No Chernobyl=President Dukakis?

It's highly arguable, but I believe that Reagan's escalation of the Cold War was still in effect by 1988.

It's not highly arguable, it's completely wrong. In 1987 Reagan signed the INF treaty, one of the most sweeping arms reductions measures of the Cold War. Reagan ended his presidency with a fairly clear renewal of détente, (though it's not often described as such) to the outrage of a lot of hawks and the Republican right. The Cold War was emphatically not still being escalated by 1988, on the contrary it was very much thawing out - that was the policy George Bush inherited.

I'm not sure I'd say that INF was the end of the Cold War like the OP, but it was certainly the beginning of the end. When you eventually got to the stage a few years later of the USSR supporting the Gulf War, I think the Cold War was unambiguously over by that point. There's no reason to date it as simultaneous with the collapse of the USSR.
 
Last edited:
On May 28, 1987, nineteen-year-old West German citizen Mathias Rust took off in small Cessna from Helsinki, Finland, and landed in Red Square, Moscow about 7 pm in the evening.

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-notorious-flight-of-mathias-rust-7101888/?page=3

Rust’s altitude probably helped him appear harmless. Had he attempted to evade radar, as many later speculated he did, the Soviets likely would have taken more aggressive action to stop him, but even in that scenario, the Soviets’ options for dealing with him were fairly limited. Since the KAL 007 tragedy, strict orders were given that no hostile action be taken against civilian aircraft unless orders originated at the very highest levels of the Soviet military, and at that moment, Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov and other top military commanders were in East Berlin with Gorbachev for a meeting of Warsaw Pact states.
The argument would be that Gorbachev has his right flank, too. Plus, no one likes being embarrassed.
 
We've been though this many times, but very often candidates get a strong lead when they have clinched their party's nomination and especially just after the convention--and go on to lose (or to win by far more narrow margins than the spring and summer polls indicated) *not* because they were terrible campaigners (though sometimes they were) but because their leads were never real to begin with: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/can-bill-clinton-win-in-1988.353222/#post-10749600

For why I think Bush was the favorite all along, just look at https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/UNRATE.txt Unemployment in November 1988 was 5.3 percent--the lowest since 1974...
The evidence doesn't support that theory. There've been 6 incumbentless elections since World War II. The 1988 election was the only one the candidate of the outgoing president's party won. But, the unemployment rate was lower at the time of three of the other 5.
 
The evidence doesn't support that theory. There've been 6 incumbentless elections since World War II. The 1988 election was the only one the candidate of the outgoing president's party won. But, the unemployment rate was lower at the time of three of the other 5.

There have been six elections since World War II when the party holding the White House was seeking a third term. (In 1952 it was seeking a *sixth* term, which is considerably harder to accomplish, especially when there is a war in Korea and the non-incumbent party has nominated a national hero...) Of those six, the party holding the White House lost in 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, and 2008 and won in 1988.

Now this 5-1 record has often been cited as "proof" that it is very hard for a party to win a third term. But note three things: First, it is confined to a few decades of US electoral history, and ignores everything preceding it, when it was quite common for Republicans (1896, 1900, 1904, and 1908; also 1920, 1924, 1928) or Democrats (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948) to win several terms in a row. Second, of the five losses, four (1960, 1968, 1976, and 2000) were very close--whereas the one victory (1988) wasn't close at all. Indeed, in 2000 (and arguably in 1960, depending on how you count Alabama) the party controlling the White House actually won the popular vote! The only case where a party holding the White House has *decisively* lost its bid for a third term was 2008, and that was with the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Third, there were specific *reasons* the party lost--in 1960, there was a recession (a mild one, but the second in two years), in 1968 there was the Vietnam War, race riots, and a Democratic Party that had torn itself to pieces, in 1976 there was the aftermath of Watergate and the Nixon pardon (and unemployment was still relatively high), in 2000 there was Nader--and in any event, elections where the popular vote winner by over 500,000 votes loses in the Electoral College are just too rare to be very instructive. And in 2008, as I have mentioned, there was the start of the Great Recession.

If in 1988 there is peace (whether the peace of détente as in OTL or as in 1984 the peace of a Cold War) and prosperity, it is hard to see why Bush would lose--any more than Nixon would have lost in 1960 if the economy had been more prosperous, or Humphrey would have lost in 1968 if there was no Vietnam War or race riots and he had a united party behind him. In short, the White House is not a metronome http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/the-white-house-is-not-a-metronome/ and 1988 is not some inexplicable aberration that can be attributed only to Willie Horton ...
 
We're talking about the end of the cold war, not the breakup of the Soviet Union, which, by the way, didn't happen until the end of 1991.

