Alternate Electoral Maps III

In this timeline people don't get to bitch about trump losing by 2.1 since when compared to this, 2.1 is basically a tie. I've brought this up to people often the last two years, and every time I do, it instantly shuts them up

Yeah, no, people still get to bitch because it's a victory by the EC not a victory by PV. Victory by EC is still stupid no matter by how much a margin.
 
Gen. Smedley Butler (Independent-PA)/Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Independent-AR): 10,633,736 votes (26.77%) and 156 Electoral Votes

I am eternally amused by the concept that a bunch of business magnates and military leaders decided that the best possible leader of their anti-socialist coup was the most outspoken leftist in the Armed Forces.
 
Yeah, no, people still get to bitch because it's a victory by the EC not a victory by PV. Victory by EC is still stupid no matter by how much a margin.
Unless if you had wanted Douglas to become President instead, under this scenario. Fortunately however, this didn't actually happen.
 
Unless if you had wanted Douglas to become President instead, under this scenario. Fortunately however, this didn't actually happen.

Still doesn't matter because Abraham Lincoln would have won by PV. Of course, if you take such an scenario where they all unite, yes, he loses. But did such circumstances exist? No.
 

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In this timeline people don't get to bitch about trump losing by 2.1 since when compared to this, 2.1 is basically a tie. I've brought this up to people often the last two years, and every time I do, it instantly shuts them up
Yet managed to drag politics outside of Chat for the second time after being warned in the past.

Kicked for a week
 
Still doesn't matter because Abraham Lincoln would have won by PV. Of course, if you take such an scenario where they all unite, yes, he loses. But did such circumstances exist? No.
You could also argue Douglas took votes away from Lincoln he was only able to get by not having to appeal to the south like he’d have to if he was running on a unity ticket
 
Highlighting the extreme sectionalism of the 1860 election, and highlighting the massive importance of the Electoral College, here's a map of the 1860 election if all of the anti-Lincoln voters-those who voted for Stephen Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell, as well as the few others-had been united behind a single candidate (for's simplicity's sake, let's say Douglas):

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Abraham Lincoln (R-IL)/Hannibal Hamlin (R-ME)-169 EV-39.82%
Stephen A. Douglas (D-IL)/Herschel Vespasian Johnson (D-GA)-134 EV-60.18%
Despite losing the PV by 20%, because of the extreme Democratic landslides throughout the South (and the closeness of the results in large Northern states such as New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania), Lincoln would have still won the Electoral College by a comfortable margin, and hence the election. California and Oregon are the only states that would have flipped to the Democrats, and New Jersey would be the only Northern state (not counting the West) to have given the Democrats a majority. South Carolina did not have PV at that time, but would have cast its votes for the Democratic candidate. The Electoral College, in this instance, truly would have been responsible for Lincoln's election, and hence, for triggering the Civil War.


This is a topic that political theorists have debated for decades. Basically, the question is in a pairwise election was Lincoln the preferred candidate of a minority of voters in all cases. In other words, if there were only two candidates would all the non-Lincoln votes go to that other candidate. There were of course 4 candidates Lincoln, Breckenridge, Douglas and Bell. You are assuming that Douglas>Lincoln (and may be assuming that Breckenridge>Lincoln, Bell>Lincoln). That is in fact not necessarily accurate. In a very detailed and complex paper Tabarrok and Lee suggest that Lincoln would have beaten Breckenridge (even in the popular vote) but that it would have basically been close between Douglas, Lincoln and Bell (although they think Douglas probably would have won in a pairwise competition with Lincoln). https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5112/4f39f5ab264ef5d819bbde6b9b0db7b0c2ed.pdf

The basic issue is that Breckenridge would only get votes in the South (albeit by a large majority) but the south is only a small fraction of the population. Bell was largely supported by former Whigs who were trying to elide the slavery issue. It is plausible that a number of these folks would have gone to Lincoln (who was after all a Whig) if a Douglas/Lincoln only election. The really interesting point is that Breckenridge was basically the person who ensure Lincoln's election despite the fact that he himself could not win in any possible set of scenarios.
 
