Talk Elections

In the 2004, primaries, Howard Dean's oganization in Iowa turnes out to be much better than in real life, and he sweeps to victory there and, on that momentum, captures New Hampshire too.  Kerry fights back bravely, but Dean's concise attacks on President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and the economy excite Democrats and convince them that they want a real bulldog to attack Bush.  Kerry bows out a few weeks after Super Tuesday and Dean, with a good ground political organization and a fired-up base, picks Iowa congressman Richard Gephardt to be his running mate.

In the general election campaign, both candidates make some verbal gaffes that occasionally get them in trouble, but the growing disatisfaction with the war in Iraq begins to gnaw at the president's approval ratings.  In return, the Bush campaign ridicules Dean's sometimes flaming rhetoric and his lack of national security experience.  The three debates between the candidates offer some good exchanges, but even though the polls show that the public thinks Dean won all the debates, general national security worries vs. the growing anti-Iraq sentiment keep the national polls close.  Drawing special attention is the vice-presidential debate, featuring two parents of gay children sharing a touching concord about their respective love for their children (which includes Cheney conceding that he thinks gay marriage should be a state and not a federal issue) in the midst of a crisp policy debate, and this appears to offset the several anti-gay marriage initiatives up for vote in a number of states.  His organization and online funding efforts, along with Gephardt's appeal in parts of the midwest and rustbelt, impel Dean to campaign aggressively in a number of states won by Bush in 2000.  Going into the election, it is clear that both parties will do a supurb job mobilizing their bases, and amidst heavy voter turnout, the voters in the middle and Independents may decide the fate of the country.

How does the election turn out?  Maps, please.

President George W. Bush / Vice President Dick Cheney
Goveror Howard Dean / Congressman Richard Gephardt

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Dean-327
Bush-211

Dean would have beaten Bush Badly.

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RON PAUL REVOLUTION!!!!!!

Take your right hand. And slowly...move it away...from your pants.

Just what I was thinking.

Ok, well, after that little bit of excitement...

Here is what would have worried me about a Bush/Cheney vs. Dean/Gephardt race.  Gephardt carries his Iowa home advantage, and his religious affiliation brings over enough voters in New Mexico and both candidates win enough union support in the Nevada cities to carry each of these three states.  But, Bush wins a close race in Florida and eeks out a one point win in Ohio, and suddenly, we have the result:

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                               Electoral Vote:                Popular Vote
Bush/Cheney                    269                           48.8%
Dean/Gephardt                 269                           49.2%

For the second straight election, Bush loses the popular vote, but the tied electoral college sends the election to the House, and Bush retains the presidency.  Coming on the heels of his controversial 2000 decision against Gore, the Democrats are half-ready to revolt.  For the only time in history, a president is elected to two terms having lost the popular vote both times and having been awarded the presidency ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court in the first election and the U.S. House of Representatives in his second.

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:o Frightening scenario...

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A few of you have Dean losing Wisconsin.  I don't think so.  If Kerry won Wisconsin, Dean will definitely win it.

Dean would have won. I can say that.

I highly doubt Dean could beat Bush. One of the reasons Bush prevailed in a close election was because they were able to stick the "Massachusetts liberal" charge on Kerry. If the GOP could make that charge stick on Kerry, a moderate compared to Dean, then they would have no trouble branding Dean as a left-wing curiosity too liberal for America. Also, too, the GOP would raise the "inexperience" charge over Dean, the governor of a state with 3 electoral votes (imagine a GOP twist on Sarah Palin in 2008, ironic isn't it?) Anyway, I think Dean's campaign would've been more energetic than Kerry's, but in the end I think Bush's second term wouldn't have been in doubt.

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Remember that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire all went for Kerry by 2 points or less, so Bush could've conceivably won there.

Bush/Cheney - 321
Dean/Gephardt - 217

Dean had been Governor for 14 years.

Dean is also a nutcase.

I remember the Democrats were saying the same thing about Reagan, back in 1980.
Didn't work out that well, huh?

