List of Alternate Presidents and PMs II

[V-J]

There are other factors as well, like Gray being chased into a Tunnocks factory

breed me

 

[shiftygiant]

The Wave that Broke the Tsunami

have i ever told you i love you

 

[Aaaaasima]

m y t e x a s l i s t

1995-2003: George W. Bush (Republican) [1]
1994: Ann Richards (Democratic)
1998: Garry Mauro (Democratic)
2003-2007: Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican) [2]
2002: Dan Morales (Democratic), Rick Perry (Republican) (Write-in)
2007-2011: Henry Cuellar (Democratic) [3]
2006: Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican), Rick Perry (Values), Kinky Friedman (Independent)
2011-2016: David Dewhurst (Republican) [4]
2010: Henry Cuellar (Democratic), Jim Hightower (Green)
2014: Kirk Watson (Democratic)
2016-2019: Wendy Davis (Republican) [5]
2019- : Louie Gohmert (Values) [6]
2018: Wendy Davis (Republican), Annise Parker (Democratic)

[1]="I congralute Al Gore on his victory"
[2]="I think that these "Values" Republicans are overreacting."
[3]="Today, we will look forward on bringing Texas to the future!"
[4]="President Clinton called me and graciously conceded her defeat"
[5]="No, I don't think that this abortion bill is necessary"
[6]="I am glad to sign the Bathroom Safety Bill into law"

 

[TPL99]

p r e s i d a v i d

 

[shiftygiant]

South East England Chief Executive
Based on this wikibox.

2006-2011: Chris Huhne (Liberal Democrats)
def. 2006 (Coalition with Labour): James Arbuthnot (Conservative), John Denham (Labour)
def. 2011 (Coalition with Labour and Green): David Cameron (Conservative), John Denham (Labour), Craig Mackinlay (UKIP), Keith Taylor (Green)
2012-2016: Gerald Vernon-Jackson (Liberal Democrats)
2016-20??: David Cameron (Conservative)
def. 2016: Fiona Mactaggart (Labour), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Gerald Vernon-Jackson (Liberal Democrats), Keith Taylor (Green)


2006
82 {↑82} - 44.4% - {↑44.4%}- James Arbuthnot, Conservative
44 {↑44} - 25.4% - {↑25.4%}- Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrats
40 {↑40} - 24.1% - {↑24.1%}- John Denham, Labour

LIBDEM-LABOUR COALITION

2011
83 {↑01} - 49.3% - {↑04.9%}- David Cameron, Conservative
63 {↑19} - 26.2% - {↑00.8%}- Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrats
22 {↓18} - 16.0% - {↓08.1%}- John Denham, Labour
01 {↑01} - 04.1% - {↑01.0%}- Craig Mackinlay, UKIP
01 {↑01} - 01.9% - {↑00.1%}- Keith Taylor, Green

LIBDEM-LABOUR-GREEN COALITION

2016
85 {↑02} - 50.8% - {↑01.5%}- David Cameron, Conservative
38 {↑16} - 18.3% - {↑02.3%}- Fiona Mactaggart, Labour
34 {↑33} - 14.7% - {↑10.6%}- Nigel Farage, UKIP
12 {↓51} - 09.4% - {↓16.8%}- Gerald Vernon-Jackson, Liberal Democrats
01 {-00} - 05.6% - {↑03.7%}- Keith Taylor, Green

CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY

 

[Yes]

m y t e x a s l i s t

1995-2003: George W. Bush (Republican) [1]
1994: Ann Richards (Democratic)
1998: Garry Mauro (Democratic)
2003-2007: Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican) [2]
2002: Dan Morales (Democratic), Rick Perry (Republican) (Write-in)
2007-2011: Henry Cuellar (Democratic) [3]
2006: Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican), Rick Perry (Values), Kinky Friedman (Independent)
2011-2016: David Dewhurst (Republican) [4]
2010: Henry Cuellar (Democratic), Jim Hightower (Green)
2014: Kirk Watson (Democratic)
2016-2019: Wendy Davis (Republican) [5]
2019- : Louie Gohmert (Values) [6]
2018: Wendy Davis (Republican), Annise Parker (Democratic)

[1]="I congralute Al Gore on his victory"
[2]="I think that these "Values" Republicans are overreacting."
[3]="Today, we will look forward on bringing Texas to the future!"
[4]="President Clinton called me and graciously conceded her defeat"
[5]="No, I don't think that this abortion bill is necessary"
[6]="I am glad to sign the Bathroom Safety Bill into law"

You've always got to close with the man one talented columnist called "the Padishah Emperor for Life of the Crazy People." Piney Woods FTW; he's like a well chosen dessert. I guess there's a POD that makes Wendy switch parties for political survival? Last gasp of the moderates?