This is a topic that political theorists have debated for decades. Basically, the question is in a pairwise election was Lincoln the preferred candidate of a minority of voters in all cases. In other words, if there were only two candidates would all the non-Lincoln votes go to that other candidate. There were of course 4 candidates Lincoln, Breckenridge, Douglas and Bell. You are assuming that Douglas>Lincoln (and may be assuming that Breckenridge>Lincoln, Bell>Lincoln). That is in fact not necessarily accurate. In a very detailed and complex paper Tabarrok and Lee suggest that Lincoln would have beaten Breckenridge (even in the popular vote) but that it would have basically been close between Douglas, Lincoln and Bell (although they think Douglas probably would have won in a pairwise competition with Lincoln). https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5112/4f39f5ab264ef5d819bbde6b9b0db7b0c2ed.pdf

The basic issue is that Breckenridge would only get votes in the South (albeit by a large majority) but the south is only a small fraction of the population. Bell was largely supported by former Whigs who were trying to elide the slavery issue. It is plausible that a number of these folks would have gone to Lincoln (who was after all a Whig) if a Douglas/Lincoln only election. The really interesting point is that Breckenridge was basically the person who ensure Lincoln's election despite the fact that he himself could not win in any possible set of scenarios.
It was not my intention to devise an alternate timeline, or to determine how the election would have gone if it had been a one-on-one race. All I was doing here was to create a map combining all of the anti-Lincoln votes under one ticket, to show the extent to which he was opposed by the South, and the critical role the Electoral College played in his victory. I didn't mean for it to be anything more elaborate or complex than that.
 
The problem with using PV totals for 1860 was that, IIRC Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in most of the Southern states. Not that he would've win them if he had, but perfectly democratic elections, these were not.
 
Another American Federation TL election map.

*

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With a population of approximately 727,000 people as of 2019, the Republic of Plata is the second-least populous nation in the AF, and only pulled ahead of Kootenai in 2002. However, its political system is one of the most unusual and notable in the entire Federation.

Originally known as Nevada, the area which is now Plata started out as an eastern part of the old Mexican state of Las Californias, and when the Californias achieved independence from Mexico, the scarcely-populated Sierra Nevada region was not admitted to the new nation, becoming the Principality of Nevada. However, in 1859, just nine years after Nevada achieved independence, silver was discovered in its deserts, and unsurprisingly, the Californias and other nearby states were eager to seize it for their own profit. The AF, however, sent in the International Guard to the Nevada border to force those governments to back down, and in 1863, Nevada was re-christened Plata in reference to both its Mexican past and its most valuable resource.

The importance of silver to the economy of Plata led to it becoming the first nation in the AF to adopt an entirely silver-based coinage in 1876, with then-Prime Minister William Stewart (a silver mine owner himself) declaring the move would make Plata 'the most prosperous nation in the Americas'. While this proved to be stretching it, it was certainly true that those who could bear the notoriously terrible heat and fairly poor working conditions in the mines of Plata did benefit a fair bit from the silver boom (although silver magnates, including those in other countries like the Californias, benefited more). Certainly, silver remained one of Plata's most lucrative exports for decades.

By the early 1950s, however, Plata's silver supply was starting to run low, which led to the 1954 election being the first which the until-then monolithic Silver Liberal Party (SLP) had ever lost. For the next four decades, Plata had a three-party system, with the SLP's social democratic policies based on silver exports being challenged by the Conservative Party of Plata (CPP), which advocated for reducing government spending and started to earn more money for the nation's treasury by allowing the sparsely-populated desert to be used for nuclear testing (not that this was something they told voters, of course) and the Platan Liberalisation Party (PLP), which worked to develop more tourism for the growing city of Reno near the western border, as well as issuing heavily liberalizing reforms including relaxing divorce laws, legalizing prostitution and (most infamously) resisting the criminalization of LSD until the CPP-PLP coalition government led by Paul Laxalt finally managed to ban it in 1973. Both of these parties managed spells in government, the CPP being in power from 1954-62 and 1982-90 and the PLP from 1966-70, while the SLP retook power in 1962-66 and 1974-82 and the CPP and PLP formed a (very fractious) grand coalition from 1970-74.

