The Caedite Infobox and Graphics Thread

[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.

 

[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

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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.

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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

 

[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

 

[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?

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​

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)

 

[Lord Caedus]

I just realized that FaceApp and other programs that could have profound implications in a post-truth era fun image editing tools could allow me to generate a more appropriate picture for everyone's favorite TL-191 character whose death we presupposed didn't occur at Little Bighorn.

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George Armstrong Custer (December 5, 1839 - June 25, 1930) was an American military leader who served as a general in the United States Army. During his long military career, Custer served in the War of Secession, American Indian Wars, Second Mexican War and the First Great War, where he was instrumental in the eventual American victory in the North American theater of the conflict.

A native of Michigan, Custer attended the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1861 at the beginning of the War of Secession. During the conflict, Custer exhibited what would be his trademarks of daring military maneuvers and a penchant for seeking publicity. He served as an adjutant to George McClellan, whose disastrous leadership led to the American defeat at the Battle of Camp Hill and eventual Treaty of Arlington which ended the War of Secession with the recognition of the Confederate States of America.

In the Second Mexican War, Custer participated in the suppression of the Second Mormon Revolt under Brigadier General John Pope, who would become the first Military Governor of Utah. Custer would gain a brevet promotion and be placed in charged of the defense of Montana, where his role as the overall commander at the Battle of the Teton River made him a national hero alongside future president Theodore Roosevelt, although the two men would become political rivals following the battle. After the war, Custer considered running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in multiple contests between 1884 and 1908, but never made himself a candidate for political office.

After his rapid rise to brigadier general, Custer's military career stalled in the next two decades between the Second Mexican War and First Great War as a result of personal and professional conflicts between him and his superiors. As one of the few American military officers whose reputation was improved by his performance in the Second Mexican War, and with alliances with influential legislators in Congress, Custer was able to remain in the Army long after he reached the mandatory retirement age of 64 in 1903 despite concerns over his continued fitness for command.

In the First Great War, Custer was one of the main American commanders on the Kentucky front, commanding the United States First Army throughout the conflict. Alongside John J. Pershing, Custer led the slow American advance through Kentucky and into Tennessee during the first three years of the conflict. Secretly disobeying orders from the War Department, Custer masterminded the Barrell Roll Offensive beginning on April 22, 1917 that resulted in both the capture of Nashville and the discarding of the then-conventional military doctrine regarding the newly-invented barrels. With American commanders imitating the strategy Custer pioneered on other fronts, combined with the depletion of Confederate manpower reserves after three years of war, the offensive marked the beginning of the end of the Great War in North America and cemented Custer's reputation as an American military hero.

Following the war, Custer was promoted to the rank of general and served as the grand marshal for the 1918 Remembrance Day parade, the first to be held since the United States won its first declared war in seven decades. He was given his final assignment, to serve as the military governor of Canada (1919-1922) following the promotion of Hunter Liggett to the United States General Staff. Finally forced to retire in 1922 at age 82, Custer survived the second of two assassination attempts by Canadian terrorist Arthur McGregor during his farewell tour of occupied Canada, throwing McGregor's own bomb back to him and killing the would-be assassin and several bystanders.

Having served in the United States Army for 61 years, Custer remains the longest-serving military officer in American history and holds several distinctions related to his long service. He was the last veteran of the War of Secession to remain in military service in either the United States or Confederate States, and was the only official military veteran of all three wars fought between those countries from 1861 to 1917 (although there were documented instances of War of Secession veterans acting as civilian auxiliaries during several engagements during the First Great War).

Custer was given a state funeral upon his death in 1930 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He is the only person interred there who fought against Robert E. Lee, the Confederate hero of the War of Secession and former owner of the land that now makes up the cemetery.

Widely admired in the United States during his lifetime thanks to both his victories and talent for self-promotion, Custer nevertheless had contemporary detractors, who criticized both his personal conduct and his military leadership during the First Great War. In the decades following the Second Great War, Custer has become widely criticized as a stand-in for the "futility and carnage of the First Great War" (in the words of the United States Military College) for his reliance on frontal assaults that produced millions of American casualties for little or no gain prior to 1917, a criticism enhanced by the publication of former Custer adjutant and Second Great War general Abner Dowling's memoirs. Custer's role as a mentor to both Dowling and Irving Morrell, the most decorated American military officer of the Great War period, has become an increasingly prominent part of his reputation and legacy among the general public and historians in the decades after his death.

