Buckley 1980

Likely he would have followed the majority of the freshman Republican senators elected in 1980 and gone down in defeat in 1986 without making a significant impact supporting the President on most major issues.
 
Likely he would have followed the majority of the freshman Republican senators elected in 1980 and gone down in defeat in 1986 without making a significant impact supporting the President on most major issues.

By that point James Buckley had been elected as Senator of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, so I wouldn’t really say he’s a freshman.

But he could very easily have lost re-election, Midterms always hurt the President’s Party and ‘86 wasn’t going to be an exception.
 
This was not a very close race in OTL--Christopher Dodd defeated Buckley by 13.43 points (56.34-42.91) https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=3895, despite Reagan easily carrying CT that year. So I'm curious what a plausible POD would be, especially since there don't really seem to have been any scandals attached to Dodd's name until Countrywide Financial in 2008... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd

(In fairness to Buckley, 13.43 points was the smallest victory margin Dodd had in any of his races for the House or Senate! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Christopher_Dodd)
 
One minor caveat is that the Republicans did pretty well in the Northeast in the 1986 mid-terms. Their only Senate seat lost was Maryland, if you count Maryland as being part of the Northeast. The Northeast did well out of the Reagan boom/ bubble, and Reagan ran up large vote percentages in those states that seem weird compared to Republican performance in other late 20th century elections. The Republicans lost their Senate majority that year in the South and in the Midwest.
 
One minor caveat is that the Republicans did pretty well in the Northeast in the 1986 mid-terms. Their only Senate seat lost was Maryland, if you count Maryland as being part of the Northeast. The Northeast did well out of the Reagan boom/ bubble, and Reagan ran up large vote percentages in those states that seem weird compared to Republican performance in other late 20th century elections. The Republicans lost their Senate majority that year in the South and in the Midwest.

The Republicans didn't have that many northeastern Senate seats up for re-election in 1986: just MD, NH, NY, and PA. With just four seats at stake, I don't think much significance can be attached to their "losing only one." I think in each case, personal/local factors were decisive: Rudman and Specter were popular moderates, D'Amato was famous for his attention to New York problems ("Senator Pothole"). And the loss in MD was simply a matter of Mathias retiring (rather than face primary opposition from the right) and the GOP nominating a candidate too conservative for a state where Reagan-Mondale had been much closer than in the nation as a whole.

Buckley never managed to increase his strength beyond a conservative core in New York, and I'm not sure he could do so in CT. (Which is one reason it would be unlikely for him to get elected in CT in 1980 in the first place--unlike NY in 1970, it isn't a three-way race.)
 
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