The 1990 election, however, saw this system come crashing down, as the CPP government of Bob List had become resoundingly unpopular for its support of a nuclear waste repository and the unconstitutional creation of an unpopulated county in the middle of the desert to be used as its location, in addition to a recession in the state. The CPP was almost completely wiped out, and since 1990 it has not won so much as 10 seats in the Platan House of Representatives and never won representation in the Senate again. As a result, the SLP (which had adamantly opposed the nuclear waste dumping and, since the 1960s and 70s had come around to the tourist boom in Reno) took power, and the PLP renamed itself the Libertarian Party, sort of fusing its social liberalism with the neoliberalism of the CPP to soak up its voters having avoided the fallout (pun unintended) from the scandals that had befallen its rival.

Since 1994, the SLP and Libertarians have alternated in power, the Libertarians taking power from 1998-2006, the SLP winning it back from 2006-2010 and then the Libertarians winning control again in the wake of the Great Recession in 2010. However, by 2018 the Libertarian government of Dean Heller had become highly unpopular; Heller faced aggressive criticism from SLP leader Catherine Cortez Mastro for being 'a total flip-flopper', with SLP campaigners distributing flip-flops with the Prime Minister's face on them as well as emphasizing speeches where he had supported a measure before adding a caption stating what he had actually voted to do to reinforce the image.

On top of this, minor parties were also starting to make an impact on Platan politics. The biggest of these by some margin was the Pirate Party, a technocratic and big-tent party which advocated for direct democracy, easier voter access to propositions and (highly unusual for a mainstream political party, although given Plata's past currency record, perhaps less so) the proliferation of cryptocurrencies, including giving out leaflets simply explaining systems like Bitcoin and their potential benefits. They mostly seemed to benefit from the decline in support for the Libertarians, and did excellently, coming only three seats and 4.2% behind the Libertarians.
The other one to gain seats in the House of Representatives was the Independent Platan Party (IPP), which ran to the right of the other four parties socially (unusual in the fairly libertarian Plata) and managed to hold a decent amount of appeal among older voters, ultimately winning 4 seats with 6.6% of the vote.
However, neither of these parties did much at all to stop the SLP winning back power, and it did so by a very comfortable majority in the popular vote and a fairly strong one in terms of House seats.

Something else to note is the nature of Plata's lower House, which like most Federation countries is where the Prime Minister sits and is the seat of most of the country's power. The 60 seats are elected by bloc vote and are not proportional like the Senate's seats, but give voters three votes to elect members of any party they wish, or one other option- the 'None Of These Candidates' vote. This is a system unique to Plata introduced for the 1974 election which allows voters to effectively choose not to vote for anyone, and if the option gets over 10% of the vote in a general election the election must be repeated the following year. However, this has rarely ever happened; the only occasion in which it did was in the 2002 election, although ironically the potential do-over for the SLP was squandered and the Libertarian government won re-election by a slightly bigger margin in 2003.

As of 2019, with the infighting in the Libertarians boiling over and the fledgling Pirates still trying to convince voters to support Bitcoin despite cryptocurrency being seen as confusing nonsense by most Platans, SLP supporters and the Cortez Mastro government appear to be fairly safe.

(Btw in case anyone's wondering, in TTL Reno has a similar reputation to Las Vegas while the latter is more like Phoenix or Denver, and many politicians who in OTL were born in Clark County are from Washoe County in TTL.)
 
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I personally apologise for the delay on my part in getting those up. It's entirely my fault not MC's, and I let this fall by the wayside. Anyway, here is Part 61. Arkansas!

