1936 Election: Best Republican Candidate

The 1936 election is one of the most devastating landslides in the history of presidential elections. And in terms of the electoral vote, the biggest landslide at 523 Roosevelt, 8 Landon. Of course, Alf Landon was an unexciting candidate. It's unlikely the Republicans could ever win with a better candidate, or even that a landslide of some proportion wouldn't happen. But of the GOP, who do you think would've performed the best against FDR if they were made the nominee instead of Landon? Note that with this, I am factoring this entirely on the Republican candidate, and not detracting from the incumbent president. Huey Long may survive in this timeline, however at most he can have a third party effort. FDR is still the Democratic nominee. Be realistic with this, which is why it's the candidate who'd perform the best against FDR, not the candidate who can beat him. Bonus points if you don't include Long. Gold star if you actually make a realistic case for the Republican candidate beating FDR
 
Alf Landon was the best candidate for the Republicans in 1936 as he was only one of the few Republicans to win in the 1934 midterms, he was a progressive moderate Governor from the Midwest with a good record in helping Kansas come back from the worst of the Depression.
His main problem was that FDR was able to pass Social Security and unemployment insurance that were very popular with the American people, also what hurt was Landon was generally supportive of the New Deal but it was the conservative wing of the Republican Party that was in charge of messaging they were vehemently against the New Deal that it stepped all over what Gov. Landon was saying.
 
I'd say Borah would be marginally better than Landon, but would still lose decisively. A post of mine from a few months ago:

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Borah would lose almost as badly as Landon, but I wonder if there would even be a Lemke third party candidacy? Father Coughlin and Borah got along well; in particular they cooperated in defeating US membership in the World Court. And Borah in OTL actually spoke at a Lemke campaign rally in October 1936: https://www.nytimes.com/1936/10/12/...king-in-place-of-gerald-smith-he-praises.html

I do think it would be a little bit harder to portray Borah as a tool of the "economic royalists" than Landon. Yes, Landon had a progressive background--he had been a Bull Mooser in 1912--but in 1936 a lot of his support came from conservatives who tried to portray him as a "Kansas Coolidge" who had succeeded in balancing the Kansas budget. (The "Kansas Coolidge" characterization was disliked by Landon himself and was undoubtedly misleading, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has acknowledged. https://books.google.com/books?id=88OMakRtI0EC&pg=PT548) Borah tried to contrast himself with other Republicans by denouncing "'The high place in the counsels of the party which corporate and monopolistic interests have long occupied,'...(mentioning oil in particular — a presumed slap at Landon)." https://books.google.com/books?id=vC5HJloBWugC&pg=PA540

Allan J. Lichtman's summary of Borah's campaign is interesting:

"Front-runner Landon was the lone Republican governor to have won re-election in 1934. He had roots in the party's progressive past, but the right found him sufficiently pliable for their purposes. His lack of national experience and stature might have mattered in a year of bright party prospects, but not in 1936. With Vandenberg looking to 1940 and Knox fading, the seventy-year-old progressive senator William Borah of Idaho emerged as Landon's main rival.

"Borah's backers included progressives mingled with a few conservatives, led by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett. The publisher touted Borah as the only Republican with a chance to beat President Roosevelt. For Gannett, any Republican was preferable to FDR, whose policies "might be called Fascism, Nazism, or Communism. It all amounts to the same thing." The president's "castigation of the Liberty League and the big interests,. Gannett told Borah, "makes it pretty difficult for the Republicans to consider a candidate representative of that class... You are the only candidate in the field who is immune to this attack." Borah's backers argued that "the main issue in the next Presidential Campaign will undoubtedly revolve around the Supreme Court." They warned that if the Court were "packed by the present Executive ... socialism would be wrapped around our neck for 25 years." The conservatives behind Borah admired his social and cultural views and believed his opposition to concentrated power would incline him to appoint Supreme Court justices skeptical of bureaucratic expansion. But Borah refused to repudiate his support for tariff reduction, generous aid to the needy, the dissolution of corporate monopolies, and other progressive policies that alienated most of the GOP's economic conservatives. in a letter to Frank Gannett, he wrote, "The price [demanded by economic conservatives] is entirely too high for their support or even the presidency.... I am not buying the Presidency, Gannett, by surrendering my convictions upon public questions." Borah kept his integrity and Landon won the presidential nomination." https://books.google.com/books?id=3q92ePfQDloC&pg=PA87

On the Supreme Court issue, one should note that Borah had joined Norris and La Follette in opposing Hoover's nomination of Hughes to the Court, arguing that Hughes' confirmation would result in "great economic oppression to the people of the United States." https://books.google.com/books?id=sPBnA3fpPI4C&pg=PA179

All in all, I would say Borah would do marginally better than Landon. But FDR would still easily win. (He might even do a little bit better with the African American vote than he did in OTL, Borah being notorious as an ally of the South on racial matters.)
 
