WI: Dukakis didn't run in 1988

Difficult one. Jackson was never going to have sufficient numbers on a nationwide basis for the nomination IMHO. Someone like Bruce Babbitt (competent, fairly inoffensive governor) may have played the Dukakis role and won. Gore, Gephardt or Simon are also possibilities.
 
it's probably going to be whoever wins New Hampshire. Dukakis was from neighboring Massachusetts and effectively took it off the table. It's possible Gephardt wins Iowa as in OTL and then takes NH. Gore would have had to change strategies entirely; his plan was to skip the early states and focus on the South.
 
Bill Clinton, maybe. If it has to be a northeastern liberal, maybe Cuomo.

Although, how do thing go in 1992 if a Clinton/Gore ticket fails bigtime in '88?
 
Gephardt is the most likely IMO and would probably have been a lot better stacked against George HW Bush, with the Midwest and Northeast likely to swing his way pretty handily.

Gore has a shot if he goes down a different road-strategy wise, but he'd honestly be best served as VP and, if all goes well for the Dems, winning the White House in '96 in a series of events that mirror Reagan and Bush's time in power.
 
I'd say it's possible that Gephardt could win New Hampshire and from there have a serious chance of winning the nomination, but he would probably lose in the general. Due to his long career in Congress Gephardt had a record that was easy to attack: Dukakis put out an ad hammering Gephardt as a flip-flopper. Here's the Washington Post in 1988: "His ideas were catching on as the campaign moved South, but Gephardt himself caught a barrage of journalistic suspicion about his highly touted populist convictions -- and a storm of attack ads from his Democratic rivals. Dick Gephardt, the voters were told in the ads of Dukakis and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, had 'flip-flopped' on issues ranging from 'Reaganomics' to Social Security, and he battered the corporate monolith while taking its money."

Gephardt also made his own situation even worse by launching attack ads against Dukakis that badly backfired. If nominated, Atwater would tear Gephardt apart and he'd lose to Bush - even if by a narrower margin than Dukakis.
 
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