AHC: The US has double it's current OTL population

Can this be achieved?

If this is possible, then how would a US with such a larger population be different from ours?

How economically dominant would it be?
 
A lot depends on whether the GNP is also double OTL or not. If it isn't, so there's a big underclass, there could be problems.
 
That's 650 million people total. So basically you're looking at a rabidly expansionist US that conquers and absorbs all of Canada and Mexico and encourages mass emigration from the rest of the world.
 
Expansionist is fine, but nothing beyond Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.

An implausible North American super union would be about 500 million people. So, we'd probably need some kind of catastrophic mass migration event from another continent to get the US past 650 million with a POD after 1900.
 
Would delaying the demographic transition work? I found a good chart on the net...

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...and it looks like it might be doable without much additional territory if you can keep the USA in Stage 2 and 3 for much longer - you basically need to stop the US from industrializing (or at least slow down the general timetable of industrialization) so that large families are still required for things like small industry and farming, yet improved medical care allows the death rate to go into serious decline, which lets the population just keep on climbing. How you can delay American industrialization is the real problem in that case, as all the geographical ingredients are there. Possibly something along the lines of, say, a worse American Civil War that degenerates into bushfire/insurgency status later on, basically a simmering conflict? Something like that could cause attacks on railways and mines and make the wealthy reluctant to invest in the USA, which would slow down industrialization, which means the USA stays in the earlier half of the demographic transition for longer which will result in a higher population later on. Combine that with something like, say, a later invention of vulcanized rubber (slowing down the arrival of the cheap condom) and you have something that seems like it could be part of the solution, if not the solution in itself.

Hmmm...perhaps some kind of American Luddite movement forms before the Civil War, which gets the backing of the Southern planter class (as machines would be fighting against slavery's economic value) with renewed conflict with Britain causing people to associate machinery and the processes of industrialization with European powers and European tyranny, possibly with a religious aspect towards it as well, causing a popular resentment towards the processes of industrialization...which, looking back from the cosy modern world, weren't exactly that nice in the first place, what with the mangled children coming out of textile mills and the like. That would slow it down (it wouldn't stop it, because obviously someone is going to come along eventually, smoke a cigarette and ask "what the fuck are we doing" and shuts it down), which could result in a a fair number of extra people joining the United States. Probably borderline ASB, but a thought all the same.

I don't see you doing this without a PoD pre-1900, though. By that point the USA was already well into the demographic transition and the birthrate was starting to drop. You need that rate to stay as high as possible for as long as possible if you are to hit your goal.
 
An implausible North American super union would be about 500 million people. So, we'd probably need some kind of catastrophic mass migration event from another continent to get the US past 650 million with a POD after 1900.
Nuclear war between China and Russia?
 
US annexes all of North America and Cuba, earlier industry and massive urbanization, and immigration policy buckles down to “fuck it - let them all in.”
 
US successfully overruns Canada during the Revolutionary war and manages to keep it in the peace. War of 1812 butterflied away. US takes more of Mexico during Mexican-American war, does a buyout instead of a war for the Civil War (like the British did) and keeps Cuba etc long term from the Spanish American War. New Englanders keep their hardcore Puritan days birthrate a generation or so longer than OTL.
 
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