 

[Yes]

p r e s i d a v i d

p r e s i d e w n o t g o t h e r e

 

[Aaaaasima]

You've always got to close with the man one talented columnist called "the Padishah Emperor for Life of the Crazy People." Piney Woods FTW; he's like a well chosen dessert. I guess there's a POD that makes Wendy switch parties for political survival? Last gasp of the moderates?

She was a Republican before 2006. So, have a moderate GOP governor from 2003-2007 and a Democratic governor from 2007-2011 may make her remain a Republican.

Also, when was the last time I've used Louie Gohmert?

 

[Aaaaasima]

For the Texas List:

2001-2004: Al Gore/Joe Lieberman (Democratic)
2000: George W. Bush/Dick Cheney (Republican)
2004-2005: Al Gore/Howard Dean (Democratic)
2005-2006: John Engler/Bob Riley (Republican)
2004: Al Gore/Howard Dean (Democratic), Joe Lieberman/John McCain (Reform)
2006-2009: Bob Riley/John Kasich (Republican)
2009-2013: John Kasich/Haley Barbour (Republican)
2008: John Baldacci/Bill Richardson (Democratic), Jesse Ventura/Angus King (Reform)
2013-2017: Hillary Clinton/Peter Shumlin (Democratic)
2012: John Kasich/Haley Barbour (Republican), Kinky Friedman/Buddy Roemer (Reform)
2017-2021: David Dewhurst/Charlie Baker (Republican)
2016: Hillary Clinton/Peter Shumlin (Democratic), Donald Trump/Bill Walker (Reform)
2021- : Sean Penn/Jim Justice (Democratic)
2020: Charlie Baker/David Perdue (Republican), Ted Cruz/Sam Brownback (Values), Bill Walker/Fred Thiele (Reform)

Al Gore had a fallout with Joe Lieberman after the 2003 debate on whether or not to go to Iraq. Eventually Lieberman was kicked out of the ticket. Lieberman then ran as a reformist with Senator John McCain. This led to both Democratic and Republican votes being siphoned off, but more Gore votes than Engler.

John Engler was seen as a promising president after 12 years of Democratic years, but he was assassinated in Seattle, Washington by a mentally disabled man. This led to a debate about whether or not gun control is necessary. The 2006 midterms led to a Democratic victory. Eventually, a background check law was passed by a veto proof majority in 2007.

The stress made Bob Riley decide not to run in 2008. Vice President John Kasich easily won the primaries and defeated Governor Baldacci and Former Governor Ventura.

Kasich's administration was rocky. The economy went south and a mass shooting in San Francisco, California was carried out by an Al-Qaeda member killed 49 people.

Senator Hillary Clinton won a 4% victory over President Kasich. However, Clinton would have to deal with the same gridlock that Kasich and Riley did. In 2014 the Republicans winning the House and tying the Senate (48 Republicans, 48 Democrats, 4 Reformists).

In 2016 President Clinton lost to Governor Dewhurst. Dewhurst was already an old man, and the Democratic senate which happened after the 2018 midterms didn't help. Dewhurst refused to run after a stroke in 2019.

His Vice President, Charlie Baker, was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. Baker had a rough primary, which led to a contested convention with Ted Cruz. Baker won out in the end, and Cruz ran under the Values party banner, bringing the Values party of Texas into the national state.

The Democrats nominated actor and Left wing populist Sean Penn, much to the dismay of the establishment. Sean Penn had a rough campaigning, giving his opponents nicknames. Sean Penn won a narrow victory, losing the popular vote to Baker.

Now America does not know what will happen under President Penn. While some were relieved under Vice President Justice, Justice looks like he will die any second, which leads to some think that Penn will pick his second choice: Tulsi Gabbard...

 

[Yes]

KEYSTONE TOPS: Governors of Pennsylvania since the Carter years

Gov. Milton Shapp 1971-79
Gov. Richard "Dick" Thornburgh 1979-83
Gov. Peter F. Flaherty 1983-89 [1]
Gov. William W. Scranton III 1989-95 [2]
Gov. Edmund G. "Ed" Rendell 1995-99 [3]
Gov. Arlen Specter 1999-2005 [4]
Gov Hillary Rodham Heinz 2005-2011 [5]
Gov. Charles W. "Charlie" Dent 2011-2015 [6]
Gov. Luke R. Ravenstahl 2015- [7]

