George W. Bush vs. Howard Dean 2004

[anvi]

In the 2004, primaries, Howard Dean's oganization in Iowa turnes out to be much better than in real life, and he sweeps to victory there and, on that momentum, captures New Hampshire too.  Kerry fights back bravely, but Dean's concise attacks on President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and the economy excite Democrats and convince them that they want a real bulldog to attack Bush.  Kerry bows out a few weeks after Super Tuesday and Dean, with a good ground political organization and a fired-up base, picks Iowa congressman Richard Gephardt to be his running mate.

In the general election campaign, both candidates make some verbal gaffes that occasionally get them in trouble, but the growing disatisfaction with the war in Iraq begins to gnaw at the president's approval ratings.  In return, the Bush campaign ridicules Dean's sometimes flaming rhetoric and his lack of national security experience.  The three debates between the candidates offer some good exchanges, but even though the polls show that the public thinks Dean won all the debates, general national security worries vs. the growing anti-Iraq sentiment keep the national polls close.  Drawing special attention is the vice-presidential debate, featuring two parents of gay children sharing a touching concord about their respective love for their children (which includes Cheney conceding that he thinks gay marriage should be a state and not a federal issue) in the midst of a crisp policy debate, and this appears to offset the several anti-gay marriage initiatives up for vote in a number of states.  His organization and online funding efforts, along with Gephardt's appeal in parts of the midwest and rustbelt, impel Dean to campaign aggressively in a number of states won by Bush in 2000.  Going into the election, it is clear that both parties will do a supurb job mobilizing their bases, and amidst heavy voter turnout, the voters in the middle and Independents may decide the fate of the country.

How does the election turn out?  Maps, please.

President George W. Bush / Vice President Dick Cheney
Goveror Howard Dean / Congressman Richard Gephardt

[anvi]

Ok, well, after that little bit of excitement...

Here is what would have worried me about a Bush/Cheney vs. Dean/Gephardt race.  Gephardt carries his Iowa home advantage, and his religious affiliation brings over enough voters in New Mexico and both candidates win enough union support in the Nevada cities to carry each of these three states.  But, Bush wins a close race in Florida and eeks out a one point win in Ohio, and suddenly, we have the result:

                               Electoral Vote:                Popular Vote
Bush/Cheney                    269                           48.8%
Dean/Gephardt                 269                           49.2%

For the second straight election, Bush loses the popular vote, but the tied electoral college sends the election to the House, and Bush retains the presidency.  Coming on the heels of his controversial 2000 decision against Gore, the Democrats are half-ready to revolt.  For the only time in history, a president is elected to two terms having lost the popular vote both times and having been awarded the presidency ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court in the first election and the U.S. House of Representatives in his second.

[anvi]

A few of you have Dean losing Wisconsin.  I don't think so.  If Kerry won Wisconsin, Dean will definitely win it.

[anvi]

Dean isn't a nutcase.  Anyway, I wish the Democrats would have nominated him in '04.  Maybe he would have lost (maybe not), but at least he would have taken it to Bush about the Iraq war full-tilt, and the nation would have had a debate about something important when it needed to.  As it was, the '04 general was a complete waste.  That's why I'm interested in the scenario.

[anvi]

Like I said, I don't know that Dean will win.  He had some vulnerabilities as a candidate, and the Bush team ran a strategically effective campaign that year and certainly would have against Dean too.  Dean wouldn't have been Swiftboated, but he would certainly have been painted as a liberal maniac.  In the end, I think Dean's major problem as a candidate was that his organization was not everything it was cracked up to be; lots of young, inexpereienced volunteers who were great at going door to door but not great about organizing caucuses in Iowa or getting out votes in New Hamphsire.  But, Dean was to the liberal base of the Democratic party what Palin is to the conservative base of the Republican party.  It was always hard to get liberals in the general excited about Kerry, and I think this is one of the major reasons that states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were as close as they were.  Had Dean been nominated, it would not have been hard to get the left to come out for him, and centrist Democrats, though they disliked Dean, would not have drifted to Bush in larger numbers than they did in the Kerry race.  Dean would also have done dramatically better than Kerry did in the debates because he would not have been as flat and reticent, as Kerry was, to take it to Bush.  I think that there is every possibility that Bush would have won, but I don't think, at the very least, that Dean would have gotten fewer votes than Kerry. 

[anvi]

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."

[anvi]

Sorry, Pragmatic Liberal, the "lightweight" comment was made by Dubya Forever and my comments about that were directed to his characterization, not yours.  I should have specified that.

I certainly agree that national security was the number one issue in 2004.  The thing that I didn't like about the Kerry candidacy is that he and his team obfuscated the national security differences with the Bush administration instead of working them.  Working the difference is rule number one in campaigns.  Kerry dithered for a long time on where he stood on the Iraq war, and that dithering was a major cause of a lot of his blunders (the voting for armerment funding before he voted against it, the initial vote in support of the war and then the practically indiscernable nuance about the war in the campaign).  On national security issues, Kerry ended up looking like what he was, indecisive, and so Bush won the issue.  The national security issue deserved its place at the top of the list of priorities in 2004, and as such it deserved an honest debate between the President and an opponent who forthrightly disagreed with how he was handling national security.  As it was, I think the debate in the general election as it took place was a waste of the nation's time.  The needle wouldn't move in Iraq for several years after the election.