Barone is limiting the term “Watergate babies” to those first elected to the House in 1974, but if we extended the term to apply to those first elected to Congress (whether House or Senate) that year, it would also include Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT).
When Leahy was elected in 1974, he was the first Democrat ever elected to the Senate from VT—I’m talking *ever*, and Andrew Jackson had founded the party 150 years before!
As DJ has noted before, had longtime Republican Senator George Aiken run for reelection in 1974, he would have waltzed to victory (he was by far the most popular politician in the state, and had been reelected unopposed in 1968); the GOP almost certainly would have held the seat in 1980 upon Aiken’s retirement, given that GOP nominee Stewart Ledbetter nearly defeated incumbent Senator Leahy that year (and in an open-seat race whoever would be the GOP nominee would have been carried in by Reagan’s coattails). Had Aiken run for reelection in 1974, it is quite likely that Leahy never would have been elected to the Senate, and if he ever was it elected it wouldn’t have occurred prior to 1986.
My hypothesis, actually, is that had Aiken run for reelection in 1974, Congressman Richard Mallary would have stayed in the House (he gave up his seat to run for the Senate that year), thus blocking Jim Jeffords from being elected to Congress in 1974. Mallary almost certainly would have run for the Senate in 1980 when Aiken finally retired, and been elected easily (and would have had a good chance at reelection in 1986 despite the political environment); his House seat would have stayed Republican in 1980, perhaps being won by Stewart Ledbetter. Had Ledbetter been elected to the House in 1980, he would be the likely GOP Senate nominee in 1988 upon Senator Robert Stafford’s retirement, and likely would have won in 1988 (and if so, obviously reelected in 1994). Had all this occurred, who knows who would be the Republican elected to the House in 1988?; perhaps it wouldn’t be someone anti-gun like Peter Smith, and Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be able to get elected as an Independent in 1990 by running to his right on guns. So, conceivably, had Aiken run for reelection in 1974, Vermont would have an all-Republican congressional delegation as late as 1996 or 2000, and Pat Leahy and Jim Jeffords never would have sullied the Senate’s halls.
I should point out that Mallary didn’t turn out to be substantially different from Jeffords. When he made a return to the VT legislature, he switched parties to Independent (liberal). It was only a matter of time before the state sent a moonbat delegation given the demographics of the nutty Whites that live there (although all it would take would be about 100,000 committed Conservatives to flip the state back to normalcy).
It was Vermont’s GOP that made the wrong-headed decision decades ago (in the ‘50s) to embrace its left-wing and discard Conservatism. A premier example is when they told Conservative Lt Gov. Consuelo Bailey not to run for Governor in 1956 (or even for reelection). They ran her out in favor of liberal Bob Stafford (who would then go on to serve a term as Lt Gov (’57-’59), Governor (’59-’61), House (’61-’71) and Senator (’71-’89), who preceded Jeffords.
Those left-wingers should’ve gone to the Democrats and left the VT GOP to the small government types. Yes, the state then might’ve gone Democrat even earlier (noting in 1958, they did elect an ultraleftist Dem Congressman, William Meyer, who Stafford left the Governorship after a single term to defeat in ‘60. Meyer’s hippie moonbat son moved here to Nashville), but the leftist RINOs certainly did us no favors.