It could have changed everything that has happened in American politics in the quarter century since.
In Jim Geraghty’s excellent tribute to the life and career of Colin Powell, he teases one of the great counterfactuals in modern political history: What if Powell decided to run for president in 1996? I have some thoughts.
Powell formally announced he was not going to run in November 1995. Just that fall, polls showed Bill Clinton easily beating Bob Dole, but losing to Powell by 15 points. When Powell made his announcement, “At the West Wing of the White House, aides watched the news conference with smiles and sighs of relief,” according to a Baltimore Sun news report at the time.
To have gotten into a head-to-head match up against Clinton, however, Powell would have had to first have won the Republican nomination. And it’s far from guaranteed that he would have. Powell would have been running as a pro-choice moderate at a time when the party was becoming more conservative in the wake of George H. W. Bush’s defeat and the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress.
Conservatives were gearing up for what would have been a blistering campaign to deny Powell the nomination. And were he to lose the nomination, we cannot assume that Bob Dole would have won anyway. Powell may have pulled moderate votes away from Dole, and allowed Pat Buchanan to galvanize even more conservatives around his candidacy, particularly were he to have the pro-choice and internationalist Powell as his main foil. As it was, Buchanan won New Hampshire and had a plausible path to the nomination.
Had Powell survived the Republican primary, his next obstacle would have been to unify the party for the general election, which also would have been a gargantuan task. Many conservatives would have been in open revolt over a pro-choice candidate. It very well could have led to a pro-life third-party challenge, perhaps from Buchanan — who would end up running a third-party campaign four years later anyway.
Were Powell to have somehow managed to keep most of the Republican Party intact (perhaps through a vow to appoint conservative justices and be operatively pro-life on policy) and had he defeated Clinton in the general election, it would have changed everything that has happened in American politics in the quarter century since.
With Powell elected in 1996, the first black president in U.S. history would have been a Republican, with all the potential implications for political demography. Powell would have overseen a booming economy, though he likely would have clashed with Gingrich-era Republicans in Congress and attempted to reach more compromises with Democrats. Without the Clinton second term and the Monica Lewinsky scandal establishing the precedent that character concerns and personal flaws don’t matter, it’s hard to see Donald Trump succeeding in 2016.
You also don’t have George W. Bush in 2000 or the recount drama and its aftermath. Perhaps Powell would have pursued more aggressive counterterrorism policies in the late 1990s, and September 11 would have never happened. Or, perhaps Powell would have been president on September 11, and the aftermath would have gone differently. It’s hard to imagine Powell making the choice to invade Iraq if it were his call, but he also may have been blamed more for the attacks because he wouldn’t have been a new president when it happened. The rise of al-Qaeda would have happened entirely on his watch.
Were George W. Bush never to have been elected and there was never an Iraq War, does Jeb Bush (who wasn’t elected governor until 1998), somehow emerge as the next Bush in line? Or does the party go in a much more conservative direction after Powell?
Without the Iraq War, you don’t get Obama, and were Bill Clinton to have been seen as a failed one-term president, Hillary Clinton likely doesn’t have a political career, let alone a presidential nomination.
There were just so many potential permutations to Powell’s decision.