The Seventh Party System: Part LXI
Map of the United States
Part I - Metropotamia
Part II - Alta California
Part III - North Carolina
Part IV - New Jersey
Part V - Adams
Part VI - Alabama
Part VII - Rhode Island
Part VIII - Sequoyah
Part IX - Assenisipia
Part X - East Florida
Part XI - Tennessee
Part XII - Kansas
Part XIII - Dakota
Part XIV - Arizona
Part XV - Delaware
Part XVI - Oregon
Part XVII - Ozark
Part XVIII - New Hampshire
Part XIX - Western Connecticut
Part XX - New York
Part XXI - Santo Domingo
Part XXII - South Carolina
Part XXIII - Baja California
Part XXIV - Chersonesus
Part XXV - Canal Zone Territory
Part XXVI - West Florida
Part XXVII - Missouri
Part XXVIII - Colorado
Part XXIX - Trinidad and Tobago
Part XXX - Pennsylvania
Part XXXI - Wisconsin
Part XXXII - Lincoln
Part XXXIII - Deseret
Part XXXIV - Platte
Part XXXV - Kiribati
Part XXXVI - New Mexico
Part XXXVII - Maine
Part XXXVIII - Alaska
Part XXXIX - Hamilton
Part XXXX - Mississippi
Part XXXXI - North Virginia
Part XXXXII - Bioko
Part XXXXIII - Hawaii
Part XXXXIV - Louisiana
Part XXXXV - Seward
Part XXXXVI - Illinoia
Part XXXXVII - Georgia
Part XXXXVIII - Columbia
Part XXXXIX - Maryland
Part L - Texas
Part LI - District of Columbia
Part LII - Vermont
Part LIII - Yazoo
Part LIV - Jefferson
Part LV - Virgin Islands
Part LVI - Washington
Part LVII - Puerto Rico
Part LVIII - Kentucky
Part LIX - Massachusetts
Part LX - South Virginia


Labor Coalition
Republicans
Democrats and Social Credit
Hispanos Unidos and Allies

Political Positions of State Governments

====

Original DeviantArt Post Here

The state of Arkansas is the further north of the Deep South states but that does not mean that it is any different than the rest of the Deep Democratic South. In fact, the state of Arkansas is so Democratic that similar to West Florida it is often intra-party disputes that dominates the state's politics.

One key element that has enabled the Democratic Party of Arkansas to become so dominant is the Pact of Christ faction, which preaches for Christian theocracy above all else and is one of the few Democratic factions to be tolerant of African-Americans. While the Black Baptist Bloc remains a the majority party for African-Americans in the state, the Democratic party has managed to siphon enough votes from the BBB to enable them to win several seats in the state's Black Belt, which when combined with the fact that only 15.4% of the state's population is black in the first place has left the Democrats by far the most dominant party in the state.

In this year's 2018 election, the Democrats once again managed to secure two-thirds majority in the state house, allowing the party total control over the state's constitution. However unlike in 2016, the party did lose a few seats to Labor and the Constitution party, leaving the Pact of Christ with less than an absolute majority, meaning that for this legislative session they will have to do deals with the other factions of the Democratic party to get their bills passed. But besides that one minor inconvenience the 2018 election in Arkansas seems to have been a quiet one that has allowed the Pact of Christ to continue their decades long rule over the bear state.

