Sadly, I missed the poll; in any case I likely would've went for the radical option.
So it might well have ended 10-10... I can absolutely see why, for I wasn't sure at all which path I should let Germany take, which was why I started the poll in the first place.
With the imperial monarchy surviving, and all the other Land monarchies surviving, ISTM that the Saxon and Bavarian monarchies will be restored as soon as things quiet down. I don't know much about the federal structure of Imperial Germany. Did the Lander have their own constitutions, like US states?
Yes, they did. And they all need to be overhauled now, for with or without the USPD, with or without the threat of revolution, the three-, four-, five- or even eight-class suffrage many of them contained cannot be upheld in 1918, neither IOTL nor ITTL. One big question here is Prussia - Willy2 being the erratic person that he was, when he leaped back into action and into his "Volkskaiser" role in TTL's second half of 1918, has octroyed a new constitution with universal instead of census suffrage for Prussia already. How the pro-parliamentary parties are ultimately going to deal with this is just as interesting as the question of how they deal with the unreformed states and how they deal with the revolutionary states. I'll comment on that in the update I'll be posting later today (or, at the latest, tomorrow).
In the US, states are politically autonomous, with Federal intervention only when there is a "civil rights" issue. (Which has become far too common in recent years, but still limited.) There is however a flat guarantee in the Constitution that the Federal government will insure "republican government" in each state.
There was no such clause in the 1871 constitution. There was "imperial execution", which was meant to apply only when Länder did not oblige with their administrative obligations, though - but this could be taken to mean "maintain law and order", so the right-wing parties in TTL's Reichstag (it has not been dissolved in contrast to OTL, which makes a lot of differences, for one thing probably there won't be the near-complete reshuffling of the party landscape of OTL where FKP, DKP, NLP and FVP were replaced by DNVP, DVP and DDP) are certainly clamouring for an imperial execution against Bremen, Saxony and Bavaria. The problem with this is not so much that the SPD-led imperial government would be opposed to it (they are hesitant, yes), but that there are few reliable forces to base such a crackdown on. Any military unit you're ordering to march to Leipzig to shoot revolutionary workers may just as well turn around and shoot you instead, in the given atmosphere. Or it may not. Ebert has not yet felt compelled to take the risk. Now this is how imperial authority erodes even further, of course, and the imperial level (both the government and the Reichstag majority, for we have already heard a little about what Willy2 has done) is hotly debating how to handle this problem. The next update will clarify some of that hopefully.
Now back to the constitution. There was no "monarchy clause" in the 1871 constitution to correspond with the "republican government" clause in the US constitution, but beside imperial execution, there was also the
Bundesrat. In constitutional theory, this would have to be the body where such questions should have been taken to and resolved - but in the Bundesrat, you now have lots of princely governments at the verge of being overthrown plus the revolutionary governments, and I don't see them coming to terms with each other directly, and the whole 1871 constitution has been declared near-obsolete anyway when Willy2 and Ebert have announced elections for a national assembly to draft a new constitution.
A "revolution" in a state would almost certainly provoke federal intervention, even in 1920.
In 1914 Germany, and maybe even in 1917 Germany, this would have been the case, too. Right now, though, the state monopoly of power is in a state of limbo. It can't go on like this for a long time, that's for sure, you're right.
In OTL, republican sentiment swept all Germany, starting at the top. ITTL it hasn't, and I don't see how Germany can go on, half monarchical and half republican (more like 75%/25%).
IOTL, it started in Bavaria, but the rest came very soon, yes. Here, it doesn't. The difference hinges on the behaviour of the MSPD. Had the MSPD decided to go for a revolution, the revolutionary wave would have been as big as IOTL if not bigger (if that is even possible). ITTL, they decided against it. Their OTL decision had a lot to do with fears of Bolshevism, not just among the bourgeoisie, but also deep within the MSPD, where anti-Bolshevik propaganda and eye-witness accounts from their Menshevik comrades mingled to create a deterring political spectre. Better to lead the revolution rather than to suffer the fate of the Russian Mensheviks and be subjected to a Red Terror like the one which haunted Soviet Russia already in the summer of 1918. ITTL, this spectre is non-existent. While bourgeois propaganda is still certain to paint revolutionary Russia in the vilest colours, TTL's VeCheKa crackdowns do not compare to OTL, they have not created an atmosphere of widespread terror and violence, and they do not target other Social Democrats (except perhaps for a few Bolshevik cells if they're joining the anarchists in sabotaging the war machinery), so the MSPD is not exactly very afraid of a "Russian situation", although most of them are culturally and politically hard-wired to prefer smoother reforms over the Russian path. Which is why the MSPD is staying on the establishment's side - but this not only means the "establishment" is more resilient and powerful, but also more heterogeneous. It's not just some small conservative elites whose way of life has deconstructed itself. It still looks like a viable path onwards, or rather: like a dozen of possibly viable paths onwards. All of which imply some sort of reform. But which?
On the other hand, there is all the anger and frustration, famine, disease and misery, all the demobilising soldiers returning, and the mood among the working classes is certainly not one of great patience. The picture looks slightly different in each city, each little state, each region, but on the whole, the country is really torn between the sentiment of "away with the old warmongers who have brought us this misery!" and that of "but no chaos now, with the Entente and the Polish rebels and who knows who else coming all over us!". OTL's November Revolution with its fast-growing MSPD-orchestration combined both: away with the old, and maintain order fast. This option is not on the table ITTL, making the situation a lot more complicated and confused.
For one thing, if the "Free States" repudiate the authority of the Empire, that's explicit rebellion. If they accept it, that's giving up the Revolution. Bremen is key, because allegiance to the Empire is the big change there. (Though again, the question of the extent of the constitutional autonomy of each Free City arises. Did they choose their own internal political arrangements?)
The extent to which the authority of the empire is explicitly repudiated is certainly debated, particularly in Bavaria, where there were secessionist thoughts IOTL, too. They are stronger ITTL. Saonxy and Bremen, being smaller and in a much more precarious position, probably don't see that option for themselves. Why would Bremen be key, they were a Free City under the 1871 constitution as well? Their situation is very much the same as that of Saxony and Bavaria right now. The differenc between Bremen on the one hand and Saxony and Bavaria on the other hand is that the Bremen rebels are a lot more radical and the USPD does not have a leading role there, while they do in Saxony and Bavaria, whose Free State governments lean a lot more moderate. Bremen's red revolutionaries are discussing things like forced requisitions of the bourgeoisie's alleged food stocks, for example - that's not something Eisner or Lipinski would even contemplate.