Talk Elections

In the 20th century

1932 and 1980?

Wait do you mean you want this topic narrowed down to the 20th century?

Because 1860 is the obvious choice with the topic as is (with 1788 and 1796 being distant, but significant second and third places)

But making the 1700 and 1800s verboten opens up 5 big ones

Those being: 1916, 1932, 1964, 1968, and 1980. Narrowly I give it to 1932.

But 1860 easily in the grand scheme of things...easily!

1932

I though that it was better to narrow the question to the 20th century, because 1788, 1796 and 1860 would be too obvious

1860, 1896, 1932, 1936, 1964, 1980, 1988

1800, 1844, 1860, 1876, 1896, 1932, 1948, 1968, 1980, 2000, 2008

Why 1988?

1968

1964

1968

1932 ended a period of essentially one-party rule.

1916 may have been the most consequential close election, coming before the US's entrance into World War One.

Although there's much we don't know.

For all we know if Dewey had won in 1948, it would have prevented the Republican resurgence with Ike, Nixon and Reagan.

And also started a period of one.

Here's a wild card: 1976.

Ford wins and all the woes of the late 1970's get pinned on the GOP. Watergate, vietnam, "malaise," Iranian hostage crisis, all perceived as a 12-year Republican orgy of incompetence and corruption. There is never a Reagan Revolution (with all that entails) in this timeline! Ted Kennedy (or someone very much like him) wins a landslide in 1980, opening the door for a second Great Society with Democratic super-majorities in Congress.


At least one historian has suggested that a Dewey victory would have prevented the resurgence of the southern strategy; stopped the GOP from adopting its intense Red-baiting campaign; and led to a much more liberal Republican Party in the long term. It's interesting to imagine a United States divided, today, between an anti-elitist, know-nothing "populist" Democratic Party anchored in the South (but with support from working-class whites nationwide)... and a business-oriented "progressive" Republican Party drawing support from educated whites and minorities across the country! Basically an extension of the 19th century's voting patterns.

Imagine a 2012 Democratic platform calling for single-payer healthcare and constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-se marriage.

1940

Yeah, Republicans should be glad they lost '76 just like Democrats should be glad they lost '04. However, a couple things...

1. I'm not sure the Iran hostage crisis would have happened with Ford and Kissinger at the helm. I'm not being partisan though...some other foreign policy blunder might have happened instead.

2. Don't you think a move towards neoliberalism was inevitable at some point? Hell, Democrats might have been the one to implement it (the more left-wing parties have sometimes adopted free-market reforms in other developed countries simply because they were the ones in power when the reforms were most needed).

Recently? 2008. The Dems showed they could win without the South, that an ethnic minority could be elected president, and that young people could elect a president over the objections of their elders.

Sorry to bump this topic but.

1788, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1940, 1944, 1968, 1976, 1980, 2000, 2008, 2016

1912, because it really marks the beginning of a progressive movement within the Democratic Party. For the first time you had a Democratic regime representing government activism, social reform, a new national reserve bank, and international cooperation. And this from a party still largely rooted in the South. It presaged the rise of the New Deal Coalition, and therefore is to me the dawn of the modern Democratic Party. Wilson is also a pivotal figure, since in my mind the decision to enter into a foreign war was on the level of the Louisiana Purchase and secession as a moment in which the fundamental nature of the republic was irrevocably changed.

1932? Perhaps. One could say FDR saved capitalism from itself. The election of a Democrat was a foregone conclusion, but this particular Democrat was the right person for the job at the most critical juncture of the 20th Century.

1940? We would have entered the war under Wilkie. Maybe sooner than in the OTL.

1968? The Democratic Primary was hugely consequential, though I think the changes happening in the country had little to do with who was in the White House. It did mark the beginning of the end of the New Deal Coalition, which would have huge consequences when it came to the future of the welfare state in America.

1980? The New Right triumphs for the first time. Reagan, his administration, and his allies were responsible for shifting the soul of conservatism away from pro-business elitism to a coalition of moralists and small government activists. This movement had been growing for some time, but Reagan made the New Right a dominant force within American politics like never before. We can thank this election for the current contentious left/right divide.

2000? Technically still in the 20th Century, Bush and his neoconservatives are responsible for the new pro-military, pro-American-power orthodoxy currently dominating White America. A lot of that has to do with 9/11, and who knows what the response would have been under a Gore administration, but I can guarantee you the nation would have taken a radically different path.

