The Caedite Infobox and Graphics Thread

[Catalunya]

Infoboxes for these elections.

Shout-out to Harold Ford from the Harold Ford Party!

 

[Lord Caedus]

The 1948 United States presidential election was the 51st quadrennial presidential election and was held on Tuesday, November 2nd, 1948. Incumbent Democratic President Henry Wallace was soundly defeated by Republican Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York and 1944 Republican presidential nominee.

Wallace had ascended to the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Defeating an attempt to replace him on the ticket at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Wallace's firm commitment to civil rights for African-Americans, including his desegregation of the United States military by executive order, led to a walk-out of many conservative southern Democrats, who launched the States' Rights ("Dixiecrat") third-party campaign led by Governor Benjamin T. Laney of Arkansas. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, in order to extract concessions from either Wallace or Dewey in exchange for their support.

Dewey, the leader of the Republican Party's liberal eastern establishment wing, defeated challenges from Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, leader of the party's conservative wing, and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota to win the party's nomination at the 1948 Republican National Convention.

Foreign policy, particularly the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, was the defining policy issue that separated both major party candidates. While Dewey was a member of the growing bipartisan consensus that advocated opposing the Soviet Union internationally, Wallace, who had overseen the end of World War II, had consistently attempted to preserve good relations with the USSR and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin even as the position became increasingly unpopular following Soviet reneging on wartime promises in Eastern Europe and Iran. Although Wallace began to hew closer to the foreign policy consensus after the fall of Greece to communism in early 1948, his administration continued to be dogged by House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations into several high-ranking members accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union.

With low approval ratings and a split in the New Deal coalition that had re-elected Roosevelt in the previous four elections, Wallace trailed Dewey by large margins throughout the campaign.

Dewey won a substantial victory in the Electoral College and a bare majority in the popular vote to become the first Republican to win a presidential election since Herbert Hoover twenty years earlier. While the Dixiecrat ticket won only five percent of the nationwide popular vote, its concentration in the former Confederacy meant that Laney won eight southern states and a total of 81 electoral votes, the best showing by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Dewey's victory marked the only time the Republican Party won a presidential election during nearly three-decade span from 1932 to 1960, commonly referred to as the Fifth Party System, dominated by the Democratic Party. This election also marked the first in a series of mid-century southern revolts from the Democratic Party presidential ticket that would culminate in the eventual realignment of white southern voters into the Republican Party fold.

This was the final presidential election held before the ratification of the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, which limits any person from being elected president more than twice.

Spoiler: Notes

• Henry Wallace is one of those AH figures that, the more you read about him, the more frustrating he becomes. He was ahead of his time on things like civil rights, gender equality, recognizing the potential world-ending implications of the Cold War and even in his old age opposed the escalation of the Vietnam War. (He also foresaw smartwatches before most Americans even had television). He seems to have been genuinely principled--very few people, much less a former Vice President of the United States, would put up with the kind of harassment and awful treatment he and his campaign experienced during his campaign tour through the Jim Crow South to prove some kind of moral point and not because they genuinely opposed segregation and treating African-Americans as second-class citizens.
  
  But he was also a fundamentally weird guy (his interests included politics, farming, mysticism and dabbling in sports like tennis and boomerang-throwing) who was absolutely terrible at several important aspects of politics (antagonizing multiple Cabinet secretaries while running the wartime BEW resulted in Roosevelt siding against him and shuttering the whole thing, not realizing just how quickly communists infiltrated the Progressive Party that was founded as a vehicle for his campaign, failing to ingratiate himself to enough Democratic powerbrokers to prevent him from being dumped from the ticket in 1944), showed himself to be very temperamental (he switched parties four times during his adult life even excluding his support for the first Progressives in 1912) and whose remarkable prescience was matched by his ability to ignore things he didn't want to believe (it took him years to recognize how badly he'd misjudged the Soviet Union despite it being obvious by the time he ran for president in 1948 that the Soviets had absolutely no intention of living up to the promises they'd made at Yalta & Potsdam and had been actively committing espionage on their wartime allies to boot) that I can't see how he could possibly have performed as president in any way except that he would get clobbered in 1948 like everyone expected Truman to be.
  
  
• For the results:
  • I gave Wallace approximately the same share of the two-party vote as Truman had IOTL September 1948 (approximately seven-eighths of what Truman ended up getting IOTL).
    
    
  • Outside of the south, I gave Wallace a slight bonus west of the Mississippi to account for his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture & switched the home-state bonus Truman received in Missouri to Iowa. I used the average vote share major parties IOTL 1944 & 1948 as a base instead of OTL 1948 that I used for the rest of the country.
    
    
  • IOTL, Thurmond only won states where he was the official Democratic nominee. It's not mentioned in the write-up, but ITTL, Wallace challenged Jim Crow harder and earlier than Truman (not being raised by family that sympathized with the Confederacy helps), including an earlier desegregation of the military, engendering a stronger reaction. As a result, the number of states where Laney is the official Democratic nominee grows to the OTL Confederacy. I averaged Thurmond's OTL performance in the four states he was the Democratic nominee IOTL, compared them to the average of his best performance in four states where he wasn't the official Democratic nominee and increased Laney's vote by that factor in the non-OTL Thurmond states except for ones where the Democratic Party machine would, in my estimation, have been strong enough to keep the party loyal (KY, OK, TN, TX) to the national ticket.
    
    
  • Finally, Wallace got all of his OTL voters.
    
    
  • The faithless Tennessee elector is kept from OTL.
    
• The Wallace & Laney photos are edited (and/or colorized, in Laney's case).
  
  
• The write-up implies the aftermath: Dewey is tossed out after one term (he spends his presidency bogged down both by fights with his own party's conservative leadership and an unpopular ATL Korean War) and Democrats win the next three elections (Adlai "Merkin Muffley" Stevenson welds the New Deal coalition back together for two terms, LBJ wins a narrow victory in 1960 in spite of the aforementioned southern revolts) before the New Deal coalition violently implodes four years earlier than OTL.
  
  In my mind, a Republican Party with just one presidential term from 1933 to 1965 means the southern white voters are less ready to switch to the Grand Old Party and the process is prolonged, with a southern regional party (with the ironic name of the National Party) emerging that briefly appears to be poised to vacuum up conservative voters from both of the major parties before instead fading away after its last serious presidential ticket in 1972 when Republicans finally start turning the "racism" dial high enough.

 

[Catalunya]

The 1948 United States presidential election was the 51st quadrennial presidential election and was held on Tuesday, November 2nd, 1948. Incumbent Democratic President Henry Wallace was soundly defeated by Republican Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York and 1944 Republican presidential nominee.

Wallace had ascended to the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Defeating an attempt to replace him on the ticket at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Wallace's firm commitment to civil rights for African-Americans, including his desegregation of the United States military by executive order, led to a walk-out of many conservative southern Democrats, who launched the States' Rights ("Dixiecrat") third-party campaign led by Governor Benjamin T. Laney of Arkansas. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, in order to extract concessions from either Wallace or Dewey in exchange for their support.

Dewey, the leader of the Republican Party's liberal eastern establishment wing, defeated challenges from Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, leader of the party's conservative wing, and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota to win the party's nomination at the 1948 Republican National Convention.