Government:
Democrats - The party of the South, similar to the state of West Florida the Arkansas Democratic party has complete domination of legislature, allowing for intra-party disputes to rise to the surface.
  • Pact of Christ are the long time dominant faction in Arkansas, a state that has always been the homebase for their movement ever since Bill Huckabee became governor in 1983. They preach for a removal of the separation of Church and State, believing God to be the only lawful sovereign on Earth. However unlike their Constitution brethen they also believe strongly in the necessity of a limited social safety net, as well as the legitimacy of African-Americans to live as equal citizens which is something the white nationalist faction of Constitution despises.
  • Wallacites are the second largest faction of the Arkansas Democrats, forming the orthodox faction of the party. While holding socially conservative values on religion they do not go as far as the Pact of Christ and wish to keep a thin boundary between Church and State. The real difference between the Pact of Christ and Wallacites though is that race relations, with the Pact of Christ believing all God fearing Protestants to be holy citizens while the Wallacites continue to believe that some form of defacto segregation remains necessary to this day. As such, they are able to win a few of the crucial Democratic County Chairmanships in rural ultra-white areas but have been unable to expand their party into the state's urban region nor its Black Belt.
  • Contract Concord is the furthest right wing faction of the Arkansas Democratic party, representing the interests of fiscal conservatives. While they are not as socially conservative as the Pact of Christ they make up for it with their zealous lust for privatization, going against the Democratic orthodoxy and calling for the liquidation of Social Security. The party also upholds the Wallacite line on civil rights and is thus one of the most antagonist factions of the party towards the Pact of Christ.
  • Longites are the smallest represented faction of the Arkansas Democratic party, standing up for the issues of the poorest in white society. The preach the ideal of making "every man a King" and wish for nothing more than the complete destruction of rich corporations for the benefit of the poor whiteman. On non-economic issues however they continue to uphold the Wallacite line and thus hold no influence of Arkansas' poor black population, which remains the dominion of Labor and the Black Baptist Bloc.
Opposition:
Labor - Unlike in most Deep Southern states Labor in Arkansas is actually the main opposition party, due to the state's small black population as well as all the African-Americans absorbed by the Pact of Christ. The party is mostly a white man's party, however it also has a fair number of blacks and other ethnic minorities, especially in the cities.
Constitution - The party of the Christian Right, they stand for theocracy and free markets and will stop at nothing to try and achieve their vision of Christian capitalism. A growing force in Arkansas, as in the rest of the South, they are being to pose a threat to the Pact of Christ's power, leading many Baptist sermons linked to the Pact of Christ to start pumping out anti-Constitution propaganda like there's no tomorrow.
Black Baptist Bloc - The party of conservative and centrist African Americans, they are a small minority due to the Pact of Christ snatching up most of their more conservative voters. Nevertheless they have managed to hold a nice center ground among rural blacks who remain disappointed in how the rest of the Democratic party often forces the Pact of Christ to divert funds from black areas to white ones.

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Credit for the base map goes to Chicxulub.
Update produced by MoralisticCommunist and posted here with permission
 
What if Ronald Reagan didn't run for President in 1980?


genusmap.php


George H.W Bush (R-TX)/Phil Crane (R-IL) 455 electoral votes, 54.5% popular vote
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter (D-GA)/Walter F. Mondale (D-MN) 83 electoral votes, 43.9% popular vote
 
For the first time in my American Federation TL, here's a map based on a historical vote rather than the most recent one in a country.

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The Republic of Louisiane is a highly unusual country in a multitude of ways, but three of these stand out most of all. The first is that it is one of the few Southern states that has not historically been a stronghold of a Democratic Party affiliate, instead being generally governed by the economically left-wing and fairly socially conservative Share The Wealth Party (SWP). The second is that it is one of only three AF member states (the others being the Californias and Dakota) to be officially bilingual, with its second language being French in recognition of its origins as a French colony and the large Cajun population, many of whom are Francophone. And the third, and most relevant to this map in particular, is that Louisiane is the only country in the AF that has attempted to withdraw from the Federation.

Even now, nearly 30 years on, the 1991 Louisiane independence referendum remains one of the most important moments in the modern history not only of the Republic, but of the entire Federation. Ever since then-Prime Minister Edwin Edwards, long known as one of the most influential figures in the Democratic Party and as the man who shocked the nation by unseating long-time PM Russell Long in the 1975 election, had produced the Cajun Citizenship Act in 1976, Cajun identity had led to both an upswing in tourism to the Acadiana region and a resurgence in Cajun nationalism. However, this had come with a sizeable amount of tension between Cajun residents enjoying the opportunity to have their ancestry recognized and black Louisianens whose right to vote had only been granted some 5 years prior as a result of the Russell Long government's Voting Rights Act 1970.

