What if Dukakis signed the bill banning furloughs for first-degree murderers? This means Willie Horton stays in prison.
If Dukakis lost without Willie Horton, what lessons would be learned by the Democrats?I have to keep going through this again and again: "The Republican convention was particularly important. It took Bush from a double-digit deficit at the beginning of August to a narrow lead at the end of that month. After that, Bush never lost the lead. This is something that conventional accounts of the Willie Horton ad rarely mention: Dukakis was already behind when the ad appeared." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...top-the-endless-hype-of-the-willie-horton-ad/ As the article acknowledges "there is always the counterfactual: Could Dukakis have come from behind in October and won the election if not for the attacks on his record on crime?" I would guess that the answer is No, though he could have made the race a bit closer. 1988 was after all a year of peace and prosperity, which usually favor the party in power, and it's not like *apart from the Willie Horton issue* Dukakis was such a great campaigner. (For example, Bush had the edge on national security--and Dukakis' ride in that tnak didn't help--and Dukakis could be attacked on crime even apart from the prison furlough issue because of his opposition to capital punishment.)
So, good for Jesse Jackson to the extent he was able to de-toxify the issue. Heck the criminal could just has well been a German-American, a Polish-American, an Asian-American, Latino-American, etc, etc, etc. And same for the victim.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...top-the-endless-hype-of-the-willie-horton-ad/
' . . . In this second time period, Bush’s popularity was sharply higher among people who already harbored unfavorable feelings about blacks. . . '
' . . . But what happened after Oct. 21? On that day, Jesse Jackson said on CBS News what few had said publicly to that point: that using Horton’s case as a campaign message actually played on racial fears. In so doing, Mendelberg argues, Jackson took an issue that had been only implicitly about race and made it explicit. Subsequent news stories began to mention race and racism when they discussed Horton and the campaign.
'Most crucially, voters, now aware that this campaign message potentially violated norms against racism, no longer reacted in the same way. Among voters interviewed after Jackson’s statement —between Oct. 22 and Election Day in Mendelberg’s survey — racial prejudice ceased to predict attitudes toward Bush and Dukakis. Jackson’s argument had neutralized the issue. . . '
I suspect that probably the neatest single POD to make Dukakis win is to have him not fire (or more quickly rehire) John Sasso as campaign manager - Sasso was talented and tough (and generally credited with propelling Dukakis to the top of the Democratic primaries in the first place) - whereas Susan Estrich had absolutely no prior experience managing a campaign and didn't exactly acquit herself well in 1988.
If Sasso is brought back as campaign manager in March after the Michigan primary (which was apparently mooted), rather than late September - it's very easy to see Dukakis not blowing the massive lead he had after the Democratic Convention and (at the very least) eking out a small victory.
Sure, three examples do indeed suggest that there's absolutely no way Dukakis wins by the 17% margin that polls had him at at before the conventions. I don't think he could have won by that much either.
But Dukakis' wide (hypothetical) lead also casts doubt on the whole 'peace and prosperity was so obvious that Bush was clearly going to win, nothing could change that' counter-hypothesis here.
If anything, 'parties get turned out of office after they've served more than one term' is a much more straightforward fundamental predictor if you insist on using one, since it's only been wrong once since 1948 - in 1988 itself. Maybe Atwater and Estrich were a part of that.
That I will agree with - if there ever was a time for a party to make it to three terms post Truman, 1988 was it. The economy was good, and Bush had an better time piggybacking of of his president's popularity than either Nixon or Gore would.
[If anything, one of the things that Dukakis would probably need to do to pull out a win is change up the electoral math - Bentsen was a good VP pick but the southern states and Texas were still all way beyond reach for him - if he runs with someone like Jim Blanchard or John Glenn and focuses more on Michigan or Ohio, he only needs something like a 3% swing elsewhere to win, and that does seem a bit more doable (The tough part is probably getting a big enough home-state bounce for VP, to be honest) - and then we have a scenario where Dukakis scrapes out a victory despite Bush winning the popular vote by a sizable margin]
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1980
Reagan 50.7%
Carter 41.0 %
Anderson 6.6%
Yes, Reagan did technically beat Carter by about 10 points, but with Reagan having 50.7% of the popular vote, I'm going to consider that, not so much a mandate, more than voters are giving his administration a chance.