Foreign policy, particularly the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, was the defining policy issue that separated both major party candidates. While Dewey was a member of the growing bipartisan consensus that advocated opposing the Soviet Union internationally, Wallace, who had overseen the end of World War II, had consistently attempted to preserve good relations with the USSR and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin even as the position became increasingly unpopular following Soviet reneging on wartime promises in Eastern Europe and Iran. Although Wallace began to hew closer to the foreign policy consensus after the fall of Greece to communism in early 1948, his administration continued to be dogged by House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations into several high-ranking members accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union.

With low approval ratings and a split in the New Deal coalition that had re-elected Roosevelt in the previous four elections, Wallace trailed Dewey by large margins throughout the campaign.

Dewey won a substantial victory in the Electoral College and a bare majority in the popular vote to become the first Republican to win a presidential election since Herbert Hoover twenty years earlier. While the Dixiecrat ticket won only five percent of the nationwide popular vote, its concentration in the former Confederacy meant that Laney won eight southern states and a total of 81 electoral votes, the best showing by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Dewey's victory marked the only time the Republican Party won a presidential election during nearly three-decade span from 1932 to 1960, commonly referred to as the Fifth Party System, dominated by the Democratic Party. This election also marked the first in a series of mid-century southern revolts from the Democratic Party presidential ticket that would culminate in the eventual realignment of white southern voters into the Republican Party fold.

This was the final presidential election held before the ratification of the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, which limits any person from being elected president more than twice.

Spoiler: Notes

• Henry Wallace is one of those AH figures that, the more you read about him, the more frustrating he becomes. He was ahead of his time on things like civil rights, gender equality, recognizing the potential world-ending implications of the Cold War and even in his old age opposed the escalation of the Vietnam War. (He also foresaw smartwatches before most Americans even had television). He seems to have been genuinely principled--very few people, much less a former Vice President of the United States, would put up with the kind of harassment and awful treatment he and his campaign experienced during his campaign tour through the Jim Crow South to prove some kind of moral point and not because they genuinely opposed segregation and treating African-Americans as second-class citizens.
  
  But he was also a fundamentally weird guy (his interests included politics, farming, mysticism and dabbling in sports like tennis and boomerang-throwing) who was absolutely terrible at several important aspects of politics (antagonizing multiple Cabinet secretaries while running the wartime BEW resulted in Roosevelt siding against him and shuttering the whole thing, not realizing just how quickly communists infiltrated the Progressive Party that was founded as a vehicle for his campaign, failing to ingratiate himself to enough Democratic powerbrokers to prevent him from being dumped from the ticket in 1944), showed himself to be very temperamental (he switched parties four times during his adult life even excluding his support for the first Progressives in 1912) and whose remarkable prescience was matched by his ability to ignore things he didn't want to believe (it took him years to recognize how badly he'd misjudged the Soviet Union despite it being obvious by the time he ran for president in 1948 that the Soviets had absolutely no intention of living up to the promises they'd made at Yalta & Potsdam and had been actively committing espionage on their wartime allies to boot) that I can't see how he could possibly have performed as president in any way except that he would get clobbered in 1948 like everyone expected Truman to be.
  
  
• For the results:
  • I gave Wallace approximately the same share of the two-party vote as Truman had IOTL September 1948 (approximately seven-eighths of what Truman ended up getting IOTL).
    
    
  • Outside of the south, I gave Wallace a slight bonus west of the Mississippi to account for his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture & switched the home-state bonus Truman received in Missouri to Iowa.
    
    
  • IOTL, Thurmond only won states where he was the official Democratic nominee. It's not mentioned in the write-up, but ITTL, Wallace challenged Jim Crow harder and earlier than Truman (not being raised by family that sympathized with the Confederacy helps), including an earlier desegregation of the military, engendering a stronger reaction. As a result, the number of states where Laney is the official Democratic nominee grows to the OTL Confederacy. I averaged Thurmond's OTL performance in the four states he was the Democratic nominee IOTL, compared them to the average of his best performance in four states where he wasn't the official Democratic nominee and increased Laney's vote by that factor in the non-OTL Thurmond states.
    
    
  • Finally, Wallace got all of his OTL voters.
    
    
  • The faithless Tennessee elector is kept from OTL.
    
• The Wallace & Laney photos are edited (and/or colorized, in Laney's case).
  
  
• The write-up implies the aftermath: Dewey is tossed out after one term (he spends his presidency bogged down both by fights with his own party's conservative leadership and an unpopular ATL Korean War) and Democrats win the next three elections (Adlai "Merkin Muffley" Stevenson welds the New Deal coalition back together for two terms, LBJ wins a narrow victory in 1960 in spite of the aforementioned southern revolts) before the New Deal coalition violently implodes four years earlier than OTL.
  
  In my mind, a Republican Party with just one presidential term from 1933 to 1965 means the southern white voters are less ready to switch to the Grand Old Party and the process is prolonged, with a southern regional party (with the ironic name of the National Party) emerging that briefly appears to be poised to vacuum up conservative voters from both of the major parties before instead fading away after its last serious presidential ticket in 1972 when Republicans finally start turning the "racism" dial high enough.

I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside. Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.

That’s why I don’t see him being clobbered to the extent you have him here. Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia) he’d likely still keep, while IMO Dewey would go for a more conservative VP, as a result of stronger conservative reaction to Wallace’s support for the strike wave. Either a repeat of Dewey/Bricker or Dewey/Halleck seems much more likely IMO.

 

[Nofix]

I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside. Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.

That’s why I don’t see him being clobbered to the extent you have him here. Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia) he’d likely still keep, while IMO Dewey would go for a more conservative VP, as a result of stronger conservative reaction to Wallace’s support for the strike wave. Either a repeat of Dewey/Bricker or Dewey/Halleck seems much more likely IMO.

I'll admit I've not read much on Wallace, but nothing I have read has ever suggested to me that the man was good at retail politics.

 

[Bene Tleilax]

I honestly think Stassen is more like likely to be the GOP nominee instead of Dewey.

 

[Time Enough]

I honestly think Stassen is more like likely to be the GOP nominee instead of Dewey.

That doesn’t surprise me, Anti-Communist, Pro-New Deal but would probably play to the Conservative core of the party better than Dewey would.

Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia)

Colorado I see probably going Republican, but I do agree with Washington going Democratic. Idaho I could see being a toss up depending on how hard Glen Taylor campaigns for Wallace.

 

[Lord Caedus]

I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside.

While it is kind of funny to imagine the impetus for Berlin Airlift or the creation of NATO being Harry Truman's goal to trigger the left, I somehow don't think that was the reasoning behind the Truman Doctrine.

Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.

That’s why I don’t see him being clobbered to the extent you have him here.

I think you significantly underestimate how difficult it would be to avert the Cold War with a POD in July 1944 (the time of the Democratic convention).

Also, I can't say I see any scenario where a Wallace administration that does little or nothing to stop what would be viewed (from the perspective of westerners observing the gradual removal of even the fig-leaf of democracy in the nations the USSR occupied after the war) as the first steps to establishing a one-party communist state in France and Italy results in Wallace being nominated by the Democratic Party for a term of his own, much less him somehow performing better than the scenario I posted.

I'll admit I've not read much on Wallace, but nothing I have read has ever suggested to me that the man was good at retail politics.

His lack of a background in electoral politics prior to becoming the Democratic nominee for vice president certainly didn't help.

IMO Dewey would go for a more conservative VP, as a result of stronger conservative reaction to Wallace’s support for the strike wave. Either a repeat of Dewey/Bricker or Dewey/Halleck seems much more likely IMO.