Since the 1980s, Custer's reputation and legacy have been further reevaluated by historians who argue that public association of Custer with the high casualties and outdated strategies of the First Great War failed to recognize important innovations by Custer and his subordinates that preceded the Barrell Roll Offensive, and that high casualties were a consequence of strategical and tactical realities at the time. Simultaneously, Custer's conduct in both the American Indian Wars on the Great Plains, and his role in formulating and implementing harsh occupation policies in Utah and Canada have become widely criticized.

 

[Lord Caedus]

Inspired both by 538 announcing its new demographic calculator for 2024 and Sean Munger's analogy for the Democrats endorsing the Liberal Republican candidate 1872 election in his video on that election.

Let's say that Merrick Garland goes mad with power sometime after he's confirmed and the national GOP is decimated by federal RICO charges as a result of January 6th trials. As a result, the party decides to back RFK Jr. after Trump, the presumptive nominee and person the party has been sculpted around for almost a decade, is found both guilty and mentally incompetent just after winning the nomination.

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Since it's not a true 1872 analogy without the losing candidate croaking before the Electoral College meets, let's say for maximum irony, RFK Jr. gets Herman Cain'd.

Unlike in 1872, many states nowadays have laws binding electors, so Shanahan is essentially assured of getting most of RFK Jr.'s electors. Among states Kennedy won that allow faithless electors, most of the delegates, being partisan Republicans, back Ron DeSantis instead of Shanahan, although a few of the eclectic (read:batshit in a different way) people the RFK campaign awarded with a place on their state's electoral slate remain loyal to Shanahan. Five of Kennedy's electors choose candidates besides Shanahan and DeSantis, with three picking hometown candidates while one picks indicted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as, in quotes "a middle finger to the deep state".

The presidential vote ends up as follows:

Joe Biden (D): 388 electoral votes
Nicole Shanahan (I): 82 electoral votes
Ron DeSantis (R): 63 electoral votes
Nikki Haley (R): 2 electoral votes
Clarence Thomas (I): 1 electoral vote
Tommy Tuberville (R): 1 electoral vote
Lily Wu (L): 1 electoral vote​

Spoiler: Metholodogy

I came up with Biden's vote-share as a function of how much Grant improved in the national popular vote from 1872 to 1868, then used the "shift all voters" function to get Biden's share of the vote up to what I got (54.2%), while moving the independents up to around 11% of the national vote (about where RFK was in March).

For the scattering of RFK Jr.'s votes, aside from states with laws that would have bound the electors' votes to the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket, I used a lot of OTL elections to decide how to split the votes up- KY, MO & TN are just their 1872 EVs transposed in 2024, split WV's delegation as a nod to the 1988 faithless elector there, split up Alabama using the 1960 results with the 1956 faithless elector, and split LA's delegation in line with its result 200 years ago. I had 1 ID elector remain loyal to Shanahan as a nod to the relatively good results for Evan McMullin's campaign there eight years ago, had a KS elector vote for Wu because I needed a "random local person gets an EV" and I figured at least one Libertarian person would get an EV in this scenario, and had one elector take the penalty to vote for Nikki Haley in SC since I figured Haley would get at least one vote from her home state in the event of a RFK Jr.-less EC vote.

Spoiler: Notes

• Some of the candidates chosen are direct nods to the 1872 scattering of Greeley's electoral votes after his death. Ron DeSantis plays the role of Thomas Hendricks here as the "major party candidate the electors back once the glue keeping the alliance with the other party is gone", and Clarence Thomas is David Davis, AKA the "random Supreme Court justice getting an electoral vote for some reason".
• A judicial watchdog group couldn't find current voter records for Clarence Thomas when they went looking in 2020, so Thomas would technically be considered an independent even if he's obviously a supporter of the Republican Party.
• It's a bit weird that both candidates here are older Irish Catholic men with a younger woman of color as their running mate. Maybe this becomes the generic presidential ticket formula like how the Democrats always had someone from either Indiana or New York (and sometimes both) and the Republicans nominated an Ohioan every other cycle in the Third Party System?

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And an extra infobox I'm calling RFK Jr. If He Wasn't Killed (By the Spirit of Horace Greeley).

Basically, just the above scenario but without the whole "dying between the election and meeting of the Electoral College" thing.