Could Dukakis have won?

[sg0508]

Waiting too long to respond to the GOP's relentless "Massachusetts Liberal" tag devastated him.  Willie Horton didn't help matters either.

The "soft on crime" label killed Dukakis in the white collar suburbs in PA, NJ, CT, CA, IL, MI, etc. Oh yes, those are states the Republicans haven't won since then.

Part of it was though, the Democrats still didn't have a cornerstone "home" in the 80s.  The power shift from the south to the midwest, northeast and west coast still hadn't materialized.  It started to, given some of the Dukakis wins that year, but he was not one to excite the party.

Being from the state of MA in generally, really didn't help.  Then lastly, he was fighting the "Reagan Revolution".  While Bush wanted the credit for winning the race, he knew not to distance himself from Reagan in the end.  The latter is the biggest mistake Al Gore made in 2000.  He distanced himself from a 23 million job creation, low inflation, economic boom of a record from '93 to '00 because the Lewinsky Scandal embarrassed him.....he paid for it dearly and so has America since then.

[sg0508]

Possibly.  He would have needed to have done the following:

1.  He needed to have picked a Southern running mate from a state he was not sure to lose.  Sam Nunn of Georgia, Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, even Richard Shelby of Alabama would have been better picks than Bentsen (who, admittedly, would have defeated Bush head to head in Texas).

The problem is he needs a running-mate that's conservative but not too conservative. Hollings and Shelby aren't it. Nunn might be grudgingly accepted, but he would likely be viewed as more "presidential" than Dukakis, thus the same problem that he had with Bentsen. Dukakis at least picks up Georgia, however, as Nunn was way more popular with Georgians than Bentsen with Texans.

Lloyd Bentsen ended the election campaign as the only one of the four with a higher net approval rating than he had going in.  I don't know what you are referring to.  Lloyd Bentsen basically ended the campaign as, to use a term I don't really like, a 'rock star.'

I also don't think Dukakis had any problem with Bentsen outshining him in personal terms or in terms of how it effected the outcome of the election.  After Bentsen's debate with Quayle and the "you're no Jack Kennedy" moment, the Dukakis campaign started running commercials on the Dukakis/Bentsen campaign and some staffers joked that Michael Dukakis' name was now 'Dukakis Bentsen'.

I can't imagine any potential Dukakis voter not voting for him because, of the four, Lloyd Bentsen was the preferred choice for President for most Americans, but I am aware that, according to exit polls, having Dan Quayle as his running mate cost George H W Bush about 2% of the vote.

I don't understand where this concern over having a Vice Presidential pick outshine the Presidential nominee comes from, to me it shows that the Presidential nominee is comfortable (for whatever that's worth) and, more importantly, shows that they may have sound judgement.

This was the first Presidential election that I followed closely and I remember that I predicted the two candidate result with no decimals dead on: 54-46% (This was before the internet, so the average person may have heard about the third party candidates like Ron Paul once or twice during the campaign and it was pretty much good like finding the actual raw number final results, rather than just being given the result as '54-46%'

I remember that my Electoral College prediction was 412-126 whereas the actual final result was 426-112 (426-111 with one college vote cast for Bentsen.) Obviously I'm able to remember that because I flipped the final two digits.  I can't remember which state or states I predicted for Bush that Dukakis ended up winning, but I'm pretty sure I predicted Maryland and Illinois for Dukakis that he ended up losing.

As I previously wrote, Dukakis did poorly in Illinois because his field organization in that state was a shambles (that was actually reported in the Canadian magazine MacLeans' and not in Newsweek) and he lost in Maryland due to their being a referendum on whether Saturday Night Specials (guns) should remain legal.  The referendum (or initiative) to ban them passed, but Dukakis still lost the state.

I also remember that right after the second debate that I predicted that had the election been held at that time that George H W Bush would have won all 50 states.

Dukakis' strong close with the late deciders probably got him Washington state, maybe WI, and solidified NY. 

If you remember that night though, ABC blew a call...they called MD for Dukakis and CBS blew a call with them calling IL for Dukakis.  Only NBC was perfect on their calls that night. When Brokaw and Co. signed off, they had two states still outstanding (IL and WA). 

The two states that Dukakis had no business losing but did, simply because of Willie Horton were MD and PA.

[sg0508]

A lot of people forget that Bush didn't pull away in the last month.  Many thought he was actually blowing it.  Until late October, most news pundits predicted a near '84 repeat in the electoral college, which Dukakis avoided largely due to his winning many of the undecided voters in the end from his Populist rhetoric.

Until the last week or two, the only few states save for Dukakis were RI, MN, IA and HI.  Even his own state was still considered to be losable.