I honestly think Stassen is more like likely to be the GOP nominee instead of Dewey.

That doesn’t surprise me, Anti-Communist, Pro-New Deal but would probably play to the Conservative core of the party better than Dewey would.

The reason I kept the OTL ticket, besides Dewey having been the frontrunner for the nomination the entire time, was simply because it was one less variable I'd have to change in terms of calculating the state-by-state results.

Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia) he’d likely still keep

Colorado I see probably going Republican, but I do agree with Washington going Democratic. Idaho I could see being a toss up depending on how hard Glen Taylor campaigns for Wallace.

Weirdly, I somehow knew people would quibble with the results of Wallace doing poorly in the Electoral College.

Good thing I still had my notes from when I made this box lying around so I can reconstruct the margin of victory in each state:

Spoiler: States where Wallace was the official Democratic nominee

Vermont: 33.47%
Maine: 25.09%
Kansas: 21.84%
Nebraska: 20.06%
South Dakota: 17.72%
New Hampshire: 17.40%
Pennsylvania: 15.10%
New Jersey: 14.52%
North Dakota: 14.45%
Delaware: 13.60%
Colorado: 13.46%
Indiana: 13.29%
Connecticut: 12.93%
Illinois: 12.57%
Michigan: 12.21%
Ohio: 11.74%
Oregon: 11.39%
Maryland: 9.91%
Missouri: 9.89%
Nevada: 8.03%
Wisconsin: 7.19%
Wyoming: 7.11%
California: 5.17%
New York: 4.79%
Idaho: 4.47%
Virginia: 2.51%
Massachusetts: 1.34%
Washington: 0.98%
Arizona: 0.02%
----
Utah: 0.01%
New Mexico: 1.13%
Rhode Island: 1.52%
Iowa: 1.97%
Montana: 1.99%
Tennessee: 2.48%
Oklahoma: 2.58%
Minnesota: 3.16%
West Virginia: 3.63%
Kentucky: 3.74%
Rhode Island: 5.28%
Texas: 29.28%

Spoiler: States where Laney was the official Democratic nominee

Mississippi: 78.99%*
Alabama: 60.75%
South Carolina: 52.57%*
Georgia: 50.31%
Arkansas: 41.12%
Florida: 23.95%
Louisiana: 22.04%
North Carolina: 2.38%


*-Wallace was the second-place candidate

 

[Catalunya]

While it is kind of funny to imagine the impetus for Berlin Airlift or the creation of NATO being Harry Truman's goal to trigger the left, I somehow don't think that was the reasoning behind the Truman Doctrine.

Never argued that was the reason, but the Berlin Airlift didn’t happen until 1948, which was preceded with two years where Truman concluded that anything that even rhymed with ‘red’ was the enemy, and literally purged communists from governments in France, Italy, and Belgium.

I think you significantly underestimate how difficult it would be to avert the Cold War with a POD in July 1944 (the time of the Democratic convention).

Also, I can't say I see any scenario where a Wallace administration that does little or nothing to stop what would be viewed (from the perspective of westerners observing the gradual removal of even the fig-leaf of democracy in the nations the USSR occupied after the war) as the first steps to establishing a one-party communist state in France and Italy results in Wallace being nominated by the Democratic Party for a term of his own, much less him somehow performing better than the scenario I posted.

Not saying that the Cold War wasn’t bound to happen, but it wouldn’t have escalated as quickly without the Truman doctrine, and as a result there wouldn’t be a Red Scare, or at least it wouldn’t have as much popular support, as communism wouldn’t be seen as negatively.

Again, I’m not arguing that Wallace wouldn’t lose re-election, but he would mainly lose due to a lack of support from elites (which would become really apparent at the DNC), and his ability to burn bridges.

Weirdly, I somehow knew people would quibble with the results of Wallace doing poorly in the Electoral College.

Good thing I still had my notes from when I made this box lying around so I can reconstruct the margin of victory in each state:

Spoiler: States where Wallace was the official Democratic nominee

Vermont: 33.47%
Maine: 25.09%
Kansas: 21.84%
Nebraska: 20.11%
South Dakota: 17.72%
New Hampshire: 17.40%
Pennsylvania: 15.10%
New Jersey: 14.52%
North Dakota: 14.45%
Delaware: 13.60%
Indiana: 13.29%
Oregon: 12.96%
Connecticut: 12.93%
Illinois: 12.57%
Michigan: 12.21%
Ohio: 11.74%
Maryland: 9.91%
Missouri: 9.34%
Colorado: 8.78%
Wyoming: 8.56%
Nevada: 8.03%
California: 7.57%
Wisconsin: 7.19%
New York: 4.79%
Idaho: 4.47%
Virginia: 2.51%
Massachusetts: 1.34%
Washington: 0.74%
Arizona: 0.47%
----
Utah: 0.63%
New Mexico: 1.24%
Rhode Island: 1.52%
Iowa: 1.96%
Montana: 1.99%
Tennessee: 2.48%
Minnesota: 3.16%
West Virginia: 3.63%
Kentucky: 3.74%
Rhode Island: 5.28%
Oklahoma: 8.49%
Texas: 15.08%

Spoiler: States where Laney was the official Democratic nominee

Mississippi: 78.99%*
Alabama: 60.75%
South Carolina: 52.57%*
Georgia: 50.31%
Arkansas: 41.12%
Florida: 23.95%
Louisiana: 22.04%
North Carolina: 2.38%


*-Wallace was the second-place candidate

I just don’t really get the math. How did Wallace lose Arizona, yet win a state like Utah, where Truman+Wallace did worse OTL? Same could be said about the state of Washington.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Never argued that was the reason, but the Berlin Airlift didn’t happen until 1948, which was preceded with two years where Truman concluded that anything that even rhymed with ‘red’ was the enemy, and literally purged communists from governments in France, Italy, and Belgium.

Not saying that the Cold War wasn’t bound to happen, but it wouldn’t have escalated as quickly without the Truman doctrine, and as a result there wouldn’t be a Red Scare, or at least it wouldn’t have as much popular support, as communism wouldn’t be seen as negatively.

I think this is an ideologically-driven interpretation of the origins of the Cold War that doesn't reflect the actual historical record, and leave it at that.

I just don’t really get the math. How did Wallace lose Arizona, yet win a state like Utah, where Truman+Wallace did worse OTL? Same could be said about the state of Washington.

I'm going to re-do the math, because I was getting tired towards the end there, but the gist is that in the west, the baseline was derived from the average of the Democratic (plus Progressive in 1948) vote in 1944 & 1948 rather than just 1948.

 

[Lord Caedus]

>Be me
>Decide to check out making a Wallace cabinet box
>Begin researching
>Find the two men he specifically said he would have named to the Cabinet
>whattheactualfuck.png
>Got to do it now
>Formulate Cabinet
>Begin write-up
>Remember comments the last time I made a box about him
>Don't feel like relitigating the Cold War or post-war farm politics
>Better put a bunch of notes in the spoiler so people read them
>Who am I kidding, people don't read notes
>doitanyway.jpg
>Pic somewhat related

----------------------------------------------​

Henry Wallace assumed the presidency of the United States upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 and served until January 20, 1949. His Cabinet was created as a result of the transfer of power upon Roosevelt's death.