[1] It was a hard job, being Deputy Attorney General of the United States, harder in some ways because of what and who he had to deal with, than being Mayor of Pittsburgh, but he stuck at it. Loyalty was supposed to have its rewards even if it meant leaving himself out of the race to succeed Milt Shapp, and that he would always believe let that bespectacled milquetoast Thornburgh in. But he had a plan: come home, run for a General Assembly seat in the next cycle and start making as many friends as he could before Thornburgh was up again. Sure he was the hero of Three Mile Island, but this was a brutal recession, even worse than the won he'd fought in Pittsburgh when OPEC shut off the oil, and it was the Republicans' fault. That gave him not one but two terms in the governor's chair, until newly-elected President Hart gave him an offer he had a hard time refusing, running two major national initiatives as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. And if he had to leave his seat to the other party, there were worse choices..
[2] Scion of one of Pennsylvania's greatest families, son of one of the last great liberal Republicans, still dogged by the "long-haired hippie" image from the right of both parties (and there was still plenty of "right" left among steel-town Democrats), Bill Scranton III seemed to have climbed as high up the greasy pole as he could as a third-term Lieutenant Governor, when suddenly the world moved and Flaherty was out of the way. Incumbency, he found was a powerful thing, as conservatives in the state party swallowed their objections and backed him for his own term, running to the left on many issues of "four-time loser" Bob Casey, Pennsylvania's most famous conservative Democrat. But what he'd hoped was the freedom to make his own way in the governor's chair was far more limited than he thought. A major primary challenge as he headed for a second full term left him mortally wounded at the polls, and many of the same moderate independents who had given him a solid win the first time wandered towards the Democrats and the right of his own party stayed home out of spite. It was hardly a fair thing to happen to a Scranton, but we can't choose what others think of us out in the world
[3] The man of the "Philadelphia Miracle," reforming mayor Ed Rendell had really wanted to stay in his job: his city was going places, the national party had taken notice, he was feted at mayors' conferences and eastern Pennsylvania looked to him as the man of the future. But the party came calling, and they made a compelling argument that the Pennsylvania GOP was at war with itself, the right so long a second-fiddle to the state's tradition of moderate-to-liberal Republican governors had decided that shanking Scranton was more important than winning. The siren call finally reached him, and Rendell threw his not insubstantial self into the race. It was a success, and he spent most of the next four years trying to bring the turnaround of Philadelphia into the Rust Belt towns of "Pennsyltucky." But state politics is never without its corruption scandals, and a major one enveloped a series of Democratic committee chairs in the Assembly as re-election loomed for the governor. It was a calculated risk on one hand, but an emotional choice on the other: stall and perseverate for the men who turned out the votes at precinct level, or try to clean house and try to ride his reputation to reelection. For all his faults, Ed was a reformer at heart; he stepped back and let the investigations go forward. And, come November, he lost by a scant six thousand votes to a dean of Pennsylvania politics who had come home, six thousand votes that might easily have turned up in a handful of Assembly districts whose elected officials were haggling over their plea deals...
[4] After eighteen years in the increasingly partisan United States Senate, Arlen Specter decided to retire, on the one hand doing the right wing of his state party the favor of nominating a replacement more to their liking, on the other considering whether to change pace into something else. To his own surprise as much as other people's, he took a look at the Republican primary field back home in Pennsylvania, with the gubernatorial cycle at hand, and decided that the three men running were either too minor or too far to the right to unseat Rendell. He threw his hat in. In a primary runoff he defeated the leading contender and, aware of Rendell's favorable despite the early stages of the committee-chair corruption scandal, grudgingly got behind Specter. It was a wise choice. Specter rode a general Republican wave, and by the time of his reelection had some of the highest favorability ratings since the end of Flaherty's term, or Thornbugh's after Three Mile. He saw off a challenge from his Democratic lieutenant governor, and settled in to a second term with an agenda of infrastructure repair and budget reconciliation, thinking about whether he might like to age into a third term after all. Hodgkin's lymphoma, however, had other ideas. Specter, ever the gentleman, discussed the situation with his doctors, and the aggressive course of treatment they recommended, and resigned his position, even though it meant a transfer of party.
[5] Handsome, intelligent, Rockefeller Republican Senator John Heinz seemed to be a rising star in the 1970s. But the tragic death of his first wife -- an exotic and aristocratic beauty -- in the Tenerife air disaster of 1978 set him back into his own world, simply carrying on with his duties and the famous family name and looking after his children. Within eighteen months however he met a woman, herself still recovering some years after the end of a major relationship at Yale Law School, and a lead counsel for the National Organization of Women. They admired one another's drive and principle, and within another couple of years one of Washington's most notable bipartisan power couples was born (she a neoliberal Democrat, he a Rockefeller Republican, were objects of occasional praise from columnists droning on about the "decent middle" of American politics.) After Heinz's tragic death, Hillary Rodham Heinz turned her attention to her family and the family foundation, and the maintenance of her husband's legacy. But the politics bug was a hard one to shake. In the middle of the decade she took an Assembly seat for a couple of terms, virtually guaranteed by her married name, to "learn the business," and made a successful run for Lieutenant Governor. She tried unseating Governor Specter, unsuccessfully, but kept her job and when his cancer diagnosis shook Harrisburg, she moved unexpectedly into the top job. Determined to show her chops, she launched a raft of policy initiatives, made a point of touring every town over 5,000 people in the state, battled for foreign investment in Pittsburgh, shepherded a bill that extended Medicaid-style supplemental insurance to all children in the state, and won a term in her own right. In 2008 she set her sights higher, running in the presidential primaries; she made the list of the nominee's (two-time North Carolina governor Harvey Gantt's) vice presidential choices, though he decided in the end running an African American nominee with a woman as running mate might be too much for the electorate at one time. Disappointed, she returned to the governor's mansion, eyes set on another term. But it seemed time for scandal again: Republican Assemblymen launched an investigation into the possible improper mixing of management of state affairs and Heinz Foundation business, conducted off the official state government grid on private email servers. Adding to the nagging imputation of scandal, more implied than proved, was an economic downturn; Heinz's defense of herself was taken as standoffishness and she narrowly lost to another Pennsylvania GOP compromise between the rightward drift of the national party and statewide electability.
[6] Charlie Dent, a familiar and competent Pennsylvania congressman, a founding member of the "Main Street Republicans" moderate caucus, a man happy in his job hoping to maneuver past favored right-wingers for a possible committee chairmanship, suddenly found himself the object of delegations from Harrisburg, plying and smiling and wheedling to encourage him into the upcoming governor's race. As a face of perceived moderation, he would put a friendly official mug on the Pennsylvania GOP's right wing and its efforts to erode Governor Heinz's credibility. In the end he was able to do the job, smiling and thoughtful and promising to be a voice for Pennsylvania's now-hurting suburbs both in Harrisburg and through his Washington connections. It was a good sell. But despite Dent's patient groundedness, events, particularly economic ones, were not kind. He could not survive the pressure from his Assembly delegation's right wing without intervening against two major coal strikes which cost him with unions across the state, and any economic recovery in the suburbs was tepid and failed to stretch to the ethnic and minority neighborhoods of the big cities. It was there dissatisfaction brewed, and from there that the challenge to the governor emerged.
[7] Luke Ravenstahl came to Pennsylvania Democratic campaign operatives as if out of a dream. A tall, handsome, Catholic-high-school football star turned excellent college student, aggressive young political activist, and Pittsburgh's youngest mayor -- even younger than Pete Flaherty started, and not even out of his twenties yet -- Ravenstahl was a central-casting solution to crafting a media image that could beat Dent's amiable but tepid public persona. Some asked whether it was wise to run someone this young at the higher level, whether he had built enough connections, compiled enough favors, to really use Pittsburgh as his base for a shot at something bigger. But wise campaign flacks know that when they've found lightning in a bottle, it is better to uncork it and see where things go than fail to use that kind of power. The Catholic football letterman played well in Pennsyltucky, and his connections to neighborhood-based development and the patchwork of Pittsburgh's ethnic communities also recommended him in Philly. It wasn't an easy thing -- Dent's campaign played hard on Ravenstahl's lack of age and experience -- but it was in the end enough. For better or worse, whether he would turn out to be up to the job or just bright promises that didn't pan out, Ravenstahl was Pennsylvania's youngest governor, and determined not to leave office while that was still true.

