I voted Obama v. McCain but if I had thought about it three seconds longer I would have picked Bush v. Gore. 9/11 was the single most influential event in our culture since – I don’t know, Watergate? Vietnam? I expect things would have unfolded a lot differently, one way or another, under a Gore/Lieberman administration than they did under Bush/Cheney.
Of course we didn’t realize how important it was at the time, unlike 2008 when we all recognized the historical nature of Obama’s election.
I think there are three answers to the question:
The most significant election in terms of changing the country was 1980. Reagan’s win was a game changer and ushered in 28 years of Republican ideological dominance. It’s possible that era of dominance is still not over. We won’t know for awhile.
The most significant election in terms of how history would have been different is Bush vs. Gore. If Gore wins, a heckuva a lot changes, because Bush did a lot of crap that frankly no one else would have been nuts enough to try.
But I think what the question intended was, “What was the most important election, where people knew how important it was AT THE TIME?” I say 2004, Bush vs. Kerry. The stakes were just so high, and they felt high at the time in a way that previous elections and the two Presidential elections since just haven’t. Every election is important, but 2004 felt almost apocalyptic.
Bush v Kerry.
George W Bush had invaded Iraq on an illegitimate pretext during his first term of office, and done so while flipping off the rest of the world which, prior to him doing so, had become downright sympathetic to the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And now the American people could either heave him out of office or put their collective stamp of approval on what he’d done.
I even joined phone trees doing political outreach to swing states… And I’d rather clean the toilets at Grand Central station with my tongue than make a bunch of cold calls on the goddam telephone.
I don’t know though, what did Bush do in his second term that would have been that different under Kerry. Iran and Afghanistan were already well under way. The housing bubble that started the credit crisis was a fait accompli by that point in time, and I’m not sure the response to it would have been much different. His legislative achievements were essentially zero for his second term (failed immigration reform, failed marriage amendment). I guess you could say the Supreme Court appointments would have been different. Having said that, it’s not like the makeup of the court is dramatically different with Roberts and Alito vs. Rehnquist and Oconnor; a little more conservative I guess. Maybe the response to Katrina would have been better? I guess I think most of what made the Bush presidency a failure had its origin in the first term.
Maybe I’m wrong. Not an extremely strongly held opinion on my part, but I think history would be far different without the Bush first term; the second term not so much.
It’s fair to say Gore would not have invaded Iraq. He would have seen that notion – if anyone even suggested it – for what it was, i.e., something analogous to FDR responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor by invading Brazil.
It’s also fair to say Gore would have paid more attention to his daily presidential briefings than W did, and then 9/11 might not have happened after all.
Not relevant.
For our standing in the rest of the world we really really needed to fire that jackass. To say “HELL NO we don’t approve”. How we mopped up after him would then be a separate performance, with its own opportunities to fuck up royally but whatever they’d be, they’d be less of a continuation.
For what I knew at the time, Bush-Dukakis. The Soviet Union was undergoing a huge transformation. Major systemic changes in a global, and nuclear capable, superpower with hardline elements that didn’t support the changes presented significant risk. While there was hope things would end up somewhere different than they did they could have gone much, much worse. I simply wasn’t willing to trust that transition period in US-Soviet relations to Dukakis.
This one has a potential to be close for me. It’s not so much that the circumstances themselves make it the most important. I nominated, I’d consider Trump (or Cruz) and Sanders to be the worst candidates their respective parties have put forward since I started voting. I worry about all of them accelerating the trend towards hyper-partisanship. This may well be the most important primary cycle of my generation given the strength they’ve all shown to date.
In hindsight, definitely, but at the time we couldn’t know that Bush would stop making novel mistakes and kinda get it together on Iraq.
Okay, I guess, but if I can take it a step further, I also don’t think we had a great understanding of just how bad Bush’s first term was until well into his second term. For example, while the poor justification for the war in Iraq was certainly known in the first term, many aspects of the war seemingly went well in the first couple of years. The insurgency really worsened at the end of the first term and beginning of the second.
I guess I feel like Bush’s first term was a disaster where the true extent of it wasn’t known until later and the second term was okay but dealing with all of the issues created in the first and then later the financial crisis, which certainly can’t be blamed on any second term actions by Bush.
#1: 2000—Everything would be different with a different response after 9/11
#2: 1980—Brought conservatism to the forefront and SCOTUS Justices that put limits on federal power
Will be #1: 2016. It is very likely that the next President will appoint 3 (4 if you count Scalia) Justices.
Imagine the new conservative court: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Conservative 1, Conservative 2 Conservative 3, Conservative 4, Kagan, Sotomayor. A 7-2 vote for nearly any conservative position. Overturn Roe v. Wade. Strike down most gun laws. Many other federal laws found to violate the commerce clause.