Wallace inherited the presidency during the final weeks of the European Theater of World War II and other than Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones, who Wallace had clashed with during his tenure as vice president[1], he asked all of Roosevelt's Cabinet secretaries to stay on until the end of the war in the Pacific. (Jones was replaced by his deputy, Alfred E. Schindler).

Following the war's end with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki[2], Wallace accepted the retirements of three Cabinet secretaries (Henry L. Stimson, Frank C. Walker and Frances Perkins) who had expressed their wish to leave the Cabinet[3]. and sacked two other inherited secretaries (Edward Stettinius and Henry Morgenthau). The post-war reshuffle saw Robert P. Patterson become Secretary of War, Jesse M. Donaldson as Postmaster General and Joseph F. Guffey become Secretary of Labor, a concession by Wallace to senators who remained distrustful of the aloof chief executive[4]. His infamous appointments of Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State and Harry Dexter White to be Secretary of the Treasury[5] were not viewed dimly at the time, owing to the distrust by the president and many in the Democratic Party of accusations made against the men by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI[6].

In 1946, Francis Biddle was made Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court to replace the late Harlan F. Stone. He was replaced by former Samuel D. Jackson, who had helped avert an effort to dump Wallace from the Democratic ticket at the 1944 Democratic convention[7].

Following the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections, the administration became dogged by investigations into communist subversion by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). White, poor in health and accused of passing secrets to Soviet agents during the war, resigned in June 1947 and was replaced by Fred M. Vinson. Also accused was Duggan, and although Wallace publicly supported Duggan and proclaimed his innocence, he relented after mounting public and congressional concern that the person first in line to the presidency[8] was a possible foreign agent and replaced him with Army general George C. Marshall.

The National Security Act of 1947 created the new position of Secretary of Defense, abolishing the position of Secretary of War and removing the Secretary of the Navy from the Cabinet. Secretary Patterson retired to private practice shortly before the Department of War was abolished and was replaced by Kenneth Claiborn Royall until Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was named the first Secretary of Defense.

The final change was the resignation of Harold Ickes, who had served as Secretary of the Interior for 15 years, owing to both his age and disagreement with Wallace over the responsibility of the United States' role in the communist victory in the Greek Civil War. He was replaced by his final deputy, Oscar Chapman.

Only Forrestal and Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard served in the entirety of Wallace's term[9].

The Cabinet dissolved on January 20, 1949 with the end of Wallace's term and the beginning of President Thomas E. Dewey's administration.

Following the declassification of top-secret VENONA cables in the 1990s and the opening of Soviet archives following the end of the Cold War, historians have concluded that both Duggan and White had committed espionage for the Soviet Union before, during and after World War II[10].

Spoiler: NOTES

[1] - FDR named Wallace to head the wartime Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and in January 1943, he attempted to expand its purview to incorporate the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which paid the bills that BEW had. Jones, a conservative southern industrialist, was also head of the RFC and successfully outmaneuvered Wallace in the bureaucratic infighting; Roosevelt eventually abolished both agencies and incorporated them into a new agency (the Foreign Economic Administration) under Leo Crowley, a Jones supporter, in July 1943.

Wallace's loss in the bureaucratic infighting greatly damaged his prestige and left him without a powerful agency he could use to build support and patronage ahead of the 1944 convention.

[2] - Wallace, unlike Truman, knew about the Manhattan Project while he was vice president. He supported the project's efforts and even after being fired by Truman and becoming embittered with him and his administration, refused to criticize Truman's decision to drop the bomb. He had persuaded Roosevelt to invest time and money into researching the atomic bomb, and felt that to criticize Truman after the bomb was used would have been intellectually dishonest. (Culver & Hyde, pp. 396-397)

With the Soviet Union's entry into the war scheduled for August 1945 (three months after the end of the war in Europe) per the Tehran and Yalta agreements and, like OTL, the new administration feeling obligated to enforce "unconditional surrender" on Japan after the surrender of Germany, the first part of Operation Downfall (Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu set for November 1, 1945) had already been approved by the president when Japan surrendered.

[3] - Walker had been battling ill health and talking about retirement while Roosevelt was alive. Perkins was the first secretary IOTL to tell Truman she wanted to leave the Cabinet. (McCulloch, p. 387)

[4] - Wallace's personality did not endear him to many politicians during his time as vice president. He was viewed as "remote" and "otherworldly" and would shut himself in the vice presidential office and study Spanish when not otherwise occupied with presiding over the Senate (McCulloch, p. 294). During Truman's brief OTL vice presidency, senators frequently dropped by to chat with their more down-to-earth former colleague from Missouri and remarked that they had not been in the vice president's office during Wallace's vice presidency. (McCulloch, p. 334)

[5]- IOTL Wallace, he would have appointed Duggan to the position of Secretary of State and White to the position of Secretary of the Treasury had FDR died while he was vice president. (Andrew & Mitrokhin, p. 109)

[6] - IOTL Hoover sent an aide at the Truman White House a list of 14 individuals, including White, the FBI had been told by Soviet defectors Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley had been feeding information to a Soviet espionage system (Andrew & Mitrokhin, p. 124). Truman disliked Hoover and viewed the attacks by him and later conservative Republicans as political grandstanding. Corroborating evidence in the form of the top-secret VENONA project of the US Army Signal Intelligence Service that had decrypted Soviet intelligence codes and that confirmed details of the testimony of Bentley and Whittaker Chambers was not shared with other government agencies to prevent its secrecy being exposed (and because any evidence from the cables would be inadmissible in court). (Devine, p. 226)

[7] - Jackson was an attorney and the permanent chair at the 1944 DNC. IOTL, he adjourned the proceedings just before Claude Pepper (head of the Florida delegation and a Wallace supporter) could be recognized in an attempt by Pepper and Wallace supporters to force a vote on the vice-presidential nominee instead of waiting until the next day to begin balloting. ITTL, perhaps he didn't, and the lack of time for the anti-Wallace group to call delegates and herd them towards their preferred candidate, Truman, allows Wallace to survive and get re-nominated.

[8] - IOTL the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 added the Speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore ahead of Cabinet officers in the line of succession, in large part because of Truman's involvement and reported preference for then-Speaker Sam Rayburn over president pro tempore Kenneth McKellar. (Glass)

With Wallace in office, who unlike Truman rose to the vice presidency via the Cabinet instead of from Congress, TTL he does not call on Congress to alter the 1886 law that does not include congressional leaders in the presidential line of succession.

[9] - IOTL, after being dumped from the ticket and being offered any Cabinet position (sans Secretary of State) in compensation, Wallace "displayed indifference to the pleas of old colleagues that he return to the USDA and lift the department from the lethargy that had settled over it during Claude Wickard's administration." (Markowitz, p. 129)

Wallace had been the one to select Wickard as his replacement (Culver & Hyde, p. 226) when he resigned to run as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1940.

[10] - The VENONA cables seem to have confirmed that both Duggan (given the code name "19" and then "FRANK") and White ("KASSIR", then "JURIST") (Andrew & Mitrokhin, p. 106) committed espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, with Duggan passing photographs of internal State Department documents to his Soviet handler and White being used to influence American policy on behalf of Soviet aims.