 

[Yes]

She was a Republican before 2006. So, have a moderate GOP governor from 2003-2007 and a Democratic governor from 2007-2011 may make her remain a Republican.

Also, when was the last time I've used Louie Gohmert?

It's an abstract "always" -- not about overuse, or your personal use or disuse, just if you want to "go there" in the rightward stampede of Texas politics, "there" can always readily be defined by Louie. I was forgetting about the party switch; your explanation's entirely plausible, she strikes me as the sort of person who would do something like stick around to stake out a position against the trend of her party.

 

[Japhy]

Oh hey it's another game of Pin the Hillary on some Dude.

 

[Yes]

Oh hey it's another game of Pin the Hillary on some Dude.

Breathe easy, @Japhy, they'd have been an interesting couple given Hillary's work aiding for Rocky and John Lindsay (Heinz was one of that last generation of moderate-to-left Rs with the likes of John Chafee and Mark Hatfield less Hatfield's anti-abortion views), and really it's all an elaborate opportunity for a pun: her married initials ITTL would be "HRH." It's a twist on cliché that I couldn't resist (Plus, to fight the POD from Hillary's corner she gains a far more emotionally and ethically stable spouse, and despite his tragic loss because sometimes TLs are out to get you even with the downdraft from the butterflies, a married life of more peace and comfort that still gives her room for her legal and political ambitions.)

 

[shiftygiant]

Oh hey it's another game of Pin the Hillary on some Dude.

