WI: Ron Paul Vs. John Edwards 2008

I can see Edwards being the Democratic nominee in the event that Hillary, Obama sit the 2008 election out and Al Gore still choses not to run. I must ask how in the hell does Ron Paul win the GOP nomination without a POD taking place five or six decades ago?
 
I can see Edwards being the Democratic nominee in the event that Hillary, Obama sit the 2008 election out and Al Gore still choses not to run. I must ask how in the hell does Ron Paul win the GOP nomination without a POD taking place five or six decades ago?

Every Republican smokes a huge bottomless bag of weed.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
I'd vote for Bernie Sanders before Ron Paul, mostly because I am a Neocon. I'd rather have a naive socialist than a PutinBot libertarian.

There are a lot of Republicans who would take Edwards any day, affairs and all, over Paul.
 
I can see Edwards being the Democratic nominee in the event that Hillary, Obama sit the 2008 election out and Al Gore still choses not to run.

*Even then* he wouldn't win the nomination--because of the Rielle Hunter affair. (Yes, word of it would get out before the convention. If need be, if he 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

Of course if there's no affair and Edwards wins the nomination, he probably beats whoever the GOP nominates (who will almost certainly not be Ron Paul, who got a grand total of 5.6 percent of the vote in the 2008 GOP primaries in OTL) because it's 2008 and the economy is so bad.
 
I've speculated that the best and least unrealistic( though that's not saying much)way to get Paul nominated in 2008 is to have him be speaking at some event where Sarah Palin is. Suddenly she goes into labor (she gave birth in April 2008) and ole Ron delivers the child. It later emerges that both the child and mother would have died had he not been there to oversee the birth. The Religious Right instantly have a new hero who can really boast about being pro life, and with overwhelming support from this bloc and Palin he is able to win the nomination over a crowded field. As an added bonus, he chooses her as his running mate.

I'm not sure he could win in 2008 though, even against Edwards. Certainly there would be a third party candidacy from the neoconservatives, but judging by how ineffective they were at recruiting anyone this time I'm not sure how serious it would be.
 
I can see Edwards being the Democratic nominee in the event that Hillary, Obama sit the 2008 election out and Al Gore still choses not to run. I must ask how in the hell does Ron Paul win the GOP nomination without a POD taking place five or six decades ago?

In 2008 the Edwards campaign planned on leaking the news of his affair with Rielle Hunter if it ever looked like he was going to win the nomination, so it's very, very hard, bordering on impossible, to get Edwards as the nominee in 2008.
 
In 2008 the Edwards campaign planned on leaking the news of his affair with Rielle Hunter if it ever looked like he was going to win the nomination, so it's very, very hard, bordering on impossible, to get Edwards as the nominee in 2008.
It becomes more realistic once you butterfly it away, which is not ASB.
 
It becomes more realistic once you butterfly it away, which is not ASB.

I agree that without the affair, an Edwards nomination is at least conceivable, though I still think it's improbable unless *both* HRC and Obama decide not to run, which is pretty unlikely. But Ron Paul winning the GOP nomination is extraordinarily unlikely in 2008 (and in 2012--but at least in 2012 the GOP may have been a *bit* more open to unorthodox ideas than in 2008). In both of the two earliest contests (Iowa and NH) he finished *fifth.* He ended with 5.6% of the total Republican primary vote, compared with 46.7% for McCain, 20.1% for Huckabee, and 22.2% for Romney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,_2008 As far as I can see, he didn't get into double digits in a single primary state (though he did so in some caucus states, where relatively small numbers of ideologically motivated people can make a difference).
 
I agree that without the affair, an Edwards nomination is at least conceivable, though I still think it's improbable unless *both* HRC and Obama decide not to run, which is pretty unlikely. But Ron Paul winning the GOP nomination is extraordinarily unlikely in 2008 (and in 2012--but at least in 2012 the GOP may have been a *bit* more open to unorthodox ideas than in 2008). In both of the two earliest contests (Iowa and NH) he finished *fifth.* He ended with 5.6% of the total Republican primary vote, compared with 46.7% for McCain, 20.1% for Huckabee, and 22.2% for Romney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,_2008 As far as I can see, he didn't get into double digits in a single primary state (though he did so in some caucus states, where relatively small numbers of ideologically motivated people can make a difference).
Yes. Getting Paul to be R nominee is harder, but not ASB as well. But what PODs are necessary?
 
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