George W. Bush V John Kerry 2008

[Antonio the Sixth]

There would have to be some fundamental changes in political reality -- most notably that America has become an outright dictatorship.  One would have to start with the elections of 2006 that in real life brought huge losses to the Republican Party but in this reality brought ral gains.

So the GOP would have to have made gains in the House instead of huge losses, that GOP incumbents won re-election, that GOP Senate incumbents (except for Lincoln Chaffee, defeated in the primaries by a hard-line GOP challenger who subsequently wins) win, and that the GOP actually wins the governorship of Ohio (rewarding Kenneth Blackwell for arranging a first re-election for Dubya) and a couple of Senate seats in Michigan and New Jersey.

Ratification of the 28th Amendment takes place in a climate of terror, but the Democrats still exist and play by the new rules. The rules are that the Opposition shows up at debates but that the Ruling party controls the polls where things matter. Mainstream news media compete to praise the Great and Glorious Leader who must bring America through dangerous times. The times are dangerous, and the media tell Americans that the economic recession proves the need for GOP leadership on the economy -- tax cuts for the super-rich, business subsidies, and tax shifts to the non-rich, an abolition of the minimum wage laws, and all sorts of goodies. Bush can run for a third term, and he wins in a landslide, picking up everything but D.C., Maryland, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii. 

Real power has of course gone to the leadership of the Party Apparatus, and political decisions are really made at the Party Conventions.

Great scenario !

In a non-dictatorial scenario ( but you're right, that's almost impossible ), Kerry would have destroyed Bush :

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bush would lose even worse than McCain if he were nominated in 2008. However, if Bush could legally run, I wouldn't put it past him to do anything he could to serve his lust for power, even with his abysmal approval ratings.

Indeed -- a third term for Dubya (or even the first term of a hand-picked successor) would indicate a dictatorship. Maybe not a despotic executive -- but that of Karl Rove as Party Boss operating much like a General Secretary of a Communist Party in power. I would assume that the Republicans actually won the 2006 midterm elections through some fraud. After those elections, Karl Rove found that he could no longer dictate orders to the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and expect those orders to be obeyed.

The 2006 midterm elections, even though they did not change the President, may have been the most important elections in American history. 

If democrats wouldn't have won the 2006 elections, they would still have won the 2008 presidency and put an end on Bush's system, who was and will remain a parenthesis in american political history.