2002-2007: Geoff Hoon (United Labour)
2007-2012: Iain Smith (Country-Urban)
2012-20??: Hillary Blair (United Labour)
/joking pls don't hate me

 

[Yes]

2002-2007: Geoff Hoon (United Labour)
2007-2012: Iain Smith (Country-Urban)
2012-20??: Hillary Blair (United Labour)
/joking pls don't hate me

You are a naughty, naughty man. Well played. Not sure that wouldn't just be outright better than Cherie though...

 

[shiftygiant]

You are a naughty, naughty man. Well played. Not sure that wouldn't just be outright better than Cherie though...

She's coming after Geoff Hoon and IDS, no matter what it's a low bar.

 

[Yes]

She's coming after Geoff Hoon and IDS, no matter what it's a low bar.

This is a true thing you have said. Between The Hoon Show (Harry Secombe for Leader of the House of Lords?) and I Do Suck, I think you'll need plans of the sewage and underground electrical systems to set that bar. I did very much like your "Country-Urban" easter egg there with IDS. Did Ken Clarke make that happen with one too many intra-party Euro referendums and four too many bottles of Veuve Cliquot? Is the Country-Union Party's insignia an Irish Setter named Tilly, nervous condition but a good breeder?

 

[shiftygiant]

This is a true thing you have said. Between The Hoon Show (Harry Secombe for Leader of the House of Lords?) and I Do Suck, I think you'll need plans of the sewage and underground electrical systems to set that bar. I did very much like your "Country-Union" easter egg there with IDS. Did Ken Clarke make that happen with one too many intra-party Euro referendums and four too many bottles of Veuve Cliquot? Is the Country-Union Party's insignia an Irish Setter named Tilly, nervous condition but a good breeder?

i don't know it was just a shitpost

 

[Yes]

i don't know it was just a shitpost

Fair enough, but sometimes manure grows things out of it. Just ask the Prescott, Osborne, and Salmond households ...

 

[Yes]

For Want of a Subclause: Or, Goin' to Carolina in my Time(line)

Gov. James T. "Terry" Sanford 1973-77
def. James Holshouser
When the great 1969 rewrite of the North Carolina State Constitution (one of a series of state constitutions under review across the country at that time) added a grandfather clause that would permit past governors to join new ones in running for a second term, people began to wonder. When "Skipper" Bowles himself, seemingly the prohibitive favorite for the run in the fall, came to the President of Duke University in private in January of 1972, people wondered even more. They need have wondered no longer. North Carolina's famous reformer was making a return to politics, and in the fall he managed to squeak past moderate Republican Jim Holshouser, in part by tactical voting from people whose preferred candidates that year were George Wallace and Jesse Helms, and were willing to vote for the liberal Sanford in the short term to force moderates like Holshouser out of power in the NCGOP, leaving it open to Helms' coterie. Sanford did indeed manage, mostly, to cut against the economic grain of the stagflated early Seventies, made substantial new investments in the state's university system, and issued a nationally-noted formal, public apology for the programs of publicly-mandated sterilization that had survived past his first term in office in the early Sixties. Sanford rolled it all into a CV that set him up for his run in the 1976 presidential primaries, which was respectable if not successful (hey, he won two states and did well on delegates for a second-tier candidate, and Secretary of Education was not a bad thing to get out of it...)

Gov. James B. "Jim" Hunt 1977-85
def. James C. Gardner 1976, I. Beverly Lake Jr. 1980

One of the state's most ambitious and politically savvy governors, Jim Hunt was a curious creature, a son of the Tobacco Belt who'd managed his family's farming business while he gained a law degree, who had apprenticed as Lieutenant Governor to Sanford's second term representing the mostly conservative East of the state, but who was himself an economic and even a social liberal. Hunt projected an image of being tough on law and order, and aggressive in his support of North Carolina's farming and fishing interests, while at the same time he started a state-level complement to the Head Start program called Smart Start, revamped the community college system, campaigned furiously to try and pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and supported a statewide rural community investment program that, despite anger in the State House, gave a fair share of funding to historically-black communities founded by sharecroppers. Effective at steering legislation for a governor with no veto power, Hunt was generally popular within the state and used that popularity to tilt at the windmill of unseating the godfather of North Carolina reactionary politics, Jesse Helms, from his Senate seat in 1984. The bitter contest, decided by just a few thousand votes, left Hunt with little taste for more politics but he remained actively involved in developing research centers for agriculture, education, and public policy in the University of North Carolina system, and set up a Hunt Foundation for research into early childhood education.