----------------------------------------------​

A large part of my analysis of who Wallace would choose in a situation where he becomes president instead of Truman is based in part on this analysis, which is the best summation I've seen how Wallace approached actual day-to-day political decision-making:

Spoiler: Devine p. 43-44

Those who worked with Wallace throughout his career in public service have confirmed that he depended a great deal on the advice and administrative talents of his associates. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Harold Smith, the director of the Bureau of the Budget, that he believed Paul Appleby had actually run the Department of Agriculture while Wallace was secretary. Even those like Appleby who benefited from Wallace's free delegation of responsibility worried that he was too easily influenced by subordinates, particularly in political matters. As many an exasperated aide discovered, Wallace had no interest in the mundane but necessary tasks required to transform abstract ideals into a workable program capable of winning public support. He found politicking distasteful and assumed that once he had gotten his message to the "common man," the inherently progressive citizenry would naturally embrace it. "In fact," wrote Robert Kenny, while himself in the midst of trying to engineer a Wallace boom in California, "he places his cause on such a high plane that we who are dedicated to promoting that cause cannot 'sully' it by discussing the crass issues of political strategy with him. When we are able to keep him on the subject a few minutes, he falls asleep." For Wallace, discussions of organization, planning, strategy, and vote gathering were extraneous distractions best left entirely in the hands of others.

Yet for a man who depended so heavily on his lieutenants, Wallace was not particularly discriminating in their selection. Rarely did he inquire into his staff members' backgrounds or political commitments. As secretary of commerce, Wallace had chosen for responsible positions staunchly conservative bankers and businessmen who often held views diametrically opposed to his own. On one occasion, Wallace and a top aide, Alfred Browning, a former army general, announced entirely contradictory policy statements on the same day. The secretary's liberal colleagues frequently intervened to dissuade him from making inappropriate selections. Ironically, Wallace would attack Truman throughout the 1948 campaign for welcoming "reactionaries" into government service, people who were, on the whole, less conservative than his own appointees at the Department of Commerce.

This disdain for the nitty-gritty of day-to-day and his own lack of political background and savvy IOTL was the reason why his Progressive campaign was so easily co-opted by communists so thoroughly that the New York Times printed excerpts of the Progressive platform and the CPUSA platform side-by-side to highlight the similarities in "substance, language, tone and political philosophy." (Devine, p. 154)

This is why a lot of Wallace's ATL replacements for the Roosevelt holdovers tend to be either relatively boring (picking people who made it into Truman's Cabinet IOTL or other relatively boring figures like Schindler or Duffey) & why Wallace keeps several (Biddle, Ickes, Wickard) around longer than Truman did IOTL. It's not stated in the write-up, but I similarly think Wallace would pull most of his Supreme Court picks from the Roosevelt DOJ veterans (Biddle for chief and Solicitor General Charles Fahy for the seat vacated by Owen Roberts, etc.)

Cited Works​

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.
Culver, John C. and John Hyde. American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Devine, Thomas W. Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism. UNC Press, 2013.
Glass, Andrew. "Truman Signs Presidential Succession Act". Politico, 17 July 2007, https://www.politico.com/story/2007/07/truman-signs-

presidential-succession-act-004989.​

Markowitz, Norman. The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism. Free Press, 1973
McCulloch, David. Truman. Simon and Schuster, 1992

 

[Catalunya]

>Remember comments the last time I made a box about him
>Don't feel like relitigating the Cold War or post-war farm politics
>Better put a bunch of notes in the spoiler so people read them
>Who am I kidding, people don't read notes

I feel called out.

No, but in all seriousness; this is an excellent post, and one that will be used as a framework for future Wallace discussions. I do however wonder if Wallace would really pull off such a 180, and replace Duggan with someone like Marshall, who he had no real relationship with, and was a bit of random appointment OTL anyway. I could see Duggan convince Wallace to nominate a close friend like Archibald MacLeish instead, or maybe Stettinius (who’d probably still be Ambassador to the UN with no Truman accusing everyone of insufficient anti-communism) could also make a return to his former office. Or maybe Acheson comes in earlier?

There are obviously a few more possible events that could radically alter a Wallace presidency, like Hoover being fired from the FBI, or with two of his most important cabinet members being outed as USSR spies he might be primaried by a coalition of Roosevelt liberals and conservatives, and be replaced with say Eisenhower on the ticket. Speaking of the Roosevelts, do you think Eleanor could be given a more significant role in the Wallace administration, considering more of her friends serve in his cabinet, and there is less of an ideological distance than with Truman?

 

[Lord Caedus]

I feel called out.

No, but in all seriousness; this is an excellent post, and one that will be used as a framework for future Wallace discussions. I do however wonder if Wallace would really pull off such a 180, and replace Duggan with someone like Marshall, who he had no real relationship with, and was a bit of random appointment OTL anyway. I could see Duggan convince Wallace to nominate a close friend like Archibald MacLeish instead, or maybe Stettinius (who’d probably still be Ambassador to the UN with no Truman accusing everyone of insufficient anti-communism) could also make a return to his former office. Or maybe Acheson comes in earlier?

Marshall was a decidedly *waves hands* pick, but I chose him more because he was universally acclaimed as a great pick IOTL when Truman announced his nomination and is someone who would have easily accepted serving under an embattled president (like he did Truman IOTL).

Would Wallace do something similar in circumstances where he's essentially been forced to replace Duggan? I'm not sure, but he wasn't adverse to picking former military men to serve under him (see the anecdote about his aide in the notes), and my hunch is that in a situation where he's at a low point politically, he would be even more willing to go with the path of least resistance of picking someone that nobody in Congress would have a quarrel with being both the face of American diplomacy and the next person in the line of succession.

There are obviously a few more possible events that could radically alter a Wallace presidency, like Hoover being fired from the FBI, or with two of his most important cabinet members being outed as USSR spies he might be primaried by a coalition of Roosevelt liberals and conservatives, and be replaced with say Eisenhower on the ticket. Speaking of the Roosevelts, do you think Eleanor could be given a more significant role in the Wallace administration, considering more of her friends serve in his cabinet, and there is less of an ideological distance than with Truman?

Indeed. It's very plausible that Wallace, even in a TL where he remained on the ticket in 1944 and succeeded FDR, could be ousted at the 1948 Democratic convention. This was before the modern era of primaries began with the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and someone like Wallace, who did not impress Democratic powerbrokers and politicos with his political skills once he was plucked from the Department of Agriculture, would almost certainly rely on the fact that he's the incumbent president and undeniable heir apparent to Roosevelt (unlike Truman IOTL) than anything else.

The real issue would be could a coalition of conservatives (sans the Dixiecrats who would have bolted over Wallace's earlier push for civil rights compared to Truman IOTL) and anti-Wallace forces find someone else who could unite the party in those circumstances? And who would want to in effect be a sacrificial lamb, since everyone IOTL 1948 (except apparently Truman himself) believed that the Republicans would sweep into the White House?

As for his Cabinet, as the write-up says, during Wallace's administration (and indeed his lifetime), Duggan and White were just accused of spying. Granted, the fact that two of the top Cabinet secretaries are being accused by the FBI itself of being spies is pretty explosive, but like Truman IOTL, Wallace and anyone left-of-center in the 1940s/1950s would have likely viewed them as a political attack rather than an actual indication of guilt.

Would Wallace have fired Hoover? I'd lean towards "no." Truman IOTL disliked Hoover (in contrast to FDR) and his tactics and yet felt the political costs of firing him were too great (as did Kennedy later)--Wallace ITTL would be in an even worse political situation, since by the time he would have felt keen to fire Hoover, it would have been seen as some sort of retaliation for accusing his Cabinet picks of being Soviet agents.

