AHC: President Alf Landon

[Peelitebkearns]

Hi all,
I know this is near impossible, but it'd be interesting to see whether anyone can pull this off.

With a pod no earlier than the 4th of March 1933, allow Alf Landon to win the presidency in the 1936 election.

FDR should preferably be his aponent, unless you see no way Landon can beat him.

Bonus points if you manage to do it without fiddling around with any assasination attempts Eg Huey Long should still dy on schedule etc, even more bonus points if you create a situation where the public at large consider president Landon to be one of the greats, both while he is in office and to this day in the history books.

So, any way this can happen?

[Makemakean]

Let the battle between the lefties and the non-lefties commence!

How to make FDR put the economy in a worse state than it was?

[Maniakes]

A major contributor to FDR's political success in 1936 was the WPA. Not only were the 3.4 million people drawing paychecks from the WPA in 1936 a lot more likely to vote for FDR than they otherwise would have been, but (until the WPA was reorganzied in 1939) it was also used as a variant of the old Spoils System, as a way to finance a political machine by giving federal sinecure jobs to campaign workers (important to note that the the way the law was written, this was not illegal, nor was it even a terribly big departure from the way state political parties tended to operate at the time).

Suppose that for some reason, FDR had decided to bundle the WPA with NIRA rather than having Congress pass them as separate bills. That way, when NIRA is overturned by the Supreme Court in 1935, the WPA goes with it. This has two consequences that hurt FDR's reelection prospects quite a bit:

1. He largely loses the political benefits of the WPA.
2. He may be goaded into attempting his Court Packing scheme before the 1936 elections rather than after them as per OTL. If Court Packing rather than the New Deal becomes the defining issue of the campaign, that could help Landon quite a bit.

Given how overwhelming FDR's OTL win was (a margin of ~11 million votes out of 44 million cast), that's probably still not enough to put Landon over the top. But what if Huey Long were to smell blood in the water and decided to go through with his OTL plan to run as a third party candidate? If Long were to peel off something like 10-15% of the popular vote from FDR's left, combined with Landon picking up an additional 5-10% from FDR's right, Landon might be able to squeak out a victory in the electoral college.