Dean isn't a nutcase.  Anyway, I wish the Democrats would have nominated him in '04.  Maybe he would have lost (maybe not), but at least he would have taken it to Bush about the Iraq war full-tilt, and the nation would have had a debate about something important when it needed to.  As it was, the '04 general was a complete waste.  That's why I'm interested in the scenario.

Howard Dean wins on exuberance and a fifty-state strategy that forces the GOP to defend everything. He barely wins, but he does win.  He can't be Swiftboated.

There seems to be several Deanamaniacs posting here who are living under the illusion that Dean would actually have been viable as a Presidential nominee.

Dean would have been far less credible as a Presidential nominee than was Kerry.  This would have become clear during the campaign. 

In 2004, Bush still commanded a considerale following in the country, and it would have taken a candidate of much more substance than Dean to have taken power away from him.

Like Edwards failed to deliver North Carolina, Gephardt fails to deliver Missouri.

A clear and comfortable win for Bush and Cheney.   

Bush/Cheney                           327
Dean/Gephardt                        211

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Like I said, I don't know that Dean will win.  He had some vulnerabilities as a candidate, and the Bush team ran a strategically effective campaign that year and certainly would have against Dean too.  Dean wouldn't have been Swiftboated, but he would certainly have been painted as a liberal maniac.  In the end, I think Dean's major problem as a candidate was that his organization was not everything it was cracked up to be; lots of young, inexpereienced volunteers who were great at going door to door but not great about organizing caucuses in Iowa or getting out votes in New Hamphsire.  But, Dean was to the liberal base of the Democratic party what Palin is to the conservative base of the Republican party.  It was always hard to get liberals in the general excited about Kerry, and I think this is one of the major reasons that states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were as close as they were.  Had Dean been nominated, it would not have been hard to get the left to come out for him, and centrist Democrats, though they disliked Dean, would not have drifted to Bush in larger numbers than they did in the Kerry race.  Dean would also have done dramatically better than Kerry did in the debates because he would not have been as flat and reticent, as Kerry was, to take it to Bush.  I think that there is every possibility that Bush would have won, but I don't think, at the very least, that Dean would have gotten fewer votes than Kerry. 

Dean/Gephardt?

Dean wins everything that Gore won in 2000, and picks up New Hampshire. Because of the Favorite Son effect worth about 10%, Gephart delivers Missouri, which was close in real life. Republicans steal Ohio and Florida for Dubya, but it isn't enough to stop a Dean victory:

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Dean/Gephardt    275
GWB/Cheney      263

Gore also stole New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oregon in 2000.

The favorite son effect is worth about enough for a vice-Presidential candidate to make a difference of 7-8%. Because Missouri wins the election outright, Gephardt doesn't need to stray far from Missouri.

I just figure that Gephardt does most of his campaigning in Missouri... and that is enough.

Bottom line, it is the height of leftist hackery and absolutely asinine for anyone to assume that Dean would have defeated Bush in 2004.

Kerry couldn't do it, Dean certainly could not have done it.

Dean was a lightweight, and would have been in far over his head in a Presidential race against GW in 2004.

I'm inclined to agree with the Republican posters on this one.

I liked Dean a lot when he was running - and I backed him. But he was an undisciplined and inexperienced campaigner and though he had a lot of support among liberal activists and classic "blue-state" voters, his support among rank-and-file Dems was always pretty soft. He never got much more than 20% in polls of Democratic voters.

Yeah, he'd not have been attacked as a flip-flopper. But he would have been tarred as an extreme liberal, he'd have had lukewarm support from red-state Dems, and he'd likely have had a chaotic organization that was at war with the regular party.

And for all the talk about antiwar voters not voting for Kerry, exit polls showed that virtually everyone who disagreed with going to war voted for Kerry. Support for the war was still roughly 50% in 2004. Bush's approval rating was at about 50%. And Dean would probably not have done as well in the debates as Kerry did.

