AHC/WI: Teddy Roosevelt wins in 1912 on the Progressive ticket.

Much has been written about Teddy Roosevelt winning the Republican nomination in 1912, but is it possible to get him as president on the Progressive ticket? I imagine that this would require a different Democratic candidate and potentially a scandal. Is there any way this could be done? Secondly, what would be the effects of a third party president?
 
IMO even TR's showing in OTL was deceptively large because it was boosted by sympathy generated by the attempted assassination:

"By October, the Bull Moose party showed signs of following the traditional route of American third parties, of proving less potent in November than in August. Three weeks before the election, however, the party received a figurative and almost literal shot in the arm, when a would-be assassin wounded its candidate during a Milwaukee speech. Roosevelt, with his unfailing sense of the dramatic, finished the speech before going off for a two-week stay in the hospital. In an election already decided, his gallantry doubtless reaped a large sympathy vote. 'This shooting will help TR directly by stopping his talking,' assessed Brandeis. 'There seemed to be very strong evidence of an ebbing tide before.' In a probably exaggerated estimate, one Democrat suggesting that the assailant, 'instead of murdering the intrepid Teddy...shot about a million votes into him.'" David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era, p. 148

The only thing I can see is some terrible last-minute scandal involving Wilson or whoever is the Democratic nominee.
 
IMO even TR's showing in OTL was deceptively large because it was boosted by sympathy generated by the attempted assassination:

"By October, the Bull Moose party showed signs of following the traditional route of American third parties, of proving less potent in November than in August. Three weeks before the election, however, the party received a figurative and almost literal shot in the arm, when a would-be assassin wounded its candidate during a Milwaukee speech. Roosevelt, with his unfailing sense of the dramatic, finished the speech before going off for a two-week stay in the hospital. In an election already decided, his gallantry doubtless reaped a large sympathy vote. 'This shooting will help TR directly by stopping his talking,' assessed Brandeis. 'There seemed to be very strong evidence of an ebbing tide before.' In a probably exaggerated estimate, one Democrat suggesting that the assailant, 'instead of murdering the intrepid Teddy...shot about a million votes into him.'" David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era, p. 148

The only thing I can see is some terrible last-minute scandal involving Wilson or whoever is the Democratic nominee.

What if Wilson had his stroke before the election?
 
The only way TR could've done this would be if the Democrats also split and Progressives from both parties united under a Roosevelt candidacy with a Democratic VP. That was his original plan, but because the Dems had the 2/3 rule it was pretty much impossible for them not to nominate a consensus candidate with broad support from the party rank and file.
 
I think we'd need Champ Clark to be the Democratic nominee, with the Progressives making sure everybody knows he'll be a loyal servant of Tammany Hall.
 
I think we'd need Champ Clark to be the Democratic nominee, with the Progressives making sure everybody knows he'll be a loyal servant of Tammany Hall.

He could always deny it. And would the average voter outside NY give a hoot about Tammany?

If turnout is anything to go by - nearly 7% down from 1908 - most voters weren't especially excited by the political hooraw of 1912.


What if Wilson had his stroke before the election?

The DNC chooses another candidate. If it happens in the last few days of the campaign, the seriousness of Wilson's condition is hushed up until the votes are safely in.
 
He could always deny it. And would the average voter outside NY give a hoot about Tammany?

If turnout is anything to go by - nearly 7% down from 1908 - most voters weren't especially excited by the political hooraw of 1912.

One thing that makes me dubious about the notion that Clark would have been a much weaker nominee than Wilson is that Clark defeated Wilson decisively in a number of primaries, including Illinois, Massachusetts, and California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_1912

Bryan IMO raised Tammany as a phony issue against Clark. (Whether he did so in the hope of getting the nomination himself has been much debated but is irrelevant here.) Bryan's argument that anyone with Tammany backing could not be a real progressive is a bit hard to accept when you recall that he himself avidly courted Tammany in 1908. (During the campaign, he publicly thanked Boss Murphy for "your good work at Denver." https://www.google.com/search?biw=1...1.64.psy-ab..0.1.176...33i299k1.0.PHmj6NucQL0) Not to mention the famous incident in 1900 when Bryan, making a campaign speech in New York City, "impulsively held his hand over [Tammany boss Richard] Croker's head and intoned, 'Great is Tammany and Croker is its prophet.'" http://books.google.com/books?id=W1A6VZs1nNMC&pg=PA172

Tammany support would certainly not prevent Clark from getting the core Democratic vote in 1912, and that would be enough in November. He had a progressive record and would be running on a progressive platform. And after all even Alton B. Parker's 37.6 percent of 1904 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_United_States_presidential_election would probably be sufficient to win in 1912!
 
Tammany support would certainly not prevent Clark from getting the core Democratic vote in 1912, and that would be enough in November. He had a progressive record and would be running on a progressive platform. And after all even Alton B. Parker's 37.6 percent of 1904 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_United_States_presidential_election would probably be sufficient to win in 1912!


Also, Parker's massive defeat seems to have been largely due to Democratic abstention rather than defection.

His 1904 vote was some 1.3 million less than Bryan's in 1900. Yet TR's vote, when allowance is made for population change, was little greater than McKinley's had been. So it would appear that while Democrats, if sufficiently disenchanted with their nominee, might go fishing on election day, they were not prepared (save possibly in the far west) to switch their votes to a Republican - even one as Progressive as TR. So even had Clark's vote been smaller than Wilson's (which I agree is by no means inevitable) it is not clear that TR's would have been much increased.

My overall impression is that the Dems were in a "no lose" situation. Had they run a candidate more conservative than Wilson, they would have lost a few votes to Debs, and maybe to TR, but probably made up for this by gaining a few from Taft. Had they picked a more radical candidate (ie Bryan) the reverse would have happened. But in either case it would be essentially "swings and roundabouts", with both popular and electoral vote totals staying much as OTL.
 
Bryan IMO raised Tammany as a phony issue against Clark. (Whether he did so in the hope of getting the nomination himself has been much debated but is irrelevant here.) Bryan's argument that anyone with Tammany backing could not be a real progressive is a bit hard to accept when you recall that he himself avidly courted Tammany in 1908. (During the campaign, he publicly thanked Boss Murphy for "your good work at Denver." https://www.google.com/search?biw=1...1.64.psy-ab..0.1.176...33i299k1.0.PHmj6NucQL0) Not to mention the famous incident in 1900 when Bryan, making a campaign speech in New York City, "impulsively held his hand over [Tammany boss Richard] Croker's head and intoned, 'Great is Tammany and Croker is its prophet.'" http://books.google.com/books?id=W1A6VZs1nNMC&pg=PA172

What an unbelievable hypocrite Bryan was.
 
What an unbelievable hypocrite Bryan was.

I think that one thing that may have embittered Bryan about Tammany was his poor showing in New York City in 1908 (unusually for a Democrat he actually lost the city, which even he had carried in 1900). He began to suspect that Tammany had knifed him. (More likely it's just that Bryan as the personification of rural, evangelical values, was a poor fit for heavily Catholic big cities--he also lost Baltimore. Also, Taft was very popular among Catholics, having gotten along well with the Church as Governor-General of the Philippines.)
 
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