Winning in 2012 could be a real disaster for Republicans. Romney was extremely movement conservative in a way that was quite out of step with the general public, it's likely that him and Ryan after repealing Obamacare would have launched an attack on entitlements and Social Security of the kind that crippled the Bush administration in 2005. Add a hideously unpopular tax cut like the one that lost Trump the House in 2018 and they could be courting electoral disaster by focusing on the most divisive economic elements of the conservative agenda.
On the other side Democrats probably respond to the first unapologetically liberal President since LBJ being a one-termer by moving to the centre again and cooperating on stuff like deficit reduction, which may give Romney cover. Bernie's 2016 run would be pretty interesting and might strike even more of a chord with Democrats, or Hillary runs more like her 2008 campaign and shuts him out. Either way it's a really bad timeline for Dems because Romney takes a hacksaw to the welfare state and there are no Obama second term cultural wins like Obergefell. Wishcasting would be that Bernie's run is stronger and becomes this TL's Trump, but the highly possible alternative is an entrenched economic and social conservative ascendency. So no, not one they should have lost.
2016 is actually the best case for the left if Ds have to lose a single election. Pre-Trump, Ds were a neoliberal party, Bernie was a nutty gadfly, and all Rs and some Ds denounced any policies helping workers as class warfare.
None of these are true today, and I attribute it to Trump's victory won largely because he claimed to represent those harmed by these issues. Ds are talking about international labor/consumer/environmental standards instead of ISDS. Bernie is heading the budget committee in charge of deciding the nation's priorities. Even Rs dont mouth the mantra "class warfare" every time something helping people gets debated. And Romney would have kept his party as sane as possible, unlike Trump. And maybe its not so bad that we recognize that we are not some unique beacon of democracy after the insurrection.
I also see the Supreme Court being 6-3 or 5-4 with Federalist Society judges, so not a huge difference from today.
Trump's win was salutary for the left
in the discourse in many ways, but on the other hand Trump winning in 2016 took a ton of WWC voters out of the Democratic coalition that makes a progressive legislative agenda basically DOA for the 2020s. Of course Clinton and other Democratic Congressional leaders like Schumer were blithely feeding this realignment from the other side, so it probably happens anyway if Clinton wins.