I'm not sure about what role Eleanor Roosevelt would play in a Wallace administration. Probably more behind-the-scenes influence, but I think she would probably be given a similar role at the UN as to what she got IOTL (I would imagine Stettinius would be given the post of first US Ambassador to the UN like OTL & with Wallace taking longer to be confrontative with the Soviets, would stick around until Dewey is sworn in).

 

[Catalunya]

Indeed. It's very plausible that Wallace, even in a TL where he remained on the ticket in 1944 and succeeded FDR, could be ousted at the 1948 Democratic convention. This was before the modern era of primaries began with the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and someone like Wallace, who did not impress Democratic powerbrokers and politicos with his political skills once he was plucked from the Department of Agriculture, would almost certainly rely on the fact that he's the incumbent president and undeniable heir apparent to Roosevelt (unlike Truman IOTL) than anything else.

The real issue would be could a coalition of conservatives (sans the Dixiecrats who would have bolted over Wallace's earlier push for civil rights compared to Truman IOTL) and anti-Wallace forces find someone else who could unite the party in those circumstances? And who would want to in effect be a sacrificial lamb, since everyone IOTL 1948 (except apparently Truman himself) believed that the Republicans would sweep into the White House?

Byrnes is a pretty obvious name as a strong inner-party standard bearer for the more anti-Wallace factions in the party, though I don’t think he’d ever be able to defeat an incumbent Wallace on a 1v1, but if his efforts would be enough to deny Wallace the nomination after the first few ballots, I’m sure a moderate consensus pick would appear. Alben Barkley is a pretty obvious shout, though it could also be Truman himself, or even a non-Southerner like Lucas or McFarland.

Someone like Barkley would be a lot more willing to act as a sacrificial lamb if he were to believe that Wallace would get crushed so badly that it would have devastating consequences down ballot as well.

As for his Cabinet, as the write-up says, during Wallace's administration (and indeed his lifetime), Duggan and White were just accused of spying. Granted, the fact that two of the top Cabinet secretaries are being accused by the FBI itself of being spies is pretty explosive, but like Truman IOTL, Wallace and anyone left-of-center in the 1940s/1950s would have likely viewed them as a political attack rather than an actual indication of guilt.

This is arguably the biggest shift of a Wallace presidency compared to Truman IMO, at least domestically. Fights over whether cabinet secretaries are communists or not, would not just make future Cold War liberals less likely to go in bed with anti-communists from the reactionary right, but would also butterfly away the split of the centre-left between pro- and anti-communist factions, with the former not dying off as quickly, and the latter not becoming as dominant in the Democratic Party’s ideology.

Would Wallace have fired Hoover? I'd lean towards "no." Truman IOTL disliked Hoover (in contrast to FDR) and his tactics and yet felt the political costs of firing him were too great (as did Kennedy later)--Wallace ITTL would be in an even worse political situation, since by the time he would have felt keen to fire Hoover, it would have been seen as some sort of retaliation for accusing his Cabinet picks of being Soviet agents.

Hoover being fired by Wallace is probably unlikely (a President Duggan after Wallace’s death would probably do it, but that’s a whole other scenario). Nevertheless, with both more people in his administration interested in weakening Hoover, as well as the likes of William J. Donovan and Cord Meyer not being pushed aside, I do think that Hoover could not amass the same amount of power as he had OTL at that point.

I'm not sure about what role Eleanor Roosevelt would play in a Wallace administration. Probably more behind-the-scenes influence, but I think she would probably be given a similar role at the UN as to what she got IOTL (I would imagine Stettinius would be given the post of first US Ambassador to the UN like OTL & with Wallace taking longer to be confrontative with the Soviets, would stick around until Dewey is sworn in).

Stettinius sticking around longer has all kinds of interesting consequences for Palestine and the Jews.

 

[Bene Tleilax]

Still maintain he'd be succeeded by Harold Stassen.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Byrnes is a pretty obvious name as a strong inner-party standard bearer for the more anti-Wallace factions in the party, though I don’t think he’d ever be able to defeat an incumbent Wallace on a 1v1, but if his efforts would be enough to deny Wallace the nomination after the first few ballots, I’m sure a moderate consensus pick would appear. Alben Barkley is a pretty obvious shout, though it could also be Truman himself, or even a non-Southerner like Lucas or McFarland.

Yeah, that would probably end up being the case if Wallace gets dumped in 1948.

Truman could plausibly lose re-election in 1946 if he remains in the Senate- his replacement lost the OTL race by about five percentage-points IOTL & I'd imagine the domestic situation wouldn't be much different than OTL (strike waves breaking out, debates about price controls, the national housing shortage, etc.) so I'd imagine that he would be in a fight even if he's IATL an incumbent who gained national prominence during the war.

Someone like Barkley would be a lot more willing to act as a sacrificial lamb if he were to believe that Wallace would get crushed so badly that it would have devastating consequences down ballot as well.

Possibly.

This is arguably the biggest shift of a Wallace presidency compared to Truman IMO, at least domestically. Fights over whether cabinet secretaries are communists or not, would not just make future Cold War liberals less likely to go in bed with anti-communists from the reactionary right, but would also butterfly away the split of the centre-left between pro- and anti-communist factions, with the former not dying off as quickly, and the latter not becoming as dominant in the Democratic Party’s ideology.

A big takeaway from Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism was that although the Progressive Party discredited the idea of a Popular Front-style movement in the postwar US, an end to the agreement between mainstream American liberals/progressives/etc. and communists was bound to happen without the specter of a fascist threat keeping the two together.

The opening chapter talks about the "Duclos letter" that led to CPUSA removing Earl Browder in favor of William Z. Foster and reorienting towards a more traditionally Leninist orientation rather than Browder's push to turn the party into a "political association" that would seek to act as a pressure group within the two-party framework. It goes on to describe the reaction to the hairpin turn on the Popular Front:

Spoiler: Devine p. 5-6

The post-Duclos line immediately put strains on the Popular Front coalition that had thrived during the war. Although the CP did not seek to sever relations with sympathetic liberals, the preconditions for a continued alliance became far more stringent. Those reluctant to offer unquestioning support for Communist policies—and more precisely, for Soviet foreign policy—were no longer considered suitable associates. Within Popular Front organizations, the Communists expected their liberal colleagues to accept resolutions predetermined at CP "fraction" meetings without asking embarrassing questions or raising the issue of democratic procedure.

Concealed Communists aggressively enforced the Party line while denouncing as “red-baiters” those who criticized their tactics or called attention to their presence. The Communists also cultivated a political atmosphere in which any opinions not in accordance with the Party position became suspect, and those who expressed them traitors to the progressive cause. When intellectual intimidation failed to silence heretical liberals, the latter found themselves publicly branded as "reactionaries," "fascists," and "warmongers." Though many non-Communists intent on preserving progressive unity opted for self-censorship, such intransigence on the part of the CP drove away many of the Party’s most valued liberal supporters. Yet rather than run the risk of reverting to "Browderite revisionism," the CPers bid their erstwhile allies good riddance, convinced they were strengthening the progressive forces by cutting their numbers.

