Having seen that the Chief of Staff in Madam Secretary (a slightly crappy drama about a American Secretary of State and later Vice President) also turned up in The West Wing as part of Walken's team I decided to rationalise the two as being set in the same universe. For some reason the West Wing has Bartlet's term start in 1999, so I move down it back two years to 1997 to sort out the timeline. With little said about the previous administration in MS I decided to give Santos the full two years with Bartlet's former Secretary of State (and first choice for VP) as Vice President. Since the Republican Party of the West Wing seems much more moderate than the one IOTL, and because the Dalton administration seems like a neocon grouping run entirely by former Intelligence Officials, I made them Republicans... it's definitely a mess, and that's without even doing the defeated candidates which I may add later...