How would the US and the world in general be like today had Mitt Romney won in 2012?
Why is obamacare dead?Domestically bye bye Obamacare. Good thing is that we might avoid rise of Trump. Romney might even win 2016 election altough probably with small marginal.
1. Or Obama proceeds to bomb the second and third debates too.Obama losing in 2012 (a not particularly close election) probably means the country is in worse shape to start with (since otherwise Obama would have won as OTL, since it's hard to unseat a sitting president without a serious recession), which is going to shape his term.
No Iran deal, but I don't think he'd be crazy enough to actually start a war with Iran, which means Iran is much closer to a nuclear weapon, and the hardliners are significantly stronger (and the Syria situation is even more of a mess).
Obamacare is gone (ITTL, the country hasn't had years to encounter the good points of Obamacare, so the Republicans can pull off a straight repeal without replacement without getting pilloried for it), which is a bad thing.
I doubt that Russia and Ukraine goes any different; George W. Bush did nothing to stop the Russian invasion of Georgia. No American president is willing to start a nuclear war over Donetsk, and Putin knows this.
Expect a big push for tax cuts, which probably pass. On the other hand, tackling immigration reform probably fails; there's a large enough division within the Republican base on the issue that it likely goes no where.
Scalia's court vacancy gets filled quickly (since McConnell will have no reason to hold up a Republican nomination as he did with Garland, and every reason to push for a confirmation ASAP rather than risk a Democrat in 2017 filling that seat), and I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy also resigned (I suspect Kennedy hasn't resigned yet mainly because he's still somewhat uncomfortable with Donald Trump being the one to choose his successor; Romney would be a bog-standard Republican and thus totally acceptable) and was replaced, which tilts the Supreme Court further right.
I agree no Trump in 2016, but the fissures that the Trump movement represents will still be there, and someone like Romney certainly can't fix those.
Bombing debates is much less important than political commentators tend to make it. Trump did abysmally in all three, and still managed to eek out a win, while Kerry's 2004 debate success didn't lead him to victory. Besides, it's really hard to imagine Obama managing to blow all three; the incumbent president usually loses the first debate but comes back to do better in the later ones. In general, people tend to overestimate the effects of campaigns, because it's what gets covered, but most elections are decided by structural factors. Bottom-line: it's really hard to beat an incumbent president (it's happened three times in the past century, and each one required a serious economic crisis).1. Or Obama proceeds to bomb the second and third debates too.
2. That's assuming the Repubs even have the Senate, which they only won in 2014.
I mean, he lost by 4% OTL (and IIRC, unlike this year, Obama was particularly resilient in the swing states, so a "win the electoral college while losing the popular vote" scenario seems unlikely), so a Romney win means a pretty substantial swing to the Republicans. Heidi Heitkamp won ND by less than a percentage point, and while none of the other races were that close, there were several that were close enough to put the Republicans in easy striking distance (especially since they will have less need to play defense with a more unpopular Obama dragging down the ticket).Really depends on Romney's win margin.
How would the US and the world in general be like today had Mitt Romney won in 2012?