How do 2004's Republicans respond...

To a Kerry Presidency that loses the popular vote?

Just looking for broad contours here. I can imagine there'll be moaning about a stolen election and such, but will these pre-Tea Party types be any more willing to govern with a Democrat, in practise. Also, will there be any interest in reform of the electoral college in such a scenario?
 
It will be more interesting as Kerry will get pegged for a lot of the crap Dubya had to deal with in his second term. The highmark of the Iraqi insergency. Hurricane Katrina. North Korea going nuclear. The Housing Bubble. the 2007/2008 Market Crash. The Ressecion in full.

If you thought Bush was unpopular at this point, imagine how a President who didn't have the benefit of a good first term would get a shellacking for all of these issues that were largley out of thier control. Kerry will liekly have approval ratings in the low teens by the time he gets kicked out by a GOP challenger in 2008.

Bush will be looked at a lot like his father - a decent Republican President who dealt with some awful stuff, did as good as he could, and might have done some good with a second term.

Kerry will be the most loathed President of the modern era since Nixon. You might be lucky to see a Democrat in the White House again by 2020. given that legecy, you might see some people wishing Bush had stolen the election.
 
wouldn't a Kerry presidency have a few acheivments that offsets some of the bad things that would happen in bush 2nd term? also didn't the democrats support a withdrawal from Iraq
 
My guess is that Kerry winning would have this one interesting consequence an appearance of instability

He would lose quite heavily in 2008, I think President McCain would lose by a landlslide in 2012.

How would 4 successive changes fo adminstration at 4 elections look
 
Kerry would have done a good job. The errors of the 2nd Bush administration woud not have happened. Especially in the poor response to the hurricane in New Orleans. The right wingers would have went nuts over losing the election and would have done anything possible to make Kerry a one term President just like they did with Obama. It would have been an interesting 4 years.
 
It will be more interesting as Kerry will get pegged for a lot of the crap Dubya had to deal with in his second term. The highmark of the Iraqi insergency. Hurricane Katrina. North Korea going nuclear. The Housing Bubble. the 2007/2008 Market Crash. The Ressecion in full.

If you thought Bush was unpopular at this point, imagine how a President who didn't have the benefit of a good first term would get a shellacking for all of these issues that were largley out of thier control. Kerry will liekly have approval ratings in the low teens by the time he gets kicked out by a GOP challenger in 2008.

Bush will be looked at a lot like his father - a decent Republican President who dealt with some awful stuff, did as good as he could, and might have done some good with a second term.

Kerry will be the most loathed President of the modern era since Nixon. You might be lucky to see a Democrat in the White House again by 2020. given that legecy, you might see some people wishing Bush had stolen the election.

Kerry would have done a good job. The errors of the 2nd Bush administration woud not have happened. Especially in the poor response to the hurricane in New Orleans. The right wingers would have went nuts over losing the election and would have done anything possible to make Kerry a one term President just like they did with Obama. It would have been an interesting 4 years.

Two diametrically opposite points here!

I think I'd agree that Kerry is going to have to deal with a lot of shit, but you probably paint him as doing worse than is altogether realistic- a very Democrat screwing scenario! Why exactly would Kerry prove to be any more hated than W was IOTL?

My guess is that Kerry winning would have this one interesting consequence an appearance of instability

He would lose quite heavily in 2008, I think President McCain would lose by a landlslide in 2012.

How would 4 successive changes fo adminstration at 4 elections look

Interesting thoughts- why do you think the hypothetical Republican victor of a 2008 election would lose in a landslide come 2012?
 
Kerry would have done a good job. The errors of the 2nd Bush administration woud not have happened. Especially in the poor response to the hurricane in New Orleans. The right wingers would have went nuts over losing the election and would have done anything possible to make Kerry a one term President just like they did with Obama. It would have been an interesting 4 years.

Except a lot of the 'errors of the Bush Administration' were issues that had built up for years, and that EVERYONE ignored until it blew up in our faces - Bush just happened to be the shmuck in office when it blew. Now it would be Kerry.

Let's use Katrina as an example. Will having Kerry in office change the general incompetance from both the Lousiana Governor and New Orleans mayor that both refused help and told people to stay put? Or that FEMA went exactly by the books in reponse to the disaster? Or the media hysteria that made the disaster seem ten times worse than it was? Or that we knew something like this would come for close to fifty years, but we just chose to ignore that a city of a million and a half people lived in a city built in a bowl right in the path of Hurricane alley?

