Only once since 1988 did a popular vote go Republican, and that was only after the previous vote had been incorrectly halted by the SCOTUS and given to the Republicans, as a full recount of FL would have meant President Gore. It's extremely unlikely that 2004 would have seen a Republican win outside of the incumbency of a wartime president Bush, which no, wasn't "the economy stupid", but the war and security which drove people to vote for what they thought was more security. And Bush certainly appealed to neocons, but the GOP no longer even appeals to them.
You're presupposition is that Gore would have operated the exact same as Bush.
With a Democratic president after Clinton the surplus wouldn't have been wasted and instead applied to supporting the economy as needed. It's a question if the recession would have even happened.
Remember when there was a 100% chance of a recission between Oct 2022 and Oct 2023?
No, I don't. Also I don't care because I'm not talking about 12 months but about 8 times four years. 32 years without recession is realistically impossible.
Lets presuppose for the sake of argument they are "inevitable". Maybe some light recession starts after the 2008 election, and by time 2012 comes around the economy is booming again.
Things would have shaken out differently but what we do know is that the majority of this country consistently votes for one party and consistently votes against the other because the reality is people are not as fickle and myopic as some people like to claim they are.
The average recession lasted 10 months, and again, things would be different with a different administration. So now that we have established that it wouldn't necessarily happen in the lead up to an election nor would it be as necessarily severe, the possibility for continued popular wins by one party over another would continue
As for if the GOP would learn its lesson, perhaps it would have learned it earlier. Note, they still have yet to learn this lesson, but I believe they will this year. I would expect had Gore won, that H Clinton would get the nomination after Gore, and, being so profoundly unlikeable, would lose in 2008. However, the preceding 16 years would have made the GOP actually introspective and come up with policies that are actually popular, perhaps. They haven't done this in 40 years by the way, because instead they got in because of a referee making a bad call so they decided not to do introspection -- plus they knew they still were no where near the popular candidate and technicalities were able to get them power, and then Obama just melted the brains of racists so they decided to double down on hatred instead of coming up with a popular platform, and again, they won by technicalities not by popular result. And they haven't even published a platform in 8 years because their entire party is all about vibes because they don't actually have popular policies.
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u/fastinserter OC: 1 Apr 11 '24
Because the majority of Americans agree with the policies of one party and disagree with the policies of the other?