I was elected as an Alternate Delegate to the 2008 GOP Convention (although ultimately I couldn’t attend for family reasons), and I can vouch for (i) the national McCain campaign asking delegates whether they would vote to nominate McCain’s VP choice if he chose a “pro-choice” candidate, and (ii) every delegate whose response I read saying either that they only would vote to nominate a pro-life runningmate or that they would support McCain’s selection because they knew that he would choose someone pro-life. McCain got the message, and he chose Sarah Palin.
I think that such revulsion among the GOP to a “pro-choice” candidate would have been almost, but not quite, as strong in 1996 as it was 12 years later. Perhaps Colin Powell wouldn’t have to become Phil Gramm (my preferred candidate in 1996), but I think that he at least would have to say that he opposed late-term abortion and would sign a partial-birth ban, opposed taxpayer funding of abortion, would nominate strict-constructionist judges, etc. And that would have been enough to allay pro-life concerns and allow Powell to waltz to the nomination. Remember, Donald Trump was much more outspoken in his support for abortion “rights” prior to 2015 than Powell was prior to 1995, and Trump was able to convince a much more pro-life 2016 GOP to nominate him for president by taking a strong stand for conservative judges.
Unless Powell mulishly ran as a pro-abortion candidate (a la Arlen Specter), he would have won the 1986 GOP nomination and likely the general as well (I don’t think that Perot would have run were Powell the nominee, and even if he ran his impact would have been much lower).
I recently read that in 1995 Dole’s pollsters found that Powell was the favorite candidate of large majorities of GOP primary voters in every l Southern state, with his best showing in Mississippi. The mid-1990s GOP wanted nothing better than to have a black Reaganite president, and those that didn’t care for that still wanted to defeat Clinton with the passion of a thousand burning suns. And many saw Powell as a sure winner in November; I remember a Republican who grew up in a rural FL community with a large black population telling me that he had no doubt that Powell would get a huge percentage of the black vote despite the R after his name.
In 1995-96, Colin Powell was viewed in a similar way as Eisenhower was viewed in 1951-52. Had he run, he would have won. I don’t know how he would have governed, but I do know that it would be very unlikely that we would have had a President George W. Bush or a President Barack Obama had Powell been the 44th President.
The thinking in the 1990s among all of us was that the first black president would be a Republican, because only a Republican would come off as not a radical. So many people “wanted” Powell because they literally looked no further than skin color or party ID-—it meant that much to show America we “weren’t racist.”
Zero finessed that by keeping his radicalism concealed deeply below the “moderate” image and crushing any stories about his real political views.
Being like Ike is what I would fear. He was ultimately a disaster for the GOP, for his court appointments, for his failures to address the overwhelming pro-Soviet incursion into our government and institutions and culture, his abject refusal or failure to roll back 2 decades of massive Socialist government and taxation and a host of other issues. Powell would’ve similarly been a disaster.