WI: Ann Richards Beats George W Bush in 1994

If Ann Richards is elected president or vice president in 2000, then her tenure might be short-lived. In OTL she died in 2006 from esophageal cancer, which was brought on by heavy alcohol and tobacco use in her younger years. It would be very unlikely to butterfly that away if the POD is in 1994. The stresses of the presidency could shorten her life further.
Is it possible she lives longer because she might have more drive and motivation to do things?
 
But one reason that McCain emphasized his "maverick"-ness in OTL in 1999-2000 is precisely that he knew the GOP Establishment was pretty solidly behind Bush. If Bush were not in the field, McCain might put much more emphasis on the many issues on which he was a pretty standard conservative Republican (including abortion) and much less on the few issues on which he wasn't (notably, campaign finance). So he might have been seen as a "mainstream Republican." Of course there might be rivals for "mainstream Republican" support--Liddy Dole or John Kasich or John Engler, for example--but they all had political disadvantages of their own, in terms of not being widely-enough known or in the case of Liddy Dole of being married to the man who had lost in 1996...

I'm really dubious that the campaign finance reform issue was as contrived against Bush as you're making out here. It's both something McCain genuinely believed in, and also something which easily segued into a partisan line of attack against the Clinton White House and Al Gore of the back of the way the 1996 campaign was financed. (McCain promised to 'beat Al Gore like a drum' over the Hsi Lai temple issue) It's not like it was just something designed to mobilise people against other Republicans, there was a partisan edge to it too. I don't think grassroots Republicans really cared about it half as much as McCain did in the end, but the intention was not just to throw it against the Republican establishment.

If McCain had presented himself as more in the way of being a 'standard' Republican it would in any case have seriously diminished a large part of why he was so successful IOTL, particularly in New Hampshire and other open or semi-open primary states.
 
I'll put a plug in for Frank Keating, who gets ignored, but who would have cut a very similar profile to Bush. And despite his being governor of a small-ish state (Oklahoma), he had many national ties, having served as an assistant AG in the (HW) Bush Administration and in the Reagan Administration. He had also developed something of a national profile after the Oklahoma City bombing, and like Bush had many ties to the oil and gas industries, governed with a (conservative) Democratic legislature, had made ed reform a key part of his agenda, and was a Catholic who drew a lot of support from the evangelical Right.
 

ben0628

Banned
McCain only gained traction because he was the only plausible alternative to Bush in the GOP primaries that year. In a world where Bush doesn't run, you'll probably see more high-profile candidates run, such as Jack Kemp, Thad Cochran, Tom Ridge, George Pataki, etc.

I'd absolutely love a Tom Ridge presidency
 
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