If Lloyd Bentsen was just getting into politics today, with the exact same views, would he be a Republican?
I met Lloyd Bentsen, back in 1988. I shook his hand--he had the softest hands I had ever felt in my life--and I had lunch with him and an actor named Rob Lowe, who was very popular at the time. Rob Lowe was clearly high on cocaine, but then so was I so I shouldn't complain. They were campaigning for Michael Dukakis and in the evening I introduced him at a student rally to about 500 students. Very exciting, it was. Bentsen and Lowe both talked quite a bit about middle class values and opposition to the trickle-down policy that was called "reaganomics" at that time.
I think Lloyd Bentsen was tired already by 1988, and certainly by 1993 when he volunteered to resign as T-man-in-chief after the David Koresh cult fiasco, which not his fault. He may not have had a genuine interest in serving as Dukakis' VP in 1988--none of us expected Bush to lose--but he did not disagree with his party's platform at that time, and I don't think he would generally disagree with it now. He was in opposition to Bush's agenda, or so he told us, and I assume that he disagreed with Bush's son in later years. I do not know what he might make of The Donald. Not much, probably.
Just before the vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 1991, I wrote him a letter asking him to oppose it. He wrote me back and said that he did oppose it. Unlike the 2003 operation in Iraq, the 1991 operation was highly controversial. It passed in the senate, but it passed by 52-48, so it wasn't so lopsided as it was in 2003. Bentsen was one of those who opposed the operation. (FWIW, I wrote to Dianne Feinstein in 2003 about that second Iraq war, but unlike Bentsen in 1988, she was perfectly okay with the Iraq invasion. At least she wrote me back, which is more than I can say for my other senator at the time, Barbara Boxer, who did vote the way I would have, but whose discourtesy of ignoring my letter really put me off. To this day I respect Feinstein more than Boxer, for that reason.)
Anyway, I voted no in this poll. I don't have much respect for the Democrats or the Republicans, but I do respect some of the members of those parties, and Bentsen genuinely struck me as fairly ideologically consistent. He was a Democrat in 1988. I don't know what he'd be now, but my suspicion is that an old man is already pretty set in his ways, so the values he held in 1988 would likely be the values he would hold today, so it's really hard to imagine him being a Republican now.