There are numerous instances in the book where such confrontational, dogmatic attitudes drove away previously sympathetic supporters, including a note (pg. 358) explaining that a young Walter Mondale initially wasn't an anti-communist despite his mentor, Hubert Humphrey, being one:

"His views changed in early 1948 after repeated unpleasant encounters with Communists active in Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). On one occasion, a spokesperson for the DFL's pro-Communist faction, furious at Mondale's success in organizing a group of college students who opposed the Communist position, likened his efforts to those of the Hitler youth."

The opening of the Soviet archives confirms that CPUSA's suspicion that the letter was dictated by Moscow was correct—it was originally written in Russian and appeared in the January 1945 issue of Bulletin of the Information Bureau of the CC VKP(b): Issues of Foreign Policy (given only to Central Committee members and top Soviet government officials) before being translated into French. Which also means that this direction was something that predated the end of the war in Europe.

TL;DR- The communists were already on a path that would alienate their non-communist allies by the time Wallace would have become president, and it would have been incredibly difficult for a vocally pro-communist minority to remain a viable faction within the Democratic Party as events of the type like the OTL coup in Czechoslovakia or the establishment of puppet states in Eastern Europe would erode American domestic support or sympathies for the Soviets.

Hoover being fired by Wallace is probably unlikely (a President Duggan after Wallace’s death would probably do it, but that’s a whole other scenario). Nevertheless, with both more people in his administration interested in weakening Hoover, as well as the likes of William J. Donovan and Cord Meyer not being pushed aside, I do think that Hoover could not amass the same amount of power as he had OTL at that point.

Meyer didn't join the CIA until 1950. Perhaps you were thinking of someone else?

Eh, Hoover was already pretty powerful by the time FDR died and I think it would only be a matter of degrees over the level of power and influence Hoover has by ATL 1949 & Dewey gets sworn in. Hoover reportedly had some kind of handshake deal with Dewey: in return for his behind-the-scenes help during the campaign, Dewey would name him AG and then to the Supreme Court when the next vacancy opened up (which would have been when Wiley Rutledge dies in September 1949). How Hoover would try to keep control over the FBI from the bench would be an interesting question, especially once Dewey leaves office.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Still maintain he'd be succeeded by Harold Stassen.

Good for you.

 

[Lord Caedus]

I'm reading a book about 19th century Britain and the repeated mention of the (now obsolete) custom of calling a general election whenever the monarch died made me think what would have happened if that custom not been changed.

Taking the popular vote swings from polling listed on the Wikipedia page for opinion polling for the OTL UK general election of 1955 and applying it to the 1951 results, here's what a snap election would have looked like if Parliament had been dissolved with the death of George VI:

Remembered this and now I can do a sequel since Chuck's mom died.

I used the poll for the date (25 working days after the week of mourning) with the largest sample size (Excel file here) and the Electoral Calculus calculator to get the results (although I overrode the results in East Devon since Claire Wright seems to be indicating that she's not running).

The good news for Liz Truss is that she gets a few more days as PM than she did IOTL. The bad news...

Spoiler: Larger map

 

[NVB]

The write-up implies the aftermath: Dewey is tossed out after one term (he spends his presidency bogged down both by fights with his own party's conservative leadership and an unpopular ATL Korean War) and Democrats win the next three elections (Adlai "Merkin Muffley" Stevenson welds the New Deal coalition back together for two terms, LBJ wins a narrow victory in 1960 in spite of the aforementioned southern revolts) before the New Deal coalition violently implodes four years earlier than OTL.

Kind of wondering who the lucky Republican that gets elected in ‘64 is. I doubt it’s someone like Goldwater since you mentioned that there was a far right party until 1972, so it doesn’t seem likely the GOP would nominate someone from that side of the party, but I also don’t think it’s someone like Rockefeller since he’s very similar to Dewey, who is likely viewed as a failure. It could be Nixon but Johnson followed by Nixon is pretty derivative of OTL. There’s some other potential names but I’m not sure if they are right either.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Maxing Out At "Morning in America"

Inspired by this graphic @Indicus posted on Discord. Basically, WI the GOP hit its popular vote limit with Reagan's re-election?

----------------------------------------------
​

The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Former Florida governor Alex Sink, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican congressman George P. Bush, Kansas governor Kris Kobach, the Patriot Party nominee, and several other minor candidates in a landslide victory. Sink became the first woman and first Asian-American elected to the presidency. The election saw the highest turnout by percentage since 1952, with Sink receiving a record 81 million votes. It is also the first election where neither major party presidential nominee was a white American without Hispanic ancestry.

Incumbent Democratic president Barack Obama was ineligible to run for a third term due to term limits imposed by the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution. Sink secured the Democratic nomination by April 2020, becoming only the second woman to become a major party's presidential nominee, and selected Virginia senator Tim Kaine, her best-performing rival, to be her running mate. Bush defeated several candidates during the Republican primaries, including Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Florida senator Charlie Crist, and former Virginia governor Bill Bolling, becoming the first sitting congressman nominated by a major party for the presidency since James Garfield in 1880. He selected Missouri senator Roy Blunt to join him on the Republican ticket. Kobach was nominated by the Patriot Party at its convention, choosing retiring Alabama senator Jeff Sessions as his running mate.

The election campaign was widely seen as divisive and troubling, with major issues including the future of the American Healthcare Act, protests against police brutality and high-profile police killings of African-Americans, and congressional failure to implement immigration reform. Kobach attracted widespread media attention for his views on race and immigration, false claims about voter fraud and ties with far-right and white supremacist groups. The selection of Bush, the third member of the Bush family nominated by the Republicans and grandson of 41st president George H.W. Bush, was criticized, alongside his age (at 44 he was the youngest major party nominee since John F. Kennedy) and lack of experience. Sink's business career also drew scrutiny throughout the campaign.

On Election Day, Sink won the election by a landslide, taking 432 electoral votes and winning 51.3% of the popular vote, with a margin of 17.1% over Bush. Sink became the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson to win over 400 electoral votes and the first Democrat to win every state on the East Coast (Ronald Reagan in 1984 was the last candidate to do so before then). Sink also became the first Democrat to win a presidential election in Kansas since 1964, in South Carolina and Texas since 1976, and the first Democrat to win the electoral vote for Nebraska's 1st congressional district since Nebraska began using the congressional district method of awarding its electors in 1992.

This election was the eighth consecutive contest where the Democratic presidential nominee won the popular vote, setting a record for the longest stretch one party has won the national popular vote. This is also the first election where a non-major party has qualified for matching federal funds for two elections in a row since the Federal Election Campaign Act was signed in 1972.

Sink and Kaine were inaugurated as the 46th President and 49th Vice President, respectively, on January 20, 2021.

Spoiler: Presidents

1989-1993: George H.W. Bush (Republican)
1988 (with Dan Quayle): def. Michael Dukakis (Democratic)
1993-2001: Bill Clinton (Democratic)
1992 (with Al Gore): def. George H.W. Bush (Republican), Ross Perot (independent)
1996 (with Al Gore): def. Bob Dole (Republican), Ross Perot (Reform)
2001-2009: Al Gore (Democratic)
2000 (with Joe Lieberman): def. George W. Bush (Republican)
2004 (with Joe Lieberman): def. John McCain (Republican)
2009-2013: George Allen (Republican) [1]
2008 (with Tim Pawlenty): def. Hillary Clinton (Democratic), Ed Schultz (Independence)
2013-2021: Barack Obama (Democratic)
2012 (with Ted Strickland): def. George Allen (Republican)
2016 (with Ted Strickland): def. Joe Straus (Republican), Donald Trump (Patriot)
2021-0000: Alex Sink (Democratic)
2020 (with Tim Kaine) def. George P. Bush (Republican), Kris Kobach (Patriot)


[1] - Allen lost the popular vote to Clinton, but won a majority in the Electoral College.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Maggie Four?