Dean could have won - but I think the odds are he'd have lost at least a little worse than Kerry. Something like this:

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Anti-war voters got on board with Kerry because they wanted President Bush out of office, so they dutifully went to the polls.  I remember that Kerry was generally believed by the public to have won all three debates, but those victories did not improve his polling numbers, which says to me that his performance in those debates overall was flat.  I don't think Dean wou
ld have done worse in the debates; he, unlike Kerry, had genuine convictions to argue for. 

Anyway, it's true, the centrist Democrats didn't like Dean, and they made no secret of it; Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry all expressed their disapproval of him.  But, Dean was governor of Vermont for 12 years (and friends of mine in Vermont remember him as a centrist governor), he was the runner-up in the Democratic nomination of 04 and his chairmanship of the DNC was instrumental in the Democratic party trashing its stupid "metro vs. retro" electoral strategy (which was Gore's and Kerry's playbook) and adopting a 50-state electoral strategy.  I don't know whether he would have beaten Bush or not (perhaps not), but he was not a "lightweight."

I never said that Dean was a "lightweight." I like Dean. I think he was an excellent chairman. And I think he would have made a strong candidate in certain respects and a decent president.

But I still think that on the whole he was probably a weaker general election candidate than Kerry. Yes, he excited a lot of people (including myself) but he left a lot of other Democrats fairly cold. And my suspicion is that his campaign would have been chaotic and fought a lot with the regular Democratic organization. Again, I'm not taking the "establishment"'s side in this - I'm simply stating what the reality would have been.

When it comes down to it, I think that there's a lot of revisionist history about 2004. The chief issue in 2004 was national security. The Iraq War divided people, but a small majority still felt it had not been a mistake. Bush was polarizing, but intensely popular with roughly half the population. And though Kerry was no Obama or Clinton, he was a stronger candidate than people remember.

Under those circumstances, the fundamentals pointed to a narrow Bush win, and I think that a Dean would have likely lost somewhat worse than Kerry. Again, that's not to say he *would have* - nobody knows what would have happened. And, yes, he *could* have won - just as Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and Clark all *could* have won. The question is who was most likely. And I think comparing Dean to Kerry, Kerry still probably had slightly better odds.

Sorry, Pragmatic Liberal, the "lightweight" comment was made by Dubya Forever and my comments about that were directed to his characterization, not yours.  I should have specified that.

I certainly agree that national security was the number one issue in 2004.  The thing that I didn't like about the Kerry candidacy is that he and his team obfuscated the national security differences with the Bush administration instead of working them.  Working the difference is rule number one in campaigns.  Kerry dithered for a long time on where he stood on the Iraq war, and that dithering was a major cause of a lot of his blunders (the voting for armerment funding before he voted against it, the initial vote in support of the war and then the practically indiscernable nuance about the war in the campaign).  On national security issues, Kerry ended up looking like what he was, indecisive, and so Bush won the issue.  The national security issue deserved its place at the top of the list of priorities in 2004, and as such it deserved an honest debate between the President and an opponent who forthrightly disagreed with how he was handling national security.  As it was, I think the debate in the general election as it took place was a waste of the nation's time.  The needle wouldn't move in Iraq for several years after the election.

Some of this discussion is pushing me towards making a habit in predictions of always having a best and worst case scenario for the candidates when making predictions. Though I have a weird feeling that even having both up might not let me be free of accusations of hackery.

Ok, here I go. First best case Dean scenario:

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Reasoning: 50 state strategy works despite the tough political climate. Dean diffuses the gun issue early on in order to do well in the west and doesn't make any significant gaffs. And somehow Gephart destroys Cheney in the VP debate. I'm not quite sure how that happens, but I can dream.

Now worst case for Dean:
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In this situation, Dean tries for the 50 state go, but runs short on money due to inept campaign mannagers, and thus isn't able to hold a defense in some normally strong dem areas of the country. He gaffs like crazy and is destroyed in the debates. DE and CT are narrow wins for Bush and only happen as a particularly nasty national smear of Dean (doesn't matter really, anything from being a loony liberal to eating babies) causes upsets in strange places.