Not one of that would change now that the White House was in differnet hands. All that would change is that Kanye West now says John Kerry doesn't care about black people.
 
I'm not sure how Katrina would be different. Kerry would likely underfund the CoE and keep MR-GO open (like his predecessors), and would keep troops in Iraq, thus depriving the Gulf of further CoE funds and NG troops and equipment. He would likely appoint an emergency manager to run FEMA, which would help. He'd also likely declare coastal LA and NOLA a disaster area before the storm, unlike Bush who only did so after (INLAND LA on the other hand...).
Still, there would still be problems with the local response (ALL OVER the Gulf), and the very scale would affect response.

And, given how Kerry refused to withdraw troops or apologize for going into Iraq, we'd likely be doing much the same- though we might listen to the Iraq Study Group as opposed to the Bush Escalation.

And, lest we forget, Republicans were attacking any legitimacy of Gore before the cases were decided.

There may be one good point. With Kerry now owning Iraq, Ron Paul might get listened to a lot more. In addition, Cindy Sheehan might run for office somewhere else- and have a better chance of winning.
 
To a Kerry Presidency that loses the popular vote?

Just looking for broad contours here. I can imagine there'll be moaning about a stolen election and such, but will these pre-Tea Party types be any more willing to govern with a Democrat, in practise. Also, will there be any interest in reform of the electoral college in such a scenario?

A lot of hollering and cries of illegitimacy with absolutely no sense of irony. Remember, since Clinton didn't win a majority of the popular vote, he wasn't truly elected. And Obama wasn't truly elected either, because ACORN, but mostly because people only voted for him because he was black.

No, they won't. Since 1994, the Republican Party has made it very clear that a opposing a Democratic POTUS is more important than governance.

Probably not.
 
The only thing that I think would change about Katrina is a little less presidential blame for it - Bush had been in office four years, Kerry would have been in for a few months. I'm not saying he wouldn't get attacked, but it wouldn't be as hard.

The original question though... I think the moderate Republicans would be smart and keep their mouths quiet and accept it, not wanting to look hypocritical. The far right, hyper-conservatives, however, would claim the people were not represented and call it a sham election, and then claim one of the alternative Florida recount standards to validate Bush.
 
No, nothing will change. Republicans are not as hypocritical has you think they are.
All politicians are.

Bush Set To Fight An Electoral College Loss

BY MICHAEL KRAMER
Wednesday, November 01, 2000

They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning for it.

Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate "what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?

"Then we win," says a Gore aide. "You play by the rules in force at the time. If the nation were really outraged by the possibility, then the system would have been changed long ago. The history is clear."

Yes it is, and it's fascinating. Twice before, Presidents have been elected after losing the popular vote. In 1876, New York Gov. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote (51% to 48%) but lost the presidency to Rutherford Hayes, who won by a single electoral vote. Twelve years later, in 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by a single percentage point, but lost his reelection bid to Benjamin Harrison by 65 electoral votes.

The same thing almost happened in 1976 when Jimmy Carter topped Gerald Ford by about 1.7 million votes. Back then, a switch of about 5,500 votes in Ohio and 6,500 votes in Mississippi would have given those states to Ford, enough for an Electoral College victory. But because it didn't happen, the upset over its having almost happened faded rapidly.

Why do we even have the Electoral College? Simply put, the Founding Fathers didn't imagine the emergence of national candidates when they wrote the Constitution, and, in any event, they didn't trust the people to elect the President directly.

A lot has changed since then, including the anachronistic view that the majority should be feared. But the Electoral College remains.

So what if Gore wins such crucial battleground states as Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania and thus captures the magic 270 electoral votes while Bush wins the overall nationwide popular vote?

"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says a Bush aide. "We fight."

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign - which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness - a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. "We'd have ads, too," says a Bush aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted."

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks a Bush adviser.
The universe of people who would be targeted by this insurrection is small - the 538 currently anonymous folks called electors, people chosen by the campaigns and their state party organizations as a reward for their service over the years.

If you bother to read the small print when you're in the booth, you'll notice that when you vote for President you're really selecting presidential electors who favor one candidate or the other.

Generally, these electors are not legally bound to support the person they're supposedly pledged to when they gather in the various state capitals to cast their ballots on Dec. 18. The rules vary from state to state, but enough of the electors could theoretically switch to Bush if they wanted to - if there was sufficient pressure on them to ratify the popular verdict.