Gov. John Porter East 1985-88
def. James "Jimmy" Green 1984

Referred to by wags in the press as "Helms on Wheels," John East was Jesse Helms' political lieutenant, ideological confidant, and electoral protégé. The hard-right, wheelchair-bound political science professor had made a run at a U.S. Senate seat in 1980, losing by a very narrow margin to Terry Sanford, returned from his Cabinet position in DC. It had taken all of Sanford's own political clout, and an advertising campaign making East look as or more extreme than Helms, to stop him then. Now, with favorable GOP headwinds, a mobilized base of Christian fundamentalists and party-swapping, older white-backlash voters, and faced with a fractious Democratic primary between Rufus Edmisten and Jimmy Green, both of whom had faced corruption charges they'd dodged in court, East plowed ahead. In the end his margin was not as large as he would have liked, as undecideds began to draw back against him at the end of the race, but it was enough. He came into office empowered to make significant budget cuts, drafting plans for the closure of several of the smallest campuses in the UNC system (particularly those that served rural and "minority-majority" communities), tougher mandatory sentencing standards for drug crimes, and a series of restrictions on access to birth control counseling and abortion two of which became federal court cases. East was a workaholic as well, driving his way through paperwork and showing a remarkable command of small legislative details. It was that command that helped him band together a "conservative caucus" of tory Democrats and new-generation New Right Republicans to pass much of his legislative agenda. But the personal toll was high; far higher than anyone at the time imagined. With his health rocky, and in the early stages of the primary campaign for his reelection bid, East returned to his family home in Greenville to deal with what he called personal business affairs. Leaving the governor who liked his privacy to himself for a bit, his security detail did not realize the governor had locked himself in the house's garage, fatally gassing himself with carbon monoxide, until it was too late. The tragedy splashed across national news and North Carolina faced its first emergency gubernatorial succession.

Gov. James C. "Jim" Gardner, 1988-93
def. Robert Jordan III 1988

Jim Gardner was a Republican of the old school, an active and elected member of the party as far back as the Sixties when it was a distinct and comparatively moderate minority presence caught amid the civil war between liberals and segregationists that was tearing the state's Democratic Party in two. He had run for governor before and lost, paid his dues, served in a number of other offices, withstood and worked with the development of the mighty fundraising and patronage machine that developed around that arch neo-Confederate Jesse Helms, and secured for himself the Lieutenant Governor's nomination in 1984, riding the tide with John East into office. Now, suddenly, the big prize had fallen in his lap in the worst circumstances. Gardner rallied the state and the party around him, showed continued support for East's agenda whether he approved of all of it or not both out of respect for the dead and to ensure there was no serious primary challenge from his right. In more good circumstances for North Carolina Republicans, projecting an image of quieter, more thoughtful conservatism than East, he powered by dull Democratic moderate Bob Jordan to a term in his own right. Now he could concentrate on the commercial and financial issues that concerned him most, easing regulations and developing tax and development incentives for outside investment in the state, while leaving most of the culture-war hot topics off to one side. This would cost him in the end; a larger, national recession took hold at the worst time for his reelection prospect, and a feeling that he had not done enough lately to justify the crucial fundraising support of Helms' network of PACs hurt the structural capabilities of his campaign. In a race towards the middle to claim the votes of anxious suburbanites tied to the state's tech-and-biomedicine boom, left Gardner up short against his opponent in 1992...

Gov. Erskine B. Bowles, 1993-97
def. James C. Gardner 1992

Erskine Bowles was part of a curious new breed, although in many ways that "new breed" was the well-educated, financially-inclined offspring of old Southern Democratic moderates, men who'd made successes of themselves and liked to truck with money, but disliked the hateful certainty of the old-line segregationists and knew the votes they needed belonged to anxious, ordinary folk who wanted a steady hand at the wheel. Erskine Bowles learned that first hand from his father: "Skipper" Bowles was one of the state's best-known and most successful Democratic Party operatives of the Sixties and Seventies, a man who kept the peace between the liberal and moderate factions (as the segregationists peeled away to Wallace or the GOP) while making a tidy sum for himself in the process. Erskine had gone into business instead, a successful financial firm in Charlotte, before he was talked into running for Congress in the anti-GOP midterms of 1986. Three terms in Congress had whetted his appetite for politics, and with a weak field emerging in 1992 when Jim Hunt announced he would make no triumphal return to state politics, Bowles threw his hat in the gubernatorial primary. With slick advertising, meticulous campaign advisers, and the Helms machine's suspicious of Jim Gardner, Bowles "micro-targeted" key stretches of suburbs across the state and appealed to them saying that he, a successful financier with a social conscience, would lead the state and those suburban voters out of recession in ways that didn't make them feel bad about themselves. The sales pitch worked. And for several years Bowles benefited from fair economic winds, even chancing such liberal notions as a major infrastructure investment in state highways and commuter routes, the development of a light rail project for the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle, more money for community colleges to retrain cigarette and textile workers whose jobs were disappearing, and so on. But Bowles' resume -- his years in finance -- came back to bite him, with charges of improper transactions and insider trading tied to work he'd done during the real-estate boom in Charlotte in the early 1980s. Added were a charge of mail fraud and questions asked about gifts he'd received while governor, and while the charges kept failing to stick they tainted Bowles, already tolerated rather than loved by white liberals and minorities, and left him vulnerable to a well-crafted challenge in 1996.