Real GDP grew 13.1 percent in 1936! It's pretty hard to defeat an incumbent president--or even make it a close race--in that kind of year, especially when people remember how the country was faring under the other party four years earlier. And part of that growth, ironically, came from a bill which (1) FDR actually vetoed, and (2) was in part the product of his administration's disastrous handling of the September 1935 Florida hurricane: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...it-actually-helped-him-get-re-elected.391174/
 
Option 1:
He was pretty old, but I wonder how John Pershing would have done - maybe make Landon the VP and give him a voice on how he moderately supports the New Deal, but Pershing is running because the nation is going to need to build up some because of the threat of war.

Have the Panay incident happen a year early, just in time to wake a few people up.

Have Pershing explain it's not about offense but about defense.

He gets to tout the fact he's got sound economics with Landon - becasue he supports the New Deal - and can help rebuild the American economy more with some defense contracts for companies.

Yeah, probably not much help, but he might pick up a few borderline states and get, oh, I don't know, a couple dozen electoral votes.


Option 2: Babe Ruth becomes involved in politics for some reason. The GOP rconvinces him to run, on the basis that "ever year he was in office, I had a better year than Hoover had." (An actual quote from Ruth in 1930) Again, Landon as VP to show he has a good team around him, but unlike Pershing, the still-isolationist America gets to vote for a candidate who wants to treat everyone nice and just go on having a good time.

If the GOP can convince people Ruth is a viable candidate, and that he has a plan in place to just keep higns improving, he might win 1-2 more states than Landon.

Of course, maybe another former pro athlete is better; I'm just not sure who. Ty Cobb might take some of the Southern vote away, but that wouldn't help enough, I don't think.
 
Not the slightest chance of Pershing. First of all, in 1936, a 76 year old candidate for president was extremely unlikely; no president had reached the age of 70 even at the end of his presidential service until Eisenhower in 1960. Moreover, Pershing's political weaknesses were evident even in 1920:

"But in mid-April, a nationwide poll by the Literary Digest, showed Pershing running a distant ninth in a field of 14 potential Republican candidates. Perhaps even more discouraging, the top spot in the poll was held by another Army hero: Major General Leonard Wood. A medical doctor by training, Wood had made his name in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where Teddy Roosevelt, the former Republican president, had served under him. Though Pershing’s accomplishments were more recent, and he might have seemed like the fresher candidate, he and Wood were about the same age; in fact, Wood was born a month earlier.

"Part of the reason for Pershing’s poor showing in the polls, some commentators explained, was that as a firm, by-the-book general often described as “unsmiling,” he was respected but far from loved by what might have been his natural constituency: his former troops. They and their families would be making up a substantial chunk of the electorate that November.

"A writer for Munsey’s Magazine, a widely read periodical of the day, tried to put it diplomatically. “He has much of the glamour that surrounds a victorious general, he unquestionably possesses high ability, and physically he is a hard muscled veteran of fifty-eight,” the writer noted, starting on the positive side. However, he added, “if what the returning soldiers… say is true, General Pershing is not to the American Expeditionary Forces exactly what Grant was to the Union Army. The admiration is there, but not the measure of affection which the Northern soldiers gave to Grant.”" https://www.history.com/news/john-j-pershing-presidential-campaign-world-war-i

And in any event, in 1936 the last thing voters wanted to be reminded of was the Great War.

As for Ruth, first of all he was a Catholic which only eight years after Al Smith's landslide defeat would have been disqualification rnough, and second athletes (like actors) who want to go into politics do not start with the presidency if they want to be taken seriously. (Sure, businessmen with no experience in public office have been nominated but that is different--many voters see the government as analogous to a business, and anyway both Willkie and Trump had been outspoken on political issues for years or decades before their presidential candidacies.)
 
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