And what would happen if the "what if" scenario came out the other way? "Then we'd be doing the same thing Bush is apparently getting ready for," says a Gore campaign official. "They're just further along in their contingency thinking than we are. But we wouldn't lie down without a fight, either."
 
if Kerry wins the presidency and the republicans decide to use the part of no strategy earlier wouldn't the same thing happen to republicans in 08-12 where they got a boost in the mid terms but lost the presidential election and public opinion turned away from them due to Obama portraying the republicans as obstructionists happen during the Kerry administration
 
It will be more interesting as Kerry will get pegged for a lot of the crap Dubya had to deal with in his second term. The highmark of the Iraqi insergency. Hurricane Katrina. North Korea going nuclear. The Housing Bubble. the 2007/2008 Market Crash. The Ressecion in full.

If you thought Bush was unpopular at this point, imagine how a President who didn't have the benefit of a good first term would get a shellacking for all of these issues that were largley out of thier control. Kerry will liekly have approval ratings in the low teens by the time he gets kicked out by a GOP challenger in 2008.

Bush will be looked at a lot like his father - a decent Republican President who dealt with some awful stuff, did as good as he could, and might have done some good with a second term.

Kerry will be the most loathed President of the modern era since Nixon. You might be lucky to see a Democrat in the White House again by 2020. given that legecy, you might see some people wishing Bush had stolen the election.

First, the premise is plausible; a shift of 100,000+ votes in Ohio would have done the trick.

I tend to disagree, though, that Kerry was necessarily doomed in 2008. There's always a window for a new President to come in and, in effect, say "Oh God, I was left an even worse mess than I thought." This is particularly true with Iraq; where Kerry could come in and debunk the rationale Bush gave for the war and call the whole thing a mistake and shift policy toward an end to the war. This was, essentially, the mainstream public view by the end of 2005 anyway.

Katrina would have still happened, but there were competent Democrats who served under Clinton and his FEMA director to put in place; "Brownie" or someone of his ilk would not have been in charge and Democrats Blanco and Nagin wouldn't have been taking potshots at DC under a Dem administration, either.

North Korea is easily deflected by blaming Bush for taking us off on a misadventure in Iraq and not minding the store.

Similarly, there was a window in 2005 to bring the housing bubble under control; there would have been a negative impact on the economy to do so, but it did not have to be nearly as bad as it was. There were mainstream figures who saw the dangers of the bubble plus the bubble in mortgage backed securities. Perhaps Kerry would have listened to them, perhaps not. But it is possible that we would have had an outcome different than the outright financial crisis that happened OTL, which was a product of people simply missing the overall picture based on the fundamentals of rising housing prices, dodgy lending practices and stagnant incomes. You didn't have to be a financial genius in 2004/05 to know we were heading down a potentially dangerous road with housing in 2004.

The other thing is that the Democrats were, Kerry winning or not, pretty well teed up to retake the House in 2006; the GOP scandals that dominated that election cycle (Ney, Foley, et al) were probably going to come out either way and a Dem takeover in a first midterm would have been huge news -- it's unprecedented in modern electoral history -- and would have bought Kerry some political breathing room. Remember here that the crash only materialized late in 2008 and the economy was not an issue in the 2008 primaries-- a politically strong President Kerry, with a new Democratic Congress behind him and his reelection prospects looking rather good in 2007 would have had no intraparty problems and could well have rode to reelection, despite whatever happened to the economy, on the strength of the coalition that emerged in what turned out to be something of a realigning election in 2008.

It is also possible that an emerging economic crisis would have caused a "rally 'round the President effect" leading voters to stick with the incumbent rather than take a chance on a GOP nominee with no obvious credentials for solving the financial crisis, which would have been an arguable proposition had, say, McCain been nominated in 2008 as he was in OTL. You might well have had a GOP field that formed when Kerry looked more or less invincible and McCain alternatives like Romney might have held back waiting for 2012.

None of this is to say that a second Kerry term would have necessarily been a picnic, but I find the notion that Kerry or any other Democrat to have necessarily been doomed in 2008 if they won in 2004 to be somewhat overblown. Certainly if things were handled as badly as Bush handled them it is probable, but it is also possible to see other outcomes, where the outcome is determined less by exigent events and more by the basic drift in the country toward a sustainable Democratic electoral coalition at the Presidential level and a generally competent administration.
 
Two elections in a row decided by the electoral college and against the popular vote would see a move towards election reform gain real traction. It might still fizzle out anyway, but the movement would dominate for a few months at the very least, and leave some real butterflies down the line. The difficulty here is getting Kerry to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote.
 
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