Some DoD elections, because once I grapple onto something I'm physically incapable of letting it go. There'll be more of these, but I'm starting out with the two presidential elections held in the *US under the 1850 census, which also helpfully include the same voting states. All credit to Jared for the TL, which is a classic of the genre and should be read by anyone who likes grimdark, American regionalism, weird neo-imperialism or all of the above.
First up: 1852. This was a Patriot landslide, in which incumbent President Lewis Cass used the enormous popularity of his conquests in Mexico to cruise to a second full term in office. The Democrats put up Governor James Guthrie of Kentucky, largely to have a chance at a big state outside their stronghold, and as expected did not break into three figures in the electoral vote.
1856 couldn't have been more different if it tried. The Patriots had been in power for sixteen years, and were getting somewhat complacent - their nomination of incumbent VP Sam Houston didn't help them appear fresh, while the Democrats nominated the immensely popular war hero General Jefferson Davis. The latter won a narrow but convincing victory, backed by nearly the entire South (obviously not called the South ITTL, but you get the point) while the northernmost tier of states backed Houston, as did North Carolina and his home state of East Texas. Senator John Bell of Tennessee launched a third-party bid under the banner of the Freedom Party, campaigning on a nativist platform, but won only Maryland.
Continuing with the DoD maps from here.
The 1860 elections saw the reelection of the hugely popular incumbent President Davis against Patriot candidate Charles Faulkner of Virginia. Davis, unlike most of those US Presidents considered truly great by posterity, had not led the US through any major war, but he had presided over the annexation of significant tracts of land in Central America, including the entire nation of Nicaragua, as a result of US filibuster campaigns. Davis also articulated the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny", the notion that the white race was destined by God Almighty to rule all the lands of the Americas and that the US was the champion of the white race, which was to guide the US for the remainder of its history. He also settled the "free negro question" by signing into law the Citizenship Act of 1859, which restricted US citizenship to whites whose parents were also US citizens (although white immigrants in the northern states continued to be able to get citizenship easily enough until the North American War). With this in mind, it's also fairly natural that his greatness was somewhat more disputed while he was in office, and so we explain the relatively narrow margin of his reelection.
Jefferson Davis may have planned a third term, as with Jackson before him and Mitchell after him, but he would never live to fulfil that ambition, as he was struck down by an assassin's bullet in 1863. The US got its first Jewish President, and the assassin's motives were traced back (however truthfully) to the Mexican government, leading to the renewal of war between Mexico and the US. This was quite easily won by the US, which took yet another tier of states off Mexico and expanded its reach to the entire Gulf coast of that nation. In spite of his religion, Abraham Myers' war record proved sufficient to see him reelected to the presidency in 1864.
1868 was the first election in twelve years not to feature an incumbent, and the first in the same amount of time not to be won by the Democrats. The incumbent Vice-President Joseph Holt, a popular former federal prosecutor who had conducted the trials of both presidential assassins (that of Mangum in 1847 and Davis in 1863), was pitted against the relatively unknown Patriot Senator Hugh Griffin of Illinois, who was nominated as a compromise candidate but proved quite an adroit campaigner in his own right. Enough so, in fact, to take him to the White House, where he would show equal skill in handling the ship of state, becoming one of America's most successful presidents and the perhaps first one whose diplomatic influence was felt outside the North American continent.
Continuing with the DoD maps from here and here. (The election data for the two elections held under the 1870 census is sadly unavailable, so we're skipping past those)
The 1880 election saw a rather nicely-encapsulated "struggle of personalities" between candidates who very much personified the ideals of their respective parties. The Patriots ran Thomas Corbin, an old-school rural populist very much of the "born in a log cabin he built with his own two hands" school, who lived as a frontiersman in the West for a long time before striking silver in the eastern backcountry of North California (where Nevada would be IOTL) and becoming immensely rich. The Democrats ran Wade Hampton III, a fabulously wealthy planter from one of South Carolina's most established old-money families. Both men had their appeal with certain groups and regions, and the election was very close, but ultimately Corbin would come out on top by a margin of four electoral votes.
Corbin's years in office ended up highly eventful, with the Third Mexican War breaking out in 1881 after an incident on the Veracruz-Mexico City railroad line, which is believed by historians to have been a false-flag operation staged by rail magnate Brutus Junius Clay to embarrass President Corbin into declaring war. Mexico surrendered unconditionally within months, and the US annexed the country wholesale, but guerrilla warfare would linger for six more years, until the last commander with Mexican allegiance surrendered in January of 1888.
By this point, President Corbin had succumbed to the "twenty-year curse" that's killed every US President elected in a year ending with zero since Jefferson, and his Vice-President David Richards became President while the election race heated up. Richards was not a particularly skilled or interesting politician, but his Louisiana planter background was seen as an asset since it might allow the Patriots to cut into the core Democrat vote. For their part, the Democrats successfully courted General Edward Mahan, the Conqueror of Mexico City, who proved an immensely popular candidate. Both parties selected VP candidates from key battleground states: Richards' running mate was Senator Charles Ramsey of North Carolina, while Mahan ran with Senator Lewis Mitchell of Westylvania, a man just barely old enough to be eligible but who was already turning heads on the political scene with his eloquent promotion of American exceptionalism and anti-British sentiment. Mahan ended up winning by a solid margin in the electoral vote, though less so in the popular vote - the biggest surprise of the election was certainly the fact that, perhaps because of Mitchell's presence on the ticket, the Democrats captured Westylvania, ending the "Free Trio"'s history of consistently voting Patriot.