The 10 most Consequential IMHO:

1. 1932
2. 1980
3. 1912
4. 1968
5. 2000 (if it counts as 20th century)
6. 1992
7. 1916
8. 1948
9. 1960 (the parties and the country would be different if Nixon won)
10. 1988

When I have time, I plan on doing a detailed TL of Nixon winning in 1960, titled "Only Nixon Could Go to Selma."

()

That's idiotic and anyone with a basic knowledge of world politics 101 and ideology 101  would know that would never ouccr.

"Progressive" =/= "left" and "populist" =/= "right".

I'm curious to see how different groups of immigrants/Cold War refugees and their descendants would vote under such an alignment. I know Vietnamese Americans are relatively Republican partly due to Reagan granting amnesty of South Vietnamese refugees.

1932.

I guess a "basic knowledge of world politics" requires you to ignore everything outside the anglosphere or before 2000.

Please tell me which country had a left-wing party that was less socially left-wing than the right-wing party???

America from 1896-1920

Look to countries with a strong religious presence, which are typically outside the Anglosphere today.

It's somewhat common in countries with high Catholic populations. Juntos Haremos Historia, for example, is a coalition based on "left-wing" economics with "right-wing" social theory. Marina Silva, a socialist who briefly was the leading left candidate for president of Brazil, has expressed conservative Christian principles in the past. Christian social democracy is a very real thing and you should read up on it – start with integralism.

Some Islamic parties also debatably lean left on economic theory while being strongly authoritarian on social matters. The Muslim Brotherhood is anti-communist but also bases its agenda on Islam including zakat al-mal, meaning that while it might not be a strictly statist redistributive party, it clearly defines economic redistribution as part of its political aim.

On the other side of that coin we have BJP – not strictly redistributive but populist and interventionist, with an extreme hard-line right view of social issues and hierarchy. However, its economic views are nationalist and illiberal rather than redistributive. It might qualify for hard liberals but not most.

So there – not only do these situations exist, these are currently active parties. Going back further in history to a more religious period, I'd guess you'd find even more examples. So it does "ouccr" no matter how idiotic you think it is.

lol no they are clearly to the right of the INC on Economic Issues.

Modi Rand on a pretty Thathcerite type platform

Juntos Haremos Historia is based on two left-wing parietes (PT, MORENA) that are left-wing both socially and economically. This is the vast majority of the party. PES is a distributist party that is socially conservative and yes they are in the coalition, but overall the coalition is still more socially and economically left-wing than their rival political parties (PRI, PAN).

Of course Islamic (like Christian) parties will be of a socially conservative-fiscally distributist economic stance. Economic Distributism is not inherently left-wing and in these cases we are talking about countries that don't have a defined left or right.

BJP is more right-wing economically and socially than the INC in every respect possible.

Nobody said anything about a defined left or right, which is an impossibly subjective standard. You claimed it was impossible for a strong coalition to hold economically redistributive beliefs and socially traditional ones. (explicitly, you said it would be impossible for Democrats to support single-payer but oppose abortion.) There was neither a claim that the party must be aligned as a binary left-right grouping or that the party must be relatively more conservative or liberal or leftist than its opposition.

Your claim is obviously untrue to anyone with "a basic knowledge of world politics 101 and ideology 101". Thanks for playing.

(And for OSR, yes, I said don't buy BJP as an option, but I included it as a contrast to MB. Don't really know why. Guess I was on a comparative roll.)

Yes and I claimed that case as it is the case throughout the world. Social and Economic issues tie into each other. It's not impossible to hold those views but a party with the left-wing views on economic issues will have views that are more left-wing on social issues that the right-wing parties. The cases in which this is not the case are countries without a defined left-wing or right-wing (in Islamic Countries etc).

This is the case in every democratic country throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America (including Mexico in which the coalition a vast majority of it anyway is left-wing socially and economically)

Defining Left and Right is also not that hard, it's a moral philosophy that you hold (equality as goal  vs equality not being a whole).

If the Democrats held those set of beliefs they would not be a major party, same with the Republicans with the same beliefs. So yes, it would be impossible for that to occur if they were the major two parties of the US.

Forgive me for bumping this again

But I would argue 1980 is the most important election in modern history. I mean, really think about the what ifs for that one, and all the ones you can get just from Carter winning that one, which was a bit more deceiving than first sight with how razor thin many states were and how you can create a realistic case in which the incumbent wins a second term despite losing the popular vote

Of the presented options, 1932, purely because of the Great Depression.

