The biggest fluke of all time: The GOP beats John Edwards in 2008

John Edwards as 2008 nominee is just a fun though experiment. 2008 was an election the Democrats just couldn't have lost, and yet John Edwards might have been proof of the saying "never say never".

What if and how could the GOP have beaten Edwards in 2008?

I imagine this would require Edwards having a comparably despicable running mate and the GOP somehow putting up a ticket better than McCain-Palin (Pawlenty-Ridge for a rust belt strategy, Pawlenty-Huckabee for a rust belt + populism method, etc).
 
Supposing the stock market hadn't crashed, McCain was probably the best they could have gotten. Maybe Romney would have been a little better. Getting Edwards through the primaries seems more challenging than the GOP beating him afterwards, though. I don't think it would work without both Obama and Hillary staying on the sidelines.

With that said, Edwards admitted to his affair in August 2008 IOTL. I think that alone would have been plenty enough to doom him - affairs are common among famous people, but running out on a dying wife is beyond shitty. Dems would fall into chaos over that.
 
Once again: The Hunter affair was well-known for a long time, and if Edwards really seemed to be on the verge of winning the nomination, some of his ex-staffers would probably have gone public with it. Moreover it is likely that in OTL the reason the mainstream media didn't cover it more before August 2008 was that he had been eliminated as a presidential candidate, so covering it seemed to be unnecessarily adding to Elizabeth Edwards' pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards_extramarital_affair

Really, the only plausible way Edwards could have won the nomination is if there had been no Hunter affair. In which case, Edwards, if he won the nomination (which is unlikely in any event) would have won in November.
 
The way you get a Hunter affair to have a much bigger effect than it did is to have Kerry win the 2004 election, and then somehow kill off Kerry, putting Edwards in the White House. Then you keep this from butterflying away or stopping the affair, and then have it come out in 2008, along with the campaign finance violations.
 
. . . Edwards admitted to his affair in August 2008 IOTL. I think that alone would have been plenty enough to doom him - affairs are common among famous people, but running out on a dying wife is beyond shitty. . .
shitty, yes, no question.

All the same, times of chronic stress with a lot of obligations including your own high standards, is exactly when people have affairs, start drinking more heavily, fall back into problem gambling, etc.
 
The way you get a Hunter affair to have a much bigger effect than it did is to have Kerry win the 2004 election, and then somehow kill off Kerry, putting Edwards in the White House. Then you keep this from butterflying away or stopping the affair, and then have it come out in 2008, along with the campaign finance violations.

"Hunter had pitched the idea of creating the series to Edwards when she met him at a bar in New York, where the politician was attending a business meeting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards_extramarital_affair Somehow I doubt President Edwards would be in that bar at that time...
 
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