I've done a few election infoboxes for the excellent election game over on AH.com
Where the World Will Lead, which is coming up to an end after two long years. Some of those are cheeseburger, so I'll get those out of the way.
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McAdoo dies before inauguration, leading to Alfalfa Bill Murray ending up President. He makes a mess of it.
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After a year of Acting President Hugh Johnson, Murray is finally confirmed as President for a second term.
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And after those eight years, the Republicans finally win with "Lucky Lindy".
Yes, at this period in time W3L [as it's shortly called as] was
really into fascism and corporatism. You had William McAdoo who Al Smith feared would exclude Catholics from the Democratic Party, "Alfalfa Bill" Murray who campaigned against corporations, carpetbaggers and African-Americans, Hugh Johnson the Mussolini fanboy, and Lindbergh the hardline non-interventionist and possible fascist sympathiser. It does get better. Eventually.
Now, skip forward a bit, and we get to the Democratic primaries in 1964. It's a fairly contentious one.
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As you can see, by this time, fascism and corporatism is on its way out, and the liberals and conservatives are battling for the party's soul. Orson Welles [yes,
that Orson Welles] leads the liberals that was recently empowered by Humphrey's 1960 run and Sam Ervin leads the conservatives. Welles wins the primaries, but Ervin wins the convention. And goes down in a landslide in November to popular Republican president Joe Foss.
After all that, the 1970s had a huge New Left and New Right that tore American politics apart, and the Democrats were led through it by Sam Yorty, but after Yorty left, the Democrats started absorbing the New Left over time, ending up becoming actually pretty left-wing compared to OTL, while the Republicans end up essentially the Libertarian Party with some conservatives as well. There's also a major socialist third party.
But anyway, enough America stuff, W3L has British stuff as well, which I have done two infoboxes of.
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Basically Clynes holds on against MacDonald in 1923, ends up PM 1923-1927 before the Tories get back in. Labour ends up going to the hard-left after Henderson is perceived as too moderate for Depression-era Britain. Hence you end up with Prime Minister James Maxton.
Then there's a lot of story between it and the next infobox, which I'll admit was my fault as I was too focused on the American side of it. But the short of it is: Cripps leads Britain through WWII, Tories split in 1950s, Labour dominate 1960s, Tory-led coalition brings neoliberalism and STV in 1970s, Denis Healey leads in 1980s, Robin Cook abolishes the monarchy in the late 1990s, there's a grand coalition in the 2000s that ends up unpopular.
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Now, there's oodles of history and story, but I'll try to explain the parties here.
Labour: The "Natural Party of Government", essentially. Provided most of Britain's 20th century PMs, oversaw devolution, the abolishment of the House of Lords and of the Monarchy, It has gone from radical left under Maxton and Cripps to pragmatic reform under Healey to working with the Tories in the early 2000s. Now they've gone back left under Blunkett.
National Democrats: One of the two results of countless splits and mergers of the British right-wing since the Tory right walked out in protest at Rab Butler's working with the Liberals on an anti-socialist pact in 1956. Since then, the "New Democrats" merged with the original splitter, the National Unionists, but a NUP splitter called the Democratic Unionists left, but ended up merging. Then there was another splitter...
United Socialists: Maxton's radicalism didn't last long in the Labour Party and was instead replaced with a more pragmatic left-wing streak that came to a head under Richard Crossman in the 1960s. His alliance with the Spanish government against left-wing rebels led to the Independent Labour Party splitting off. They ended up splitting in the 1990s, but merged back together a decade later as the USP.
National Front: The previously-mentioned DUP splitter was Neil Hamilton's British Democratic Party, which ended up being taken over by ex-Labourite Robert Kilroy-Silk and rebranded the NF. They're basically UKIP.
Reform: Basically an latter-day Social Democrats, they split from Labour when Labour negotiated a Red-Red-Green coalition with the USP and Greens. They ended up killing off the Liberals by taking their votes.
Green: Basically the Greens, only unitary due to stronger presence in Parliament earlier.
Then there's other parties not mentioned in the infobox because they weren't in the top six...
Scottish Republican: Split off the SNP once it went ultra-right-wing under Ian Smith (yes, that Ian Smith), they're essentially a left-wing Scottish nationalist party decidely rooted in socialism.
(15 seats, 1.9%)
Communist: Marxism-Leninism. Basically the USP's time in coalition hurt them with zealous "never compromise" voters which went and voted for the next best thing.
(12 seats, 3.4%)
Liberal: Often seen as the "Natural Party of Coalitions" due to their ability to work with both sides, they've nevertheless relied way more on the Tories than Labour. They imploded this election due to Reform providing a much more coherent alternative that appealed more to Liberal voters than their party did.
(12 seats, 2.6%)
Plaid Cymru: Wales essentially didn't get devolution until the remaining bits of Britain did in 1999. Which ended up driving a bunch of soft nationalists to Plaid in protest at this. Plaid ended up in government from 2002 to 2010, but lost the Assembly election in 2010 to Labour. Overall, they're still very much
the alternative to Labour, at least for the moment...
(11 seats, 1.2%)
Unionists (Scotland): Remember I mentioned Ian Smith's SNP? Well, they ended up merging with the Scottish Tories to form the Unionists after realising that their "nationalism" was more soft-regionalism than anything and that they were only splitting the vote and allowing Labour to dominate Scotland and whatnot. They sit with the NDP.
(10 seats, 1.2%)
I'll try to explain more about the story via wikiboxes, but if you have an AH.com account, I recommend reading the
British and
American archives I set up. I'll try to finish the British one eventually, I promise you.