I would say all of Roosevelts elections were equally important

Makes me sick to read. Not just because that’s the seemingly 9th different scenario that could’ve easily saw the Kennedy’s back in the White House (which I would love although not nearly as much as if it had been a second JFK term, RFK of JFK Jr) - but because the electoral map would be a lot more favorable to Democrats and so many policies which have made our economy imbalanced & unfair - would not have been enacted - we would be far better off today

Oh what could have been

The only problem with this is that the supermajorities would consist of Watergate Babies elected in 1974. That Democratic Congress inaugurated the neoliberal era.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/


IRL, Carter himself contributed to the neoliberal turn for the same reasons.

https://www.salon.com/2011/02/08/lind_reaganism_carter/

These things are historically determined, because Capital is historically conditioned. Just as Herbert Hoover's Republicans anticipated the New Deal in response to the Depression, so too did 70s Democrats contribute to the rise of neoliberalism well before the "Reagan Revolution". It may have been married to socially liberal policies, but the results would have been largely the same.

1932

I would say 2012 was the most important of my lifetime due to hindsight factor

For the elections of my lifetime, it would be 2000 due to the hindsight factor.

Could you tell me which historian suggested that a Dewey victory would have prevented the resurgence of the “southern strategy” which began with Hoover in 1928?

Regarding a Ford victory in 1976, I’ve often imagined a more liberal Democrat (Alan Cranston is one name I have had on my mind of late) winning in 1980 and trying to push forward the social liberalism that swept America’s urban cores during the 1980s with the growth of heavy metal and rap music. I have always imagined, though, that if a wave of social liberalism swept the country during the 1980s, there might have been an extreme reaction if the Republican Party did regain power at some point during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Imagine Pat Buchanan becoming the Republican nominee in 1992 or 1996 and winning – and being able to get a majority of seats in the House without a majority of votes due to a 2020-like concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas.

It began with McKinley and the Lily-Whites in 1896.

I had forgotten about that, but it is true that the Republicans did try to capture the South’s lily-white electorate from the time of disfranchisement, although until Ben W. Hooper became Governor of Tennessee in 1911 and Harding carried Oklahoma and Tennessee in 1920 it did not have any tangible results. Moreover, in the Border States the Republicans did make many tangible gains during the “System of 1896.”

That was the first real attempt, but it failed miserably. 1928 was the first time it had any grounds

Pat Buchanan getting elected President would require a very different alignment from the one that got Reagan and two Bushes elected. In a President Buchanan alignment, the GOP’s views on trade and war would be flipped, No Child Left Behind wouldn’t be a thing, etc.

Close election counterfactuals:

Since the 2000 election was technically in the 20th century, I'm going to include that one.

The entire history of the country (and the world) post-9/11 would have been radically different.

Ford winning in 1976 might have prevented the Reagan Revolution from ever happening. Even if Reagan beat Ford for the GOP nomination in 1980 (likely), he would have been a tough sell after 12 years of Republicans, during which we saw inflation, economic stagnation, losing an overseas war, and several energy crises. Americans would have wanted something new, even if that meant Ted Kennedy.

If Nixon won in 1960, he would have presided over the civil rights movement and the ramp-up in Vietnam. I wrote a story about this, "Only Nixon Could Have Gone to Selma," in which he becomes a champion of civil rights and the Southern Strategy never happens. When abortion is politicized, the Democrats are the party of southern born again Protestants and Northern urban Catholics, both of whom oppose abortion rights. Republicans fall back on their social progressive, albeit elitist, roots. The party of educated whites and big business. How things play out from there I have no idea.

But the most consequential:

If TR won the 1912 GOP nomination, he would have cleaned Wilson off the map. The US would have joined the Entente in WWI much earlier, resulting in a rapid victory. The provisional Russian government wouldn't have collapsed, and the Bolsheviks never would have taken power. Germany would have avoided such a harsh peace, which means no Hitler. Meanwhile, many of TR's progressive, socialist ideas would have been seen as perfectly acceptable without the specter of Soviet Communism. Old age insurance, national health, and a much more activist government would have been spearheaded by a progressive GOP. The Democrats would have remained the party of Southern reactionaries. The USA also wouldn't have been dominated by Wilsonian foreign policy ideology for 100 years.

A much, much better world.