, it just might be incentive enough for the GOP to work harder in the state. It'd be tough, but I think with the advantage of having represented New York, Kemp could at least make the Democrats worried about New York. After all, they could play on the fact that Clinton defied "traditional" electoral logic in choosing Al Gore, another Southerner, as his VP.

At the end of the day, it would be an uphill battle all the way, and may not pay off. But I think it's conceivable for Jack Kemp to make New York competitive in 96.
 
Changing the nominee alone doesn’t deprive Clinton a second term. You need either a major scandal to break out (his affair with Monica getting out earlier perhaps), a Republican Party that doesn’t make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House, or at the very least keeps him from overreaching, a worse economy, or a foreign policy blunder.
 
Yep, you're right. Too strong, like Reagan in '84 and Obama in '12, to be beaten.

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.
 
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.
 
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.

Economy was too strong. Incumbents get re-elected when the economy is good. Short of "a dead woman or live boy", Clinton was going to win.
 
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.

I tend to agree. Reagan could be had if the economy sags in 83, or he seriously bombs the second debate. Obama would be smoked with bad October economic numbers, another bad debate as well, a rainy day in battleground states, or a massive NGP VAN (Democratic data platform) crash that would leave them unable to figure out who to remind to vote (which actually happened to Romney's data platform on election day).
 
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.
Republican electorates vote for the candidate who speaks to the issues that they are focusing on at the moment.

People were super mad about the executive amnesty and the 2014 Central American migrant surge, hence we get Trump. In 2000, they wanted someone who wore his faith on his sleeve after Lewinsky and some cultural war defeats, so we got Bush. In 2008, Republicans wanted the surge to succeed badly and to take a hard line on terror, so we got McCain. Had the election happened a year later, we would have gotten Romney instead, and we did get him in 2012, because he was the recovery candidate who talked about fixing bad economic situations.

Part of the reason Dole failed so badly is because Republicans had little to animate against in 1996. We had a genuinely good and growing economy, power on the world stage, and the culture wars had died down a bit. Even Rush Limbaugh complimented Clinton for the economy during this period and how he ran things, and rather focused on Clinton's ethical lapses. Dole was the definition of meh, running against an outlier in Buchanan and a bunch of other meh people.
 
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.
 
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.

McCain's "maverick reputation" is literally 100 percent press spin originally manufactured by his aide Mark Salter. He is a down the line conservative in every possible way that matters. The only people who buy into it are credulous DC media centrists and insane alt-right types.

Here's a good profile of Salter that talks about this: http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/04/13/inventing_john_mccain/

Also in the book Game Change it talks about how Obama's people did polling to test out the "maverick" image and found that the general public didn't buy it at all and just saw McCain as Bush's third term, and rightly so.
 
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