Liberal court: 6-3 the other way. No more limits on federal power. No more death penalty. Reverse Heller.
Yikes.
Toss in overturning Citizens United and I’m tickled pink. Not to mention Roe would be secure for generations and charades that effectively close abortion clinics would be illegal.
I still say worries about the court are overrated. First, Presidents generally don’t get to replace as many justices as you would think. The average seems to be about one per term. Since they are appointed for life, the only ones that really count are those who die unexpectedly. Ginsburg is not voluntarily stepping down while a Repubilcan is in office. So an appointment that changes the makeup of the court will probably only occur once every two terms. Hopefully Nate Silver will come along with real numbers someday if he hasn’t already. But the last time a President got to replace a justice with an ideological opposite was Bush 41. Scalia is the first such opportunity in 25 years.
Then, even if you do get to change the ideological balance of the court, you have to pick a reliably ideological justice, which is more difficult than it looks. And then that ideologically reliable justice has to start making new precedents or overturning old ones, which is not easy, since unlike with politicians, justices have to explain their reasoning in depth.
So it’s important, but not nearly as important as partisans make out. Usually it’s a scare tactic to get people to vote the party line even if they have no other reason to do so.
Funny, I’d have it exactly backwards.
Clinton v. Kasich: does Kasich have enough fingers on his hand to sign bills that Congress sends him? If Yes, and if he doesn’t veto a bunch of stuff, then there’s going to be little difference between the effects of a Kasich Presidency and a Cruz Presidency.
Trump v. Sanders v. Bloomberg: it’s hard to know, really, what the effects of a Trump Presidency would be: it’s not even clear what his relationship with the GOP Congress would be like. And it’s clear that, though he seems to be on board with repealing Obamacare (and replacing it with something YUUUUGE), he wouldn’t attack Social Security or Medicare and would almost surely block GOP attempts to mess with them, which right away makes a Trump Presidency less disastrous than any other GOP Presidency.
And in addition to his iffy relationship with his own party, Trump’s damage will be limited by the reality that he doesn’t have that deep an agenda. Cruz and Rubio already know in some detail what programs they’d like to axe. Trump doesn’t. (And it’s likely that his micron-deep understanding of our government would be his downfall in a debate against Clinton or Sanders.)
I guess I think people like Clinton, Rubio, and Kasich (even Jeb) play to the extremes quite a bit in the primaries but when they’re actually in office they will be much more moderate. For example, how about when Clinton says it is a done deal that she would ban fossil fuel production on federal lands (40% of coal, 14% of natural gas, and 18% of oil)? Of course she wouldn’t. At most she might be less likely to open up new lands or some regulations might raise the cost so some extraction is no longer economic. That’s just bullshit election talk.
On the other hand, I think Sanders and Cruz actually mean what they say and would actually push forward on all of their nutty unworkable ideas.
Who the hell knows with Trump. Some of his domestic ideas have kernels of sound logic to them even when he takes them off the deep end. I think he would be the most disastrous foreign policy president in our history though. The damage he might cause there could be absolutely catastrophic.
I think Master Blaster in Post #11 & adaher in #22 nailed it.
I voted in every election in the poll and of course lived through the aftermath of each. I score it as those two did.
The hyper-partisans trot out “If we don’t win this time the Other Side will end democracy forever!!1!” about every 8 years. It was BS in the past and it’s BS in the present.
The one thing I do think different this time is *if *this election urns out to be the precursor of the US developing a separate reactionary party *a la *the French National Front or the British UKIP. The mere election of Trump won’t do this, but given 20 years more hindsight it may then be seen to have been the catalytic step which got the whole movement actually moving.
2000, Bush v. Gore. Although we didn’t know it at the time, how the country would react to 9-11, the two subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bush’s appointments to the Supreme Court, changed the country more than any of the other elections, with the possible exception of 1980, Carter v. Reagan v. Anderson.
But at the time, Bush v. Gore was not very important and turnout wasn’t that great. Which just goes to show that every election can be the most important in your lifetime, so vote in all of them.
Midterms too. Arguably, the 1994 midterms were more earthshaking than most Presidential elections.
This is a useful fiction for ‘centrist’ pundits to give themselves permission to treat seriously conservative candidates such as Kasich as moderates. But hasn’t the notion that politicians will govern much more moderately than they ran been repeatedly debunked?
And the era when politicians could moderate their stances more than trivially as they pivoted from the primaries to the general election has been pretty much killed by the Internet. Twenty years ago, few people were going to sift through stacks of old newspapers to compare what a candidate had said during the primaries with the general election. Now it’s a quick Google away.
Why allow a piece of paper written by men prevent progressive goodness?