Gov. Walter B. Jones, Jr. 1997-2001
def. Erskine Bowles 1996

Walter Jones Jr. was, to his detractors and even to some more neutral observers, something like the Chauncey Gardner of North Carolina politics. He was a vessel into which the ideas and desires of everyone to the right of Erskine Bowles could be poured, and in his public pronouncements and gymnastics over policy, he showed what seemed a mix of unthinking but ingratiating self-contradiction, and the furious hustle of a man whose only proper goal was his own success scrambling to reassure everyone, even enemies of one another, that he really was on all their sides. The son of a conservative Democrat who had held North Carolina's 1st Congressional District for decades, Jones Jr. had switched parties and run as a zealous New Right convert for the state legislature, holding a seat that covered Seymour Johnson Air Force Base for eight years before he joined the 1996 Republican gubernatorial primary. He benefitted from sheer good luck too when Helms' fair-haired boy David Funderburk was involved in a nasty car crash that raised questions of DUI, collapsing the strongest opposing campaign. Jones, who could sound enough like East for Tobacco Belt reactionaries and "exurban" white-flighters, and enough like Gardner to make the state Chamber of Commerce happy, moved ahead, smiling his broad, nervous smile the whole time, and quite ready to invest in the negative advertising needed to drive Bowles' favorable through the floor. Once he had won the election, however, the trouble began. Jones was outstandingly quick on his feet in getting a crowd to like him, but lacked a similar deftness managing the tactical demands of policy making. In practice he was a Chamber of Commerce man more than a Citizens' Committee one, and his inability to stop liberal filibusters of culture-war bills that defunded services in heavily minority areas or the arts or women's health made him look ineffective. His zealous efforts to help both Charlotte and Winston-Salem become significant financial-services centers carried the same price as it had for Bowles: not every bag man was honest, and not every state representative above board, and as several modest-sized corruption scandals erupted Jones' efforts to keep himself separated from them mobilized Democratic partisans while at the same time telling the Chamber of Commerce he was not willing to stand up and fight and make their little legal problems go away for. And just as it seemed fate had smiled again and handed him a natural advantage as he faced reelection, he turned out to be wrong about that too...

Gov. Harvey B. Gantt 2001-09
def. Walter B. Jones Jr. 2000 Richard Vinroot 2004

Harvey Gantt was one of North Carolina's more remarkable political characters. A tall, graceful, highly-educated black man in a lily-white political culture, mayor of the city that had fundamentally rebalanced the political, cultural, and economic geography of the state with its breakneck growth, a man who had desegregated Clemson University in South Carolina by showing up to school in the Sixties, then gained advanced degrees in architecture from MIT and served three two-year terms as Charlotte mayor through the go-go Eighties, Gantt was the very substance of something new in state politics. Though he lost his 1990 bid to unseat Jesse Helms his campaign did surprisingly well and mobilized black political activists around the country. He went on to serve in President Mabus' Cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was ranked one of the most effective cabinet officers throughout his tenure. After he returned to North Carolina he became involved in a series of civil rights and urban renewal organizations, and tested the waters for a run at the governorship. After beating out State Attorney General Mike Easley on the strength of urban and minority votes, he found himself toe to toe with Walter Jones Jr. Rather than emphasize the emergent financial scandals in the legislature, he emphasized his work in urban development and renewal and jobs creation just as another recession loomed. He also commissioned what became a legendary series of advertisements staged as conversations with North Carolina's favorite celebrity son (or at least tied with Michael Jordan and Richard Petty), Andy Griffith, who was himself a big Gantt supporter. The normalizing, encouraging conversations of those pieces were credited with swinging key undecided votes in Gantt's favor, while he concentrated on not making the mistakes of 1990 and starting a massive voter registration and mobilization base across the state's cities and in minority-heavy areas, including significant outreach to the growing Latino community in North Carolina's farm belts. Once governor he became involved first in mitigating the recession, then in developing new strategies for bringing high-tech investment into the state, instituting "pay to play" fees on financial institutions after a bitter legislative fight, finally acquiring veto power for the North Carolina governorship, investing in biotech research to develop new crops and uses for crops to revitalize the state's sagging farm belts, and managed a comprehensive budget reconciliation process for state income tax to cut the famous sales tax on food (used to fund community colleges) by half. That and a buoyant real estate marked helped Gantt survive a strong challenge from one of his successors as mayor of Charlotte, moderate Republican Richard Vinroot who had vaulted to his party's nomination with the late Jesse Helms' machine in disarray. Gantt's survival was narrow but he emerged still in office, devoted now to the recommendations of Jim Hunt's blue-ribbon commission for a comprehensive system of preschool in the state, for which he sought to build a partnership of public and private investments to extend the reach of Smart Start and begin providing resources for part-day preschool in trial districts of the public schools. As one of the nation's most powerful African American politicians, and a broadly successful governor, he now decided, as his term drew towards an end in 2008, to throw himself and his resources in the direction of higher things....

