AH Challenge: 3 Major American Political Parties

Your mission is to find a POD after FDR dies that will leave America with 3 major parties: Republicans, Democrats, and something else. By major, I mean it has won a presidential election by 2009.
 
The Dixiecrats did quite well back then. Although they'll never win an election they could have something of a Lib Dem role.

Btw Polandwank update soon :D
 

wormyguy

Banned
Ross Perot was actually leading in the polls in 1992 before he did his weird thing where he dropped out then dropped back in again. Get rid of that, and you might see a president from the Reform Party, henceforth a powerful force in American politics.
 
American 3rd parties tend to be either single issue (ie the Dixiecrats) or revolve around a single candidate (ie Perot with Reform, Nader with the Greens, Debs with the Socialists, Wallace with the AIP, or the Progressives with LaFollette).

The Progressives and Socialists, had they been able to merge, and had the Socialists been able to avoid being tarred with the "Godless" brush, might have had staying power as a 3rd party in the plains states and among rural workers, miners, and the like, sort of like the Canadian NDP.
 
If we could stretch the POD a bit, we might see another third party attempt soon. I have a feeling that another third party will pop up during the 2012 elections. The GOP will likely de-emphasize its "family values", anti-abortion plank in favor of combatting Obama's expansive spending programs. The GOP will essentially revert to its pre-Moral Majority fiscal conservatism. The "values voters" will be locked out, since they can't vote Dem and have been relying on the GOP to deliver pro-life supreme court justices and pass incremental legislation against abortion. Expect something like a "Values Conservative Party" which would in essence be a coalition of conservative Christian groups under a fundamentalist type who can talk secular (Huckabee?). This group would caucus with the GOP on fiscal conservatism but break ranks if the GOP renegs on its social conservative policy.

This situation has one major downfall. Let's say that the GOP candidate is weak overall, and Obama wins again in 2012 (not unlikely, iff he delivers on healthcare and jobs). The VCP candidate gets something like 10% of the vote, perhaps enough to be a GOP spoiler. But if enough voters vote VCP and GOP to create a pseudo-coalition in the Senate, expect some gridlock if the Dems need extra votes to pass bills through. People may feel that voting VCP backs up their social conservative views, but that move might create even more aggravation in Congress.
 
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