Talk Elections

What if Gore was the Democratic nominee for President in 1988?

He would have lost but it would have been much closer more like a obama or trump win and less like Reagan’s win.

How do the Democrats interpret his loss?

I hate to agree with Greedo, but basically this.

What does an Obama or Trump win even mean? Their electoral college margins were somewhat similar but Trump lost the PV by 2 while Obama won the PV by 4 (I assume you mean his reelection victory).

I think it depends on the margin.  If Gore was closer than Dukakis (which I agree is likely) then it may just be chalked up as a year that was going Republican in any case. 

But if Gore was blown out, it may have worked against the Democratic willingness to move to the center that got Clinton nominated and elected in '92.  So in that campaign probably Jerry Brown does better, and we'll handwave that as a result, he's more prudent and doesn't mention that he'd consider Jesse Jackson as a running mate, which was something that really broke his momentum.

Let's say that Brown wins the nomination.  Presumably Ross Perot still runs, so we have Bush vs Brown vs Perot, with an economy sliding into recession.  This could be fairly interesting.

Gore could conceivably win. People forget, Dukakis led Bush by 17 points at one point in 1988 and Atwater won't be able to dig up dirt on and attack Gore the way he did Dukakis, plus Gore had a center right voting record at that point (environmental issues aside), so you can't smear him as liberal or smear liberalism itself to the extent that it was smeared with Dukakis.

Granted, you could argue 1988 was destined to be a Republican year regardless given the economy and the stability abroad, but low unemployment and stability didn't help Gore in 2000, so it alone might not be enough to carry Bush over the finish line. In either case, a HW Bush vs. Gore election in '88 would be a close one.

Crime would certainly be less of an issue if Gore was nominated while the environment may have been more of an issue. I wonder if Gore would have attacked Bush over his oil past and Reagan's environmental record.

I know the conventional wisdom is that the Dem. primary electorate "learned their lesson" after nominating liberals like Mondale and Dukakis by moving to the center with Clinton, but I don't actually buy it.

I think Clinton won because 1) the big names like Cuomo, Bradley, Gephardt, and Gore sat it out, 2) he was a very highly skilled politician, and 3) he was the only Southern candidate running in a year where the primary calendar favored the South, and he didn't have to deal with Jesse Jackson in the race, siphoning off black votes.  Thus, he cleaned up among both Southern whites and blacks.

So I'm not sure Gore '88 being nominated and losing the GE prevents Clinton from being nominated in '92.  What it might have done though is prompt Clinton to run a somewhat different campaign, that would avoid too many parallels between himself and Gore.

^^^ This. With the dismal way the Dems were portrayed after 8 years of Reagan (vacillating, weak on defense, soft on crime, etc.) a narrow Gore defeat in 1988 would almost have been seen as a victory for the Dems by many: Bush had an impressive resume and association with Reagan, while Gore had his youth (40) working against him. I think Clinton still would have been the nominee in 1992 and may not have had to change much.

Any chance Gore might have chosen Bill Clinton (or even Hillary Clinton) as his running mate?

Except that Dukakis made a lot of costly missteps during the campaign that hurt him at least as much as Willie Horton, especially the tank and the death penalty question in the debates.  More importantly, Bush 1 took the lead in the polls after the GOP convention, about a month before the original Willie Horton ad debuted.

his wife would have abolished music on January 20, 1989.

Gore/Cuomo gets between 190-240 votes. In 1992, a “Southern Democratic candidate” is discredited, and Tsongas is nominated with Sam Nunn as his running-mate. He wins the presidency.

All this is true. With that said, this all being true doesn't mean Gore can't win. Regardless of which way it would go, we'd be looking at a close race if 1988 was Gore vs. Bush.

With Gore as nominee, does H.W. choose Quayle?

I assume that Quayle was chosen to appease the more conservative wings of the GOP, since Bush himself had the reputation of a moderate.

If that is so, then Quayle's nomination is even more likely as Bush would have a more difficult time convincing conservative Republicans to go to the polls, whereas it didn't take as much to convince them that Bush was a clear alternative to Michael "card-carrying member of the ACLU" Dukakis.

I find this agreeable.