Was curious about what an attempted fourth Thatcher run would have looked like. In my research, I found that she was apparently planning to call a general election in June 1991. So, let's say she somehow stays on and gets her wish *here*.

Can't say I was expecting this result when I set out to do this box (also lol FPTP spitting out a LibDem surge even as they lose votes compared to the Lib-SDP Alliance).

Also, it's not shown in the results, but Thatcher came *very* close to losing her seat here:

Spoiler: Finchley

I swapped a Monster Raving Loony candidate for Lord Buckethead, since he would stand in Finchley again *here* with Thatcher still PM. Luckily, that candidate got almost literally the same number of votes in 1992 (130) as Buckethead did five years earlier (131) so I figure it's a wash.​

Spoiler: Methodology

I used Gallup polls from the 1990/1991 period, all prorated so that they would equal the OTL 1992 percent of the three UK-wide parties' vote (96.3%).

I applied three factors to last OTL poll (April 26, 1991) to determine the votes of the three major parties: the effect of Thatcher, how much each party gained or lost during the OTL election campaign and the "Shy Tory" polling error.

Polling immediately before and after Thatcher's announcement that she was departing shows her unpopularity by November 1990 (Labour went from ahead by 8.5% with Thatcher has head of the Conservative Party to behind by 1.5% when it was announced she was leaving). Prorated, I figure that her staying on *here* cost the Tories roughly five percent of the vote that all went to Labour (of course this is just the

The campaign factor was determined by how much support changed over the IOTL general election campaign, applied to each party. The Conservatives roughly lost about four percent over the OTL campaign, Labour a little over a percent and the Liberal Democrats gained five.

Finally, I multiplied each party's vote by the result of their actual OTL 1992 vote divided by their projected vote in the last Gallup poll before the election (April 8, 1992). This gave the Tories a boost (a 1.11 multiplier) at the expense of Labour (.93) and the LibDems (.92).

After getting each parties' nationwide (Britainwide?) result, I did a uniform swing in each constituency to get the results. I kept all the other parties and candidates' votes the same, hence why you'll notice that Northern Ireland is the same as OTL 1992.

Spoiler: Changed seats from OTL 1992

Aberdeen South (LAB instead of CON)
Amber Valley (LAB instead of CON)
Ayr (LAB instead of CON)
Basildon (LAB instead of CON)
Batley and Spen (LAB instead of CON)
Battersea (LAB instead of CON)
Birmingham Edgbaston (LAB instead of CON)
Birmingham Hall Green (LAB instead of CON)
Blackpool North (LAB instead of CON)
Blackpool South (LAB instead of CON)
Bolton North East (LAB instead of CON)
Bolton West (LAB instead of CON)
Brecon and Radnor (LD instead of CON)
Brentford and Isleworth (LAB instead of CON)
Brigg and Cleethorpes (LAB instead of CON)
Brighton Kemptown (LAB instead of CON)
Brighton Pavilion (LAB instead of CON)
Bristol North West (LAB instead of CON)
Bristol West (LD instead of CON)
Burton (LAB instead of CON)
Bury North (LAB instead of CON)
Bury South (LAB instead of CON)
Calder Valley (LAB instead of CON)
Cardiff North (LAB instead of CON)
Chorley (LAB instead of CON)
City of Chester (LAB instead of CON)
Clwyd North West (LAB instead of CON)
Colne Valley (LAB instead of CON)
Conwy (LD instead of CON)
Corby (LAB instead of CON)
Cornwall South East (LD instead of CON)
Coventry South West (LAB instead of CON)
Crawley (LAB instead of CON)
Davyhulme (LAB instead of CON)
Derby North (LAB instead of CON)
Devon West and Torridge (LD instead of CON)
Dover (LAB instead of CON)
Dudley West (LAB instead of CON)
Ealing North (LAB instead of CON)
Eastbourne (LD instead of CON)
Edinburgh Pentlands (LAB instead of CON)
Edinburgh West (LD instead of CON)
Edmonton (LAB instead of CON)
Elmet (LAB instead of CON)
Eltham (LAB instead of CON)
Erewash (LAB instead of CON)
Erith and Crayford (LAB instead of CON)
Exeter (LAB instead of CON)
Falmouth and Camborne (LD instead of CON)
Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (SNP instead of CON)
Gloucester (LAB instead of CON)
Gravesham (LAB instead of CON)
Great Yarmouth (LAB instead of CON)
Halesowen and Stourbridge (LAB instead of CON)
Harlow (LAB instead of CON)
Hastings and Rye (LD instead of CON)
Hayes and Harlington (LAB instead of CON)
Hazel Grove (LD instead of CON)
Hereford (LD instead of CON)
High Peak (LAB instead of CON)
Isle of Wight (LD instead of CON)
Keighley (LAB instead of CON)
Kensington (LAB instead of CON)
Kincardine and Deeside (LD instead of CON)
Lancaster (LAB instead of CON)
Langbaurgh (LAB instead of CON)
Leeds North East (LAB instead of CON)
Lincoln (LAB instead of CON)
Littleborough and Saddleworth (LD instead of CON)
Luton South (LAB instead of CON)
Mid Staffordshire (LAB instead of CON)
Mid Worcestershire (LAB instead of CON)
Milton Keynes South West (LAB instead of CON)
Mitcham and Morden (LAB instead of CON)
Monmouth (LAB instead of CON)
Newark (LAB instead of CON)
North Dorset (LD instead of CON)
North West Leicestershire (LAB instead of CON)
Northampton North (LAB instead of CON)
Norwich North (LAB instead of CON)
Oxford West and Abingdon (LD instead of CON)
Perth and Kinross (SNP instead of CON)
Peterborough (LAB instead of CON)
Plymouth Drake (LAB instead of CON)
Portsmouth South (LD instead of CON)
Ribble Valley (LD instead of CON)
Richmond and Barnes (LD instead of CON)
Salisbury (LD instead of CON)
Sheffield Hallam (LD instead of CON)
Slough (LAB instead of CON)
Somerton and Frome (LD instead of CON)
South Derbyshire (LAB instead of CON)
South East Staffordshire (LAB instead of CON)
South Ribble (LAB instead of CON)
Southampton Test (LAB instead of CON)
Southport (LD instead of CON)
St. Ives (LD instead of CON)
Staffordshire Moorlands (LAB instead of CON)
Stevenage (LAB instead of CON)
Stirling (LAB instead of CON)
Stockton South (LAB instead of CON)
Swindon (LAB instead of CON)
Taunton (LD instead of CON)
Teigenbridge (LD instead of CON)
Torbay (LD instead of CON)
Twickenham (LD instead of CON)
Tynemouth (LAB instead of CON)
Vale of Glamorgan (LAB instead of CON)
Waveney (LAB instead of CON)
Wells (LD instead of CON)
Welwyn Hatfield (LAB instead of CON)
West Dorset (LD instead of CON)
West Gloucestershire (LAB instead of CON)
Westminster North (LAB instead of CON)
Weston-super-Mare (LD instead of CON)
Winchester (LD instead of CON)
Wolverhampton South West (LAB instead of CON)
Worcester (LAB instead of CON)