I am aware, and once again, Chernobyl was not the primary cause. It was a symptom of the overall issue of a country which was fighting a plethora of technical and social issues.
 
There have been six elections since World War II when the party holding the White House was seeking a third term. (In 1952 it was seeking a *sixth* term, which is considerably harder to accomplish, especially when there is a war in Korea and the non-incumbent party has nominated a national hero...) Of those six, the party holding the White House lost in 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, and 2008 and won in 1988.

Now this 5-1 record has often been cited as "proof" that it is very hard for a party to win a third term. But note three things: First, it is confined to a few decades of US electoral history, and ignores everything preceding it, when it was quite common for Republicans (1896, 1900, 1904, and 1908; also 1920, 1924, 1928) or Democrats (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948) to win several terms in a row. Second, of the five losses, four (1960, 1968, 1976, and 2000) were very close--whereas the one victory (1988) wasn't close at all. Indeed, in 2000 (and arguably in 1960, depending on how you count Alabama) the party controlling the White House actually won the popular vote! The only case where a party holding the White House has *decisively* lost its bid for a third term was 2008, and that was with the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Third, there were specific *reasons* the party lost--in 1960, there was a recession (a mild one, but the second in two years), in 1968 there was the Vietnam War, race riots, and a Democratic Party that had torn itself to pieces, in 1976 there was the aftermath of Watergate and the Nixon pardon (and unemployment was still relatively high), in 2000 there was Nader--and in any event, elections where the popular vote winner by over 500,000 votes loses in the Electoral College are just too rare to be very instructive. And in 2008, as I have mentioned, there was the start of the Great Recession.

If in 1988 there is peace (whether the peace of détente as in OTL or as in 1984 the peace of a Cold War) and prosperity, it is hard to see why Bush would lose--any more than Nixon would have lost in 1960 if the economy had been more prosperous, or Humphrey would have lost in 1968 if there was no Vietnam War or race riots and he had a united party behind him. In short, the White House is not a metronome http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/the-white-house-is-not-a-metronome/ and 1988 is not some inexplicable aberration that can be attributed only to Willie Horton ...
I'm not saying it's hard for a party to win a third term. I'm saying the evidence doesn't support your theory that Bush won because of the unemployment rate.
 
On what do you base the argument that the cold war ended in 1991?

Had the hardline coup succeeded the cold war could have easily flared up again. Sure tensions declined, particularly after the INF treaty but, at the earliest, I would call the end as of December 1989. Once the Soviets let the communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapse, it was essentially over, a different outcome in the August 1991 coup possibly excepting. But not until then.
 
Had the hardline coup succeeded the cold war could have easily flared up again. Sure tensions declined, particularly after the INF treaty but, at the earliest, I would call the end as of December 1989. Once the Soviets let the communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapse, it was essentially over, a different outcome in the August 1991 coup possibly excepting. But not until then.

I think it's a little more involved than just the unemployment rate but the economy still has outsized importance. I am sure there are better sources than the link below but it is a good starting point.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...uring-the-effect-of-the-economy-on-elections/
Incumbentful elections from 1956 to 2004 followed the 6% Rule, which states that when the economy grows more than 6% from the third quarter of the year before the year before the election through the third quarter of the year of the election, the president wins. When it grows less, the president loses. But, the 6% Rule obviously didn't apply to incumbentless elections. The 6% Rule is now defunct. The 2012 election broke it.
 
Incumbentful elections from 1956 to 2004 followed the 6% Rule, which states that when the economy grows more than 6% from the third quarter of the year before the year before the election through the third quarter of the year of the election, the president wins. When it grows less, the president loses. But, the 6% Rule obviously didn't apply to incumbentless elections. The 6% Rule is now defunct. The 2012 election broke it.

I am pretty sure the 6% rule does not meet any level of statistical significance. Regardless, can we agree that the economy has a considerable impact on Presidential elections? As to 1988, the economy was arguably strong enough to provide incumbent advantage. If you would like to disagree, either make the case that the economy was for some reason not as relevant or that their is a better model for measuring the relationship between the economy and elections.
 
I am pretty sure the 6% rule does not meet any level of statistical significance. Regardless, can we agree that the economy has a considerable impact on Presidential elections? As to 1988, the economy was arguably strong enough to provide incumbent advantage. If you would like to disagree, either make the case that the economy was for some reason not as relevant or that their is a better model for measuring the relationship between the economy and elections.
There were 9 incumbentful elections from 1956-2004. The 6% Rule held true in all of them. Look it up. https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/GDPMC1.txt There was no incumbent in 1988.
 
But why don't we just look at third and fourth quarter of an election year? (the 4th quarter because people sometimes pick up which way the economy is going)
 
Top