I was wondering had the sex scandal with Donna Rice not occurred in 1987, how likely was Colorado Senator Gary Hart to win the Democratic nomination instead of Michael Dukakis?
And more importantly how do you think he would have fared against George H.W Bush? I think Hart’s best chance was 1988, in 1984 he would have lost to Ronald Reagan, though not to the extent that Walter Mondale did. But I think his chances against Bush was up in the air and could have defeated him.
To answer this question, we need to consider the power of incumbency and the state of the economy in 1984 and 1988. I use the Fair model.
Using data through 2008 (sorry), incumbency and the economy gave Mondale 37.9% of the popular vote: he won 40.8%. So Mondale wasn’t too bad of a candidate: he wasn’t the disaster that Hart and others claimed.
The model predicts that a Democratic candidate in 1988 would get 49.5% of the popular vote, indicating that the race could have gone either way. But Dukakis was an exceptionally weak candidate, earning 46.1% of the popular vote - a shortfall of 3.4 percentage points. It’s not clear whether a typical Democratic candidate would have won in 1988. But he or she probably would have done better than Dukakis.
Was Gary Hart a stronger candidate than George HW Bush? I’m not sure. Bill Clinton tended to beat the model as well as his opponents.
Didn’t Dukakis lead Bush by double digits in the polls at one point? If he could do that well, couldn’t Hart have done even better, maybe even ultimately won?
Nice idea, Velocity: let’s look at the polling.
May 1988: Dukakis leads Bush by 10 points. Nate Silver showed that polls that early are close to meaningless. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/17/us/poll-shows-dukakis-leads-bush-many-reagan-backers-shift-sides.html
I saw a headline claiming a 17 point lead for Dukakis after the DNC summer convention. It evaporated after the GOP convention.
Sep 1988: Dukakis leads Bush by 48 to 45. That’s more interesting. Polls beat fundamentals in September: at that point Dukakis is polling nearer the level of a typical Democratic candidate. Dukakis Barely Leading Bush in New Poll - The New York Times
Serious question. The Donna Rice incident implies a certain recklessness on the part of Hart. Did he make other mistakes? Was he a strong, weak or middling candidate? Was he popular in Colorado, which was and is a fairly purple state?
As it happens, I volunteered for the Hart campaign in both 1984 and early 1987, and then Dukakis after that. If not Donna Rice, there would probably have been some other damaging indiscretion sooner or later, so Hart might still have won the Democratic nomination but lost the election, mired in scandal. Bush also had peace, prosperity and Reagan’s continuing popularity going for him. But I think, all in all, Hart would certainly have been a stronger candidate than Dukakis, and a better chance of winning the Presidency.
Which reminds me of a joke from 1987:
Q. What’s the difference between Republican women and Democratic women?
A. Republican women give their heart to Bush.
I love this joke because the real punch line is the part that goes unsaid. Actually spelling it out ruins the joke, really.
Definitely. The press does seem to let personal indiscretions generally go unreported, since they’re so widespread that it’s hard to justify cherry-picking. But Hart essentially dared the media to report it, when he could have kept discreet. If they’d passed on that, there’d have been another thing, and another. His judgment was put into question, not for having an affair as such, but for flouting the social conventions surrounding them. That poor judgment would have shown up in other ways later on.
Looking at all the factors and the state of the country at the time and remembering Reagan was still pretty popular and coattails do mean something, I think Hart would have done better than Dukakis and pushed the popular vote closer to even.
But I still can’t see him winning electorally in 1988, no matter how I play with the numbers.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying.
Dukakis got 45.65% of the vote nationally. About 1% went to third-party candidates, so to split the popular vote evenly with Bush, (or Hart in his place) would have had to improve to 49.5%, an increase of 3.85%, while Bush’s share would have had to decrease by the same amount.
So in a dead-even popular vote, a Dem would have won all the states Dukakis won (111 EVs), plus those he lost by 7.7% or less. That would be California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, Connecticut, New Mexico, Montana, South Dakota, and Vermont, for 47+25+24+11+10+8+5+4+3+3= 140 EVs. So he loses, 287-251.
The state the Dem would have needed to win in 1988 was Michigan with its 20 EVs, but Dukakis lost Michigan by 7.9%.
What’s the difference between the Rockettes and a circus?
A circus is an array of cunning stunts.
But Dukakis was exceptionally weak. An average Democrat would have gotten 49.5% given the economy. And typically the Dem will underperform or overperform by more than 1 percentage point. Gaps of 3 or more points generally indicate mismatched competitors.
The question though is whether Hart would have been above average. I don’t know frankly. I perceive Bush Sr. as a near-average Presidential candidate, which of course says he has above average political skills, albeit not in a showy way.
How would Gary Hart have handled a gotcha question during a debate?
ETA: I think Mondale could have beaten Bush in 1988 if he wasn’t nominated in 1984.
Hart had made a good showing and had been through the presidential primary process in 1984, and won two hard-fought U.S. Senate campaigns in Colorado. I think he would’ve done pretty well in the 1988 general election.