Would Democrats have voted for Colin Powell if he had run for president in 1996?

 (My answer on Quora)

I suspect that Colin Powell running under the GOP ticket would have performed better than Robert Dole in 1996 whose campaign was anemic at best however a mass transfer of votes across party lines would unlikely have taken place.

Bill Clinton still had considerable personal appeal in 1996 especially among the African-American constituency , the economy was strong (for a variety of reasons many of them having nothing to do with him personally) and other than the problem in the Balkans (which had turned into a Clinton coup with the Dayton Agreement) foreign policy was not dominating the political headlines. The drive for change was weak within that time context, which in turn favors the incumbent.