2000: John Mccain vs Al Gore

[brucejoel99]

McCain, easily. In 2000, he had serious cross-party appeal, a lot of it based off of his support for campaign finance reform; he was basically seen as a moderate in the vein of Clinton, but for the Republicans, & had pretty substantial "maverick" credentials. This also provided him with substantial support from independents. The economy was good overall in 2000, but it was already showing signs of weakening with the dot-com crash earlier in the year, which is what Gore himself has blamed his defeat on (but also, in any event, Gore wasn't that good of a campaigner, & the general view of the time was that people were tired of the Democrats being in the White House, as the scandal fatigue was a real thing). And if Bush could only just barely defeat Gore, then I think McCain has a very strong chance of narrowly winning both the electoral vote & the popular vote (let alone potentially doing so in a landslide). Not only that, but Bush was actually a weak general election candidate: during the debates, he forgot Social Security was a federal program, not to mention the DUI scandal that broke in the weeks before the election.