AHC. Keep the Whigs Around as a Third Party

Gaius Julius Magnus

Gone Fishin'
The challenge is to have the U.S. Whig Party survive the pre-Civil War era collapse it did OTL but be a third party with the Republicans and Democrats still being the two major parties. Similar to the Liberals during the 20th Century in Great Britain being the third party below the Conservatives and Labour.
 
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Saphroneth

Banned
The reason this is tricky is that the Liberals were able to be "Constituency MPs" - that is, people voted for a Liberal who was the representative of their area, which usually meant about 30,000 people voted for him or her.
Not only is this considerably harder in the US, where constituencies are larger - people vote for three positions (House, Senate, President) and the larger two of these are not third party compatible in the slightest.
 
Is there perhaps any way to get them to be a mostly states party with a lot of representation at the state legislature/general assembly but only a smaller number of national representatives? That's the only way I can see anything vaguely resembling the Liberal Democrats happening.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
If the Union fails to reunite the country during the Civil War, we might see the Republicans split between the Radical and Moderate factions, with the Moderate Republicans taking up the old Whig name along with much of its ideology.
 
What would be the point of reviving the Whigs after the ACW? The Republicans had taken over their economic program. The leading thing that made conservative northern Whigs reluctant to join the Republicans before the war was the fear that a "sectional" party would bring about disunion and possibly a civil war--but now that the war had already taken place, that was moot. [1]

Some southern Old Whigs did talk about reviving the party, but ultimately felt that they had to join the Democrats to ensure white supremacy. The race issue turned out to be fatal to any attempt to form a third party in the South, as the Populists would later learn.

[1] Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts expressed the dilemma of such conservatives best:

"But what can be done by a man who feels as I do? I voted against the Fugitive Bill, but I can never go for defeating the execution of it by forcible resistance, or by unconstitutional legislation. I deplore the passage of the Nebraska Act, but I honestly believe that Northern rashness and violence have been the main instruments in accomplishing its worst results. I am for resisting the aggressions of slavery, but I cannot unite in taking the first great step for rending the Union by the formation of a sectional party." https://books.google.com/books?id=dh5CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA181
 
The Republican Party was pretty much a rebranding of the antislavery Northern branch of the Whig party, with the Southern branch surviving separately as the "Opposition Party" using something very much like the constituency MP model, merging with the Know-Nothings to form the Constitutional Union party in 1860, and then disappearing during the Civil War and its aftermath.

If you could somehow prevent the Civil War with a POD after the rise of the Republican Party, the Constitutional Union party could persist for some time, but they're probably doomed in the long run because of their lack of viability at the Presidential level, which hurts them with straight-ticket voters and largely cuts them off from federal patronage appointments.
 
When it came to the presidency the Whigs were like a sports team that makes it into the post-season and sometimes to the championship game but lost every time and never developed a winning dynasty.

In 1836 they couldn't gel their support behind one person and were split between four. They won in 1840 but the president died a month in office. They refused to nominate his successor in 1844, and when they won again in 1848 the president dies after a year an a half in office. In 1852 they again refused to nominate the incumbent successor. Personally I think they inspired the high POTUS turnover on 24.
 
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