George W. Bush vs. Howard Dean 2004

[pragmatic liberal]

I'm inclined to agree with the Republican posters on this one.

I liked Dean a lot when he was running - and I backed him. But he was an undisciplined and inexperienced campaigner and though he had a lot of support among liberal activists and classic "blue-state" voters, his support among rank-and-file Dems was always pretty soft. He never got much more than 20% in polls of Democratic voters.

Yeah, he'd not have been attacked as a flip-flopper. But he would have been tarred as an extreme liberal, he'd have had lukewarm support from red-state Dems, and he'd likely have had a chaotic organization that was at war with the regular party.

And for all the talk about antiwar voters not voting for Kerry, exit polls showed that virtually everyone who disagreed with going to war voted for Kerry. Support for the war was still roughly 50% in 2004. Bush's approval rating was at about 50%. And Dean would probably not have done as well in the debates as Kerry did.

Dean could have won - but I think the odds are he'd have lost at least a little worse than Kerry. Something like this:

[pragmatic liberal]

Anti-war voters got on board with Kerry because they wanted President Bush out of office, so they dutifully went to the polls.  I remember that Kerry was generally believed by the public to have won all three debates, but those victories did not improve his polling numbers, which says to me that his performance in those debates overall was flat.  I don't think Dean wou
ld have done worse in the debates; he, unlike Kerry, had genuine convictions to argue for. 

Anyway, it's true, the centrist Democrats didn't like Dean, and they made no secret of it; Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry all expressed their disapproval of him.  But, Dean was governor of Vermont for 12 years (and friends of mine in Vermont remember him as a centrist governor), he was the runner-up in the Democratic nomination of 04 and his chairmanship of the DNC was instrumental in the Democratic party trashing its stupid "metro vs. retro" electoral strategy (which was Gore's and Kerry's playbook) and adopting a 50-state electoral strategy.  I don't know whether he would have beaten Bush or not (perhaps not), but he was not a "lightweight."

I never said that Dean was a "lightweight." I like Dean. I think he was an excellent chairman. And I think he would have made a strong candidate in certain respects and a decent president.

But I still think that on the whole he was probably a weaker general election candidate than Kerry. Yes, he excited a lot of people (including myself) but he left a lot of other Democrats fairly cold. And my suspicion is that his campaign would have been chaotic and fought a lot with the regular Democratic organization. Again, I'm not taking the "establishment"'s side in this - I'm simply stating what the reality would have been.

When it comes down to it, I think that there's a lot of revisionist history about 2004. The chief issue in 2004 was national security. The Iraq War divided people, but a small majority still felt it had not been a mistake. Bush was polarizing, but intensely popular with roughly half the population. And though Kerry was no Obama or Clinton, he was a stronger candidate than people remember.

Under those circumstances, the fundamentals pointed to a narrow Bush win, and I think that a Dean would have likely lost somewhat worse than Kerry. Again, that's not to say he *would have* - nobody knows what would have happened. And, yes, he *could* have won - just as Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and Clark all *could* have won. The question is who was most likely. And I think comparing Dean to Kerry, Kerry still probably had slightly better odds.