Good points. Have to figure out how that impacts things.
To be more exact on the issue, Nixon offered national health insurance and Kennedy wanted single-payer.
Business Week said:The Watergate Babies stripped power from the party kingpins. They dumped committee chairmen and changed rules so the party caucus, rather than the leadership, made committee assignments. Bucking the old bulls was easy because the Class of '74 owed little to the Democratic bosses. ``We didn't expect a lot of the Watergate class to win,'' remembers Sam M. Gibbons (D-Fla.). ``We just put them on the ballot to have a Democratic name there.''
[…]
far afield from the '74 reformers who hobbled their Speaker. As a result, they created a power vacuum that would be filled over the next decade by strong committee chairmen such as Ways & Means boss Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).
CHECK BOUNCERS. Some of the Watergate Babies eventually gained powerful positions. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and Paul Simon (D-Ill.), for instance, went to the Senate and eventually ran for President. Indeed, it was remarkable how easily much of this class adapted to Washington. They took generous campaign money. They bounced checks at the House bank. They became part of a system they had vowed to change when their hair was longer and their commitment deeper.
[…]
The Class of '74's legacy was a campaign-finance reform law that created political action committees.
[Business Week]
Wiki said:Notable freshmen included future Senators and presidential candidates Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).
Future President Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee for a seat in Arkansas, but lost.
As for the Republican class of 1980, and the Democratic losses:
Wiki said:the Republicans defeated nine incumbents: Herman Talmadge (D-GA), Frank Church (D-ID), Birch E. Bayh II (D-IN), John Culver (D-IA), John A. Durkin (D-NH), Robert Morgan (D-NC), 1972 presidential nominee George S. McGovern (D-SD), Warren Magnuson (D-WA), and Gaylord Nelson (D-WI).
Notable new senators included future Vice-President J. Danforth Quayle (R-IN). Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-NY) defeated incumbent liberal Republican icon Jacob Javits in a primary, demonstrating the ascendancy of conservative Republicans.
Chappaquiddick is butterflied.
Then it's probably Kennedy versus Carter in the primaries, and whoever you feel like keeping around for the 1980 nomination can lose. It would have been a toss-up, basically, Hamilton Jordan's primary strategy analysis (he recognized that Iowa = momentum) versus The Kennedy Restoration.
Stagflation butterflied away due to avoiding the oil embargo and having different fiscal policies.
No oil embargo, not energy crisis.
IOTL Nixon proposed a negative income tax under pressure from Milton Friedman, but without the corresponding savings from being able to cut social security and welfare. Therefore Friedman rallied the House Republicans, and prevented it.
ITTL we could suppose Friedman has more influence and so Nixon doesn't enact entitlements because he introduces a negative income tax (for the left, he can call it a guaranteed annual income). (Not introducing entitlements is functionally equal to cutting them, given what having social security indexed to inflation has done to the US budget.)
Friedman having more influence, but without the Kemp-Roth supply side pushers (i.e. balanced budget Republicans would still prevail), should help to right the US at that point in time
Reagan is a great cheerleader and will grant funding and promote reform.
Would he keep the draft? Or perhaps introduce national service with a slew of optional jobs?
Also, Panama Canal? I assume Reagan keeps it, and that should cause some hand-wringing.
No, Nixon still pulls out, but the funding for South Vietnam stays in place, so the Vietnamization of the war is more successful. Also, the Republicans would at least credibly threaten to resume the air war if the North Vietnamese were to launch a full scale invasion.
Yeah that's what I meant, I didn't mean to imply Nixon would stay in. However Viet Nam probably still remains an issue with the McGovernites.