Obama 2012 landslide

What if the Republicans in 2012 had nominated Rick Santorum in their primary, and he proceeds to lose by a wide margin to President Obama?

I'm thinking he picks Bob McDonnell to be his running mate thinking that a work-minded southern governor is a good balance to his rust belt catholic social conservative politics. The press then digs around and discovers McDonnell's corruption earlier. Cross that with Santorum responding poorly to Todd Aikin and Richard Mourdock, and the GOP doesn't fare well that year.

President Obama wins North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nebraska's Second Congressional District and likely wins the popular vote by 7-8 points like in 2008.

Jeff Flake and Dean Heller lose their Senate races, meaning the Senate is 57-43 afterwards.

Democrats win the popular vote in the House by 2-4 points instead of by 1 point. The GOP maintains control of the house by its fingertips probably due to gerrymandering.
 
The Republicans would probably start vetting their candidates better and start shying away from the social extremists.
Making the 2016 election unrecognizable.
 
I'm generally against the theory that one election cycle informs primary voters to choose the 'smartest' choice next time around, so I don't necessarily think that Obama cruising over a social conservative would cause the GOP primary voters to nominate a more pragmatic Rubio or Pawlenty (wrong cycle, I know) type. It's not like OTL Romney was running from the center in the primaries either. Former Obama Comms Director Dan Pfeiffer likes to mention that in 2004, after Kerry lost, everyone in the Democratic party was convinced that they needed to nominate someone that could cut Republicans off from the center and appeal to the midwest and then the voters went ahead and voted for someone named Barack Huessian Obama (his emphasis on the middle name, to point out how unthinkable that would be in the 2004 political climate), which, against the 04 conventional wisdom, turned into massive political success.
 
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I am less inclined now than I once was to think that Santorum would have done much worse than Romney in 2012. I now think that voters--apart from the majority who simply choose on party lines in election after election--are basically either in the mood for a change of administrations or they aren't (they weren't yet in 2012) and that having a particularly controversial candidate may change the vote by a couple of percentage points but that's about it. And I am not sure that Santorum losing by seven points would have much effect on the 2016 Republican primaries--after all, Cruz, rather than Trump, was the most explicitly religious-right candidate (and in that sense the most Santorum-like) in 2016, at least after Carson left the race.
 
I am less inclined now than I once was to think that Santorum would have done much worse than Romney in 2012. I now think that voters--apart from the majority who simply choose on party lines in election after election--are basically either in the mood for a change of administrations or they aren't (they weren't yet in 2012) and that having a particularly controversial candidate may change the vote by a couple of percentage points but that's about it.


Indeed. Poor old Goldwater was dismissed as the greatest vote loser since Landon. Yet if I recall my Theodore H White correctly, opinion polls at the time showed LBJ curbstomping Rockefeller or Lodge almost as badly.
 
Would this shift Senate seats? If so does it change control for 2014-6 and 2016-8

That has a big impact on the Supreme Court

That's probably the most consequential butterfly, especially considering the thin majority at the moment. Looking at OTL results, it looks like only Heller and Flake would have been in striking distance for a seat flip, and the Democrats did really well in holding Missouri, Montana, and flipping Indiana. However, even if the Dems go up two seats and still lose 9 in 2014 like OTL, they'd still lose the chamber by a big margin.
 
Would this shift Senate seats? If so does it change control for 2014-6 and 2016-8

That has a big impact on the Supreme Court

Not so far, actually--unless it changes the results in at least three Senate races, which I doubt. (Even a 50-50 Senate rather than the 52-48 one of OTL would have voted to use the "nuclear option" and confirm Gorsuch.) My own guess is that a Santorum nomination will change only one Senate race--NV, where Heller was the only Republican who won a Senate race in 2012 by less than 3.0 points. Even if Flake is also defeated (which I doubt) the GOP will still control the Senate in 2017.

Likewise in 2016, even if the Republicans have a 53-47 or even 52-48 majority instead of the 54-46 of OTL, that's enough to block Garland.
 
The Republicans would probably start vetting their candidates better and start shying away from the social extremists.
Making the 2016 election unrecognizable.

The issue is they did tinker with the process for 2016. The rules changes they set up made it that whoever becomes the front-runner would have a more commanding lead delegates wise - giving way to Donald Trump. The idea was that it'd help a plurality candidate like Romney 2012 move ahead, but instead it paved the way for Trump to get a majority of the delegates with a minority of the vote and avoid a contested convention.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/grap.../explaining-the-presidential-primary-process/


If you're talking about the Senate races, Mourdock had already won statewide office by the time he ran for Senate and Flake was a typical-if-conservative congressman who, if he had an issue, was that he was less of a firebrand than other Republicans. Todd Akin is a whole other matter, but he was actually third in the GOP primary until McCaskill started running ads against him to bump him up (very clever on her part).
 
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