The GOP nomination would have been pretty wide open early on, without Bush in the race. Elizabeth Dole would have led the early GOP primary polls because of name recognition. She probably wouldn’t have become the nominee in the end, but she would have at least still been in the race when Iowa voted, unlike in real life.
And more candidates probably would have run if there was no Bush campaign juggernaut: John Engler, Tommy Thompson, Jack Kemp. I guess conceivably Kemp would have been competitive with Dole in those early polls if he ran, since he’d just been the party’s VP nominee a few years earlier.
I don’t know that McCain could have won. It’s hard to overstate how threatening the 2000 version of McCain was to GOP orthodoxy. He tacked left (at least on domestic policy) during that 2000 campaign, before tacking back right a few years later in order to win the 2008 GOP nomination. The establishment would have worked pretty hard to stop him in 2000 whether Bush was on the scene or not. You should read Jonathan Chait’s January 2000 piece
”This Man is not a Republican” piece if you want to see what I mean.
