Obama would have run a different campaign against Romney.  And Romney would be poison to the "Kill him""terrorist""traitor" pink-t-shirt wearing Abercrombie crowd.

Or for that matter if McCain had sucked it up and made Romney his VP.

Maybe so.  The Dems were never going to win deep red states like Texas and Oklahoma where the religious right base is dominant, so the whole Mormon thing might not have hurt him as much as has been made out.  And I can't believe that Romney would have displayed the same cluelessness and tone-deafness as McCain.  I certainly can't imagine Romney choosing Palin as a running mate.  On the other hand, his convention speech bashing the liberal Democrats currently running Washington was notable mainly for its detachment from reality.  And Romney is so closely identified with the Wall Street/corporate wing of the party that it's hard to see him doing any better given the current economic climate.

yeah, the real counterfactual is Romney as vp, as that is something that could actually have happened.

The big problem with Romney is that he is (transparently, which is odd) singularly most insincere-seeming politician ever.

I think Romney would have at least a fifty-fifty chance of doing better than McCain has done. Winning? I don't know. I still think that Huckabee would probably be winning right now had he been the GOP nominee. He combines cultural authenticity, fantastic charisma, and plausible economic populism in a package that isn't a member of the Senate and so is free to make the perfect the enemy of the adequate in any economic policy discussion. Just imagine if the GOP nominee didn't sit in Congress and so didn't have to vote on the bailout package? That would have been an absolute killer position from which to kneecap Obama over the last two weeks.

miceelf, Romney would probably have won the GOP nomination if Republicans used proportional allocation instead of winner-take-all for most state primaries. If the parties had switched nominating rules, this would have been Romney versus Hillary. And in that counterfactual, I think it's safe to say that news anchors across the country would be practicing saying "President Romney" in the shower every morning.

yeah mice, he is insincere, but he is genuinely so, nobody would ever confuse him with having an ounce of it so they would be willing to overlook it, like people do Biden's gaffe, because it is so much a part of him. The question is, is he competent? I don't for a moment imagine my stockbroker will ever "feel" my pain, I don't want him to, I just want him to make me money. Would Romney give off that vibe?

Stormtrooper Sarah is God's gift to Dan Quayle. Somewhere he is laughing because now he will be remember as a pretty harmless schmuck who was in over his head. Sarah is a brownshirt. Palin will never crack above 30% in the polls, she won't attract any money people, and she will fade into the Alaskan wildnerness even more irrelevant that Quayle is today.

I think it was Noam who kept reminding us in the early primary season that Romney's "touch" on the economy might not play as well with people as some might think. Romney represents the CEO who laid you off to help the company bottom line, not the guy who got laid off and had to find another job. He's no Tim Pawlenty.

Romney would probably have an advantage over McCain on the economy, but he also would have started out in a huge hole to begin with.  He ran as a generic orthodox Republican, exactly the wrong type of candidate for this year.  One of the recurring questions over the first few months of the general election campaign was why Obama didn't have a bigger lead.  But it wasn't nearly so much Obama underperforming as it was McCain overperforming because he was viewed as something *other* than a standard Republican.  In those hypothetical general election matchups, Obama generally had double digit leads over both Romney and Huckabee.  The Republicans did in fact stumble into the candidate of their party with the best chance of winning.

At the end of the primaries, it was Romney who was more associated with Bush than McCain.  Romney had been defending Bush policies throughout the debates ("double Guantanamo," remember?)  If Romney had won, we would hear how the GOP should have picked the guy who ran against Bush in 2000 and fought his domestic agenda and military policies after that.

Romney as VP pick is, of course, the more tantalising prospect to consider, since it was altogether more recent in memory (goodness, that Florida primary seems ever so long ago!)

But the likelihood is that Mitt would be outperforming McCain so much by this point (on economics, of course, but otherwise as well) that it would lead to a chorus of "flip the ticket".

Obama would have to be running a much sharper game on his economic talking points by now, that's for sure.

Ultimately though, the iron-clad rule of people voting the top of the ticket would hold, and there would be little substantial difference in outcome.  (The Palin effect vs the Mormon effect?)