Gov. David E. Price 2009-13
def. David Funderburk 2008

For David Price, the North Carolina governorship was both a bequest and a reward. The decades-long liberal congressman from North Carolina's college-town enclave around Chapel Hill and Durham, Price was asked personally by Harvey Gantt if he would enter the race, at a moment made favorable by Gantt's own presidential campaign and to open the seat up to one of Gantt's state legislative allies. Neither Gantt nor Price expected a win in a landslide; Price instead concentrated on mobilizing core Democratic turnout, and on giving one of the comeback stories of North Carolina politics, now-Congressman David Funderburk, an heir to the remains of the Helms machine, enough ideological rope to hang himself with comfortable suburbanites who didn't want to identify themselves with bigotry. In that moment it was a success. And as governor Price was true to his word and to himself, taking in many ways more overtly liberal positions than Gantt did, dressed up less in outreach to private interests and calls to bring people together in common prosperity. There were still terrible inequalities of income, race, and sex in the state and Price decided he had been handed the opportunity to tackle them. This was not always easy, and it became nigh impossible with Republican control of the state legislature after midterms. But price fought on. Some measures, particularly in rural poverty relief and equitable funding for historically black colleges in the UNC system, showed surprising success. But many others became targets of right-wing advertising, and Price's consistent veto battles with the budgets set by the Republican-controlled lege towards the end of his term took a toll on his strength but endeared him to liberals. Out of that came one agreement developing a permanent funding line for North Carolina Public Broadcasting; a small thing against abortion restrictions and structural racism but still a candle lit. Perhaps Price's greatest quality was his almost serene ability to get on with the job, unafraid of his electoral fortunes. That was just as well...

Gov. Daniel Forest 2013-
def. David Price 2012

To look at him, Dan Forest was every lesson drawn from the NCGOP's experience with Walter Jones Jr. made flesh and fully operational. Relatively young, handsome, son of Sue Myrick a NCGOP stalwart who had succeeded Gantt as mayor of Charlotte, a corporate success story in his own right, who could talk business and investment policy with intelligence and soft-pedal social conservatism with a smile, Forest put a vibrant, young, forward-looking face on what was essentially, in demographic terms, pure backlash by the aging, conservative eastern and west-central portions of the state against the cities and minorities, bringing along enough affluent suburban voters who wanted a market turned loose to flourish to seal the deal. Forest did indeed clash with the cultural right of his party, not over end goals, but over how fast and openly they could move against the cultural liberalism of Charlotte and the Triangle, but provided enough business opportunities, tax cuts, and development incentives for finance, energy, and agriculture to soothe tempers. A surprisingly deft manager of legislators, Forest was able successfully to set policy from the governor's mansion again in ways no Republican had since Jim Gardner, perhaps since John East. He also knew how to talk to suburban North Carolinians, offering a language of opportunity and rising fortunes to justify legislative backsheesh and deregulation. Whether Forest's formulas would see the state into greater prosperity, whether he would successfully be able to take the turn towards voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering demanded by his party's right, and whether that would all pass muster with the voters, remained to be seen. But Forest was smart, ambitious, and buoyed by his own success to give it a try....


ETA: On a personal note, the first political rally I ever attended as a knowing and attentive participant (Mom had taken me to a couple of Mo Udall rallies in Ohio in '76 as preschooler) was during Jim Hunt's OTL campaign against Helms in '84. My mother was actually hired to replace John East on the faculty of his old school when he won his Senate seat; the department was on the ground floor and his old office was by one of the exit doors for the sake of his wheelchair in pre-ADA days. Later, when he decided to retire after one Senate term, during the summer of '86 my dad (as a university administrator) and the chair of Mom's department met with East in a Greenville restaurant to discuss an emeritus position after he left the Senate. He concluded the meeting, then went home and did exactly as described here minus the inattentive bodyguards; besides his more obviously physical ailments East had fought a lifelong battle with near-crippling major depression that made that outcome likelier "when" not "if" -- indeed a bolder POD would be him actually mastering his suicidation and carrying on because that was a less likely outcome. It was summer vacation, and I still remember my mother getting the call (we were visiting family in Florida at the time, she and I) and my father saying the police reckoned he and the dept. chair were the last non-family members to see East alive.