On top of this, once the economy started to turn sour in the late 70s and early 80s and both the SWP government of Edgar 'Sonny' Moulton Jr., a vocal Cajun, from 1983-87 and the second Edwards government that replaced it helped foster Cajun nationalism by campaigning heavily in Acadiana, a region that was politically fairly evenly divided between SWP and Democratic voters. This led to sizeable amounts of conflict between Cajuns, blacks and English-speaking whites (most of whom lived in the north), with cities where many residents of each lived like New Orleans experiencing rioting during the summer of 1989, triggered by allegations of police brutality in the nation's biggest city.

In order to try and resolve this tension, Edwards announced that in 1991 Louisiane would hold a binding referendum on its membership of the AF, in part to distract from personal disapproval of his leadership and the scandals he had faced by drawing support from what many considered his greatest accomplishment and partly because the AF had become something of a sticking point for Louisianens who were cynical of the benefits of the forthcoming trade deal NAFTA to the country, as they felt it would detract from tourism and hurt the state's export economy and wanted to try and leave it or at least secure an opt-out, something the AF's chief executive had refused repeatedly.

Not surprisingly, this idea split Louisianens heavily. The divide was described by some from outside the country as not really being so much a left-right divide as an ethnic one; blacks were certain to be No voters (especially because many of them feared an independent Louisiane might renege on the Voting Rights Act under a Democratic or otherwise conservative administration without the AF to keep civil rights in place under its Twenty-Seventh Amendment protecting people's rights regardless of gender or race), Cajuns were guaranteed to vote Oui, but it was unclear how white voters would go.

In the campaign, Democrats generally supported a Oui vote, while the SWP pushed for a No vote (generally the 'yes' side was known as Oui, while the 'no' side was No); the two biggest minor parties, the Parti Cajun (PC) and Black Panthers, a centrist Acadiana party and far-left black-oriented party, both supported Oui at first, the latter doing so more in hopes of promoting a more left-wing policy under an independent Louisiane, while the Ecology Party favored a No vote. The polls remained close for much of the campaign, mostly due to white ambivalence about which way to vote, but the week before the election, something very interesting happened.

On the 1st October 1991, a week before polling day, the head of the white nationalist group Louisiane Blanc, David Duke, declared his support for the Oui campaign. This immediately led to serious bad publicity for the Oui side; Edwards withdrew his support for it, the Parti Cajun disavowed Duke aggressively, and the Black Panthers switched to No to ensure Duke's vision of an independent Louisiane could be stifled. A poll on the 2nd October found that on average, the projected result had plummeted from 52-48 Oui to 57-43 No. But then, on the 4th October, Duke was assassinated while out campaigning in Lafayette by a black resident. Immediately, the referendum became competitive again, although the changes in support stayed the same; with Duke gone, voter fears of a fascist Louisiane went too, although black Louisianens remained unenthused about the idea of an independent country without rights protections in place.

Overall, No still won, but by a fairly tight margin. Oui votes were greatest in Arcadiana, of course, but voters in a few northern counties also supported Oui because of opposition to the implications of NAFTA. Of the state's major cities, only the Arcadianan cities of Lafayette and Lake Charles voted Oui, and the rest were heavily No, as was much of northern Louisiana where rural voters were more jealous of Cajuns than worried about NAFTA.

It is perhaps unsurprising that, in the aftermath of the traumatic referendum, Edwards' government prepared for defeat. A year later, the SWP would win the 1992 election, and Cleo Fields, the first black PM of Louisiane, would succeed him. However, voters hoping the Fields premiership would be less dramatic than Edwards' final term would be sorely disappointed.
 
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