What would the '96 field have looked like? My guesses:
GOP
Quayle
Dole
Robertson
Democrats
Clinton
Gore
Gephardt
Nunn
Simon
B. Kerrey
J. Kerry
Who else, any of these offbase? (may end up in GD)
I think that if Quayle had run at all, the other Republicans would defer to him as the (vice-) incumbent, similarly to how Gore wasn’t seriously challenged in 2000, or Bush in 1988. If the party considered him unelectable, they’d have arranged behind the scenes for him to not run at all.
Mario Cuomo was regarded as a power player in the Democratic party in the nineties. The consensus is that he sat out the 1992 election because most people expected Bush to get re-elected. Cuomo was expected to make his move in 1996.
On the GOP side, a lot of people regarded James Baker as Bush’s political heir.
You should also include Bill Bradley, Richard Lugar, and Jack Kemp as contenders.
Forgot about Super Mario! Kemp and Lugar are obvious too! (IMO Lugar would’ve been Dole’s Secretary of State in 1996)
If Bush had won in '92 we probably wouldn’t have seen Bill Clinton in '96. We Democrats kill and eat our failures. My guess is that it would have been Bob Kerry or Bill Bradley taking the nomination. I think Paul Tsongas might have been a frontrunner except he was dying at the time. Gephardt would have run, of course, with the usual results.
I have no idea what the Republicans would have done. Almost certainly not Bob Dole, but who?
I think Quayle v Gore would have been a pretty good possibility in '96.
I would imagine that Cuomo’s defeat to Pataki in 1994 would have ended his presidential ambitions anyway. Of course if Bush had won in 92, there probably wouldn’t be a Republican landslide in 94 and perhaps Cuomo would have survived.