AHC: Have a president change parties after their presidency

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
Bernie Sanders sounds like the obvious candidate.
After one term as a democrat he goes back to whatever he was before.
 
It's 1992, and Gary Hart, who avoided getting his affair with Donna Rice leaked, is President after having defeated Vice President Bush. The economy is souring, rumblings about Hart's personal life start to make rounds in the news circuit, and Lowell Weicker has clinched the Republican nomination by being the only moderate in a very large conservative field.

Election Day comes around, and Weicker beats Hart, who's more concerned with suppressing the knowledge of his affair than bolstering the economy.

Two years into his presidency, Lowell Weicker is dealing with attacks from the right more than the left. Newt Gingirch is challenging his agenda at every turn, and there's rumors that he might run against the President in '96. Knowing full well he'd never survive a primary against Mr. Republican, Weicker decides to go independent.

In 1996, Weicker's leading in the polls. Newt Gingirch and Jerry Brown are viewed as too conservative and too liberal respectively, and things have been good under Weicker. He wins re-election as an Independent candidate, but with the GOP firmly against him, President Weicker has been mulling over caucusing with the Democrats.
 
But might the very fact that Byrnes becomes POTUS in this scenario, if not prevent entirely, at least substantially delay the national Democratic Party's embrace of the Civil Rights movement? Come 1948, one can easily imagine more progressives supporting Henry Wallace and the GOP winning the African-American vote again.

But in that event Byrnes will most likely lose, and the Democrats will move leftward--"a southern conservative led us to disaster," etc. Actually, I am not even sure Byrnes will be nominated (I don't say "renominated" because he had never been nominated for president) in 1948, so clear will his electoral liabilities be.
 
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