Continuing with the DoD maps from here, here and here. This is the last *US election for which I have complete data, so expect a lull before I get to the Yankee ones.
The 1892 election was the first conducted after the 1890 census, which reapportioned the electoral vote to the strong benefit of the Northwest, and in particular the Great Plains, at the expense of the East and the Gulf States losing significant vote weight. In a different world, these changes would've benefitted the Patriots greatly, but as it stands, that was not to be. The Patriots' core vote of Plains farmers and Southwestern hacienda workers (who traditionally voted as instructed by their employers) was beginning to loosen throughout the 1880s, and only the incumbency and popularity of President Corbin staved off the party's decline. Until 1892, that is, when both factions walked out of the convention in protest. The Plains farmers had long been up in arms over the expansion of large-scale plantation agriculture into their region, which they saw as unfair competition against free labor, and when the Patriots had eight years in office and did nothing to stop this, the farmers began to grow discontented with the party. State parties such as the Wilkinson Progress Party and the Kansas People's Party had been founded during Corbin's years in office, but in 1892 they made common cause. When the Patriot convention looked like it was about to nominate notoriously pro-slavery Governor Emil Burke of Pennsylvania, the Plains delegates left the convention, forming a national People's Party and nominating maverick Senator William Shipstead of Wilkinson [a sort of William Jennings Bryan figure] for president. The People's Party adopted a platform calling for the abandonment of the gold standard, the abolition of national banks, and the curtailing of indentured labor in the northern states [although he did stop short of calling for abolitionism, because of course he did, this is DoD].
The southwestern blancos also bolted from the Patriots, forming the Reform Party and nominating Emilio Canalizo of Veracruz on a ticket of equality and justice for all white men [again, this is DoD; if you think anyone in the *US is going to give half a fig about the non-white population and still win significance, you're pushing your luck].
The rump Patriot Party decided to drop Burke, nominating instead the more traditional Eastern Patriot, Senator Charles Ramsey of North Carolina. His running mate was Colonel John Watson, a veteran of the Mexican war who still carried a bullet in his shoulder, and was hoped to add a bit of badly needed war-hero charisma to the ticket.
The Democrats, meanwhile, were chugging along just fine - they had a popular incumbent who looked like he was actually supporting the common man, notably setting up the Industrial Commission to prosecute cartels in the railroads. President Mahan decided to drop VP Mitchell from his ticket for re-election, instead choosing Governor Luis Terrazas of Chihuahua, a veteran politician of the southwest who was also the first blanco to be nominated by a major party.
Ultimately Shipstead's ticket proved even more successful than the Patriots had feared. He carried every single state in the Plains, coming close to second place in the electoral vote. What was worse, he split the vote in the Free Trio badly, allowing the Democrats to carry all three states despite Mitchell being absent from the ticket. The Reform Party, by contrast, was a damp squib, getting no more than 20% of the vote in any single state and failing to break 1% nationally. Its supporters would claim election fraud against them, but such claims weren't very likely - well, certainly not likely enough for anyone to ever act upon them.
The overall result was a Democratic landslide, with Mahan being confirmed in office by nearly three quarters of the electoral college. Having returned to the New White House, the President set about to deepen his reform agenda in hopes of attracting Populists to the Democratic fold. Before his second term was up, constitutional amendments had been passed to allow a progressive federal income tax and the direct election of senators. Moreover, civil service reform was instituted, and the remit of the Industrial Commission was expanded to include heavy industry as well as the railroads. America had entered a new age.
The technological barriers were the development of clipper ships, which in OTL were more or less a product of the Australian gold rush, and so are developed sooner here with the need. The cultural barriers were lowered because there was already higher immigration before the gold rush (basically redirected from the USA), which meant that gold discoveries were publicised which were kept quiet in OTL. (More immigrants who wanted to make money, rather than a government which had an interest in keeping things quiet.)
The broad picture would be similar, but there's quite a few details I would tweak if I were redoing it. Some of them I even had plans to do a big retcon for and rewrite of the whole timeline, but the scale of the task was a bit off-putting, and the rewards limited, so I moved on to other projects.
I didn't flesh out all of the details, but in essence, *America would lose the war, have a peace imposed with a whopping great indemnity, loss of some border territory, some attempted military restrictions, etc (sound familiar?). That would go predictably wrong in all of the obvious ways, with *America ending up quasi-fascist, extremely revanchist, and at war with New England, Canada, and parts of South America, right when Britain and other European powers would prefer to have no distractions outside of the Continent, because they still faced problems with Germany.
Honestly, I think that might be even more dystopic than the actual DoD. When the story ended in 1933, the *US still had some measure of democracy, even if it was a white supremacist one and it looked like Alvar O'Brien was a dictator in the making, while New England had endured a bout of fascism but had just seen democracy restored, and it looked ready to prosper in the future as a neutral, social democratic state. A revanchist *US, though, is gonna turn very nasty very quick.
