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Do you remember who was expected to win before Trump showed up? There's no way that Jeb Bush was going to achieve or do anything substantially meaningful if he was elected, and even that's a tall ask - I don't think he beats Clinton in the 2016 election. In the counterfactual world where he takes office the biggest changes I can see are that Russiagate never happens, the Syrian war gets escalated and the Ukraine war kicks off early.
I agree. After McCain and Romney both failed, it's kind of hard for me to believe that any of the other 2016 Republican primary candidates other than Trump would have beaten Hillary. It seemed like the Republicans needed to try something new, because what they had been doing was not working.
To be fair, Hillary is no Obama in terms of charisma - so it would have been easier for a Republican to beat her than for one to beat Obama. But the field was pretty bad. Jeb Bush was dorky and a Bush, Marco Rubio was goofy, Ted Cruz was easily made fun of and memed on by Democrats. Maybe Kasich could have won? I don't remember much about what he seemed like.
There were no great candidates in 2016, but probably any of them but Bush could have beaten Clinton fairly easily. Bush's name would have dragged him down harder with the kinds of voters he needed to make up for the lack of immigration restrictionists that we really got to see when it was just the primaries.
There was a time when people were thinking, "I we really going to end up with Bushes and Clinton's again?!"
Fairly easily? Maybe I'm the one that's off my rocker, but from where I sit, Trump was the only one that even had the chance. The kind of people that vote Republican wouldn't go for another 4 years of the neocon war-globalism machine (there's a reason why Trump swept the primary, and continues to have a stranglehold on the party) and would just stay home, and the kind of people that wouldn't mind would be completely content to vote for Clinton.
Paul? Probably too “radical”
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You are. Clinton was a profoundly weak, unpopular candidate. She had 35 years in the public spotlight and there just was not anything to like there for the majority of Americans. No one running in 2016 could have beaten her in the landslide she deserved, but the 2016 election was Generic, Boring Republican Candidate's to lose.
2016 was a very Republican year and Clinton was a terrible candidate. As it was, Republicans across the country ran ahead of Trump, from House races to Senate, Gubernatorial, and even further downballot. A more boring election where you don't get all the negative partisanship Trump creates that has lower turnout than 2012 instead of higher turnout benefits those other Republicans even more.
This is already quite a while back, but I don't remember anyone saying it at the time, and it seems like a conclusion reached retroactively after she lost to Trump.
You and I remember 2016 very differently. The historic unpopularity of both candidates was one of the major narratives of the election. The Libertarians were polling at 13-14% at one point that summer for crying out loud. The tired joke on everyone's lips was that both parties chose the only candidate that could possibly lose to the other.
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No, it was absolutely said at the time.
Here's an example from early on in the 2016 election process.
Here's another one from later on
You can find a lot of them. She was not well liked.
Just as a quick sanity check - would you say any establishment Republican could beat Harris relatively easily, because she's not well liked?
I'm not sure. I think Trump could beat Harris pretty easily if he were ten years younger, but we won't really know the contours of the election until it's over.
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Bush's lead had disappeared by the time Trump started taking off. It was essentially an open race and, to be honest, would probably have ended up being either between Rubio and Cruz or a three way between them and Kasich, depending on if Kasich and Rubio could consolidate. However, Rubio's pro-immigration image would have turned off the people who went for Trump in real life, so I could see it easily going to Cruz.
He's a weak vessel, but we didn't know that in 2016. He could probably handle Clinton fairly easily, especially if he focused on immigration like Trump did.
I was under the impression that this was in no small part due to Trump's attacks on Jeb. Without Trump there's no differentiation among the republican candidates at all, and that means Jeb's structural advantages deliver him the nomination (so he can lose to HRC). As for Cruz, we absolutely knew he was a weak vessel in 2016 - though I'm not sure that becomes as obvious with Trump out of the picture. At the same time, I don't think Cruz would even adopt the positions he did without Trump establishing them as primary-winners first.
I hate to say it because I would prefer that it didn't matter to people, but given how politics actually work, I'm not sure that Ted Cruz has the looks to win the Presidency. Trump looks weird too, but the difference is that Trump has figured out how to own his looks and make them work for himself. Almost everything weird about Trump's looks plays into his "the blue collar man's billionaire" macho persona. His obesity, his cheap-looking spray tan, his thin hair. I don't know if Ted Cruz would have been able to pull off making his looks work in alignment with his persona.
I agree that looks matter, but I think Trump also gets to coast on past glories. He was a big deal in the past, and while his appeal didn't manage to reach me, he was apparently attractive enough to spawn a flood of erotic dreams (https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-always-sex-dreams-160500781.html).
That's a good point. Trump has the advantage of having an established reputation as a lothario playboy. Cruz doesn't, although given that he's a wealthy famous politician I'm sure that if he wanted to go that route he would have no shortage of opportunities.
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Bush's lead was already shrinking before Trump came down the escalator. He had an early lead because he started with more name recognition, but he was not a strong candidate along any dimension except that vague sense of competency that came from having done a good job in Florida, which he failed parlay into actual success on the campaign trail.
Immigration was already an issue prior to 2016. The whole reason the autopsy had happened after 2012 was because the Republicans were already tentatively on the restrictionists side of the brewing crisis and had been for a while -- pretty much the entirety of the highly restrictive current legal environment was passed by Republicans in the 90s and 2000s. Unfortunately the only Republican President to serve after those laws came into effect was an immigration booster and Obama was never going to enforce the letter or the spirit of the law, so they never worked.
Cruz came from the right wing of the party on this debate. He may not have made it the center of his campaign -- but he may well have -- without Trump, but he already had the reputation and had already made it a important plank of his platform.
Bush was a terrible candidate, but so was everyone else in the running. What Jeb had on his side was the GOP establishment, and none of his competitors in the non-Trump world had the charisma or popularity among the republican base to overcome that advantage.
The GOP did not actually care about immigration - they made noise about it because their base cared, but whenever they were in power they did everything they could to make sure more and more illegal immigrants entered the country. The GOP's wealthy donors wanted to make sure that they could continue to drive up the price of real estate while putting downward pressure on wages. While they made noises about it, Trump was the only person to actually try and do anything about it because he wasn't beholden to those same donors.
Autopsy? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
Had he? Maybe I'm remembering things wrong but I don't recall Cruz talking seriously about immigration until Trump brought it up. I think in the non-Trump world Cruz just has the same positions on immigration as the GOP consensus and accepts a minor portfolio position in the stillborn Jeb! administration.
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Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
I'm talking about Cruz.
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
Against Clinton, that's not as much an anchor as it should be. She was the anti-charisma and had the reputation of a flaming pile of shit among the general public.
I think pretty much any Republican who could speak coherently and with even a modicum of force could have beaten her in 2016, but Republicans like Jeb or Rubio would have sparked off a base revolt, anyway, while in office. Only someone who could credibly pursue immigration restriction would have been able to please the base and those two are the exact opposite.
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