Challenge: Make LBJ POTUS Pre-1963

Exactly what it says. Make Lyndon Baines Johnson the President without using the historical case. I'll add my own arguments once several posts have been made.
 
Stevenson picks LBJ in 1956, they lose in a landslide to Ike/Nixon but LBJ is lined up for 1960. Getting him the nomination is easy. While JFK's 1st ballot victory appeared overwhelming due to vote splitting, he only cleared a majority by 45 votes. If he falls short on the first ballot, Hizzonor et al take manual control from the convention 'autopilot' and Kennedy is finished. LBJ/Symington narrowly beat Nixon in 1960.
 
Some electoral maps with the old colors.

genusmap.php


(R) Dwight D. Eisenhower/ Richard M. Nixon: 423 EV, 55.3%
(D) Adlai E. Stevenson II/ Lyndon B. Johnson: 108 EV, 44.4%

Incumbent President: Dwight Eisenhower (R)

genusmap.php


(D) Lyndon B. Johnson/ Stuart S. Symington: 279 EV, 49.7%
(R) Richard M. Nixon/ Henry C. Lodge II: 247 EV, 49.8%
(I) Harry F. Byrd/ J. Strom Thurmond: 11 EV, 0.2%

Incumbent President: Dwight Eisenhower (R)
President-elect: Lyndon Johnson (D)
 
Total agreement with Rogue Beaver. In order for LBJ to win he needs to make it to that second ballot at the Convention. Daley is not as enthusiastic about the ticket and decides not to bring the dead to the polls.

Now what would his Presidency have been like? Cuba would immediately come to the forefront, and in order to prevent a nuclear war, we need to invade during the Bay of Pigs (Johnson had initially supported air strikes against the missile positions during the Missile Crisis).
 
Vietnam: might or might not become an issue. It depends on who LBJ picks for his Cabinet, which will not include Republicans such as Dillon and McNamara.

Cuba: Would there be a Bay of Pigs? I doubt it. LBJ said that Mongoose was a "goddamned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean" (guess how its COO felt about that) and didn't care that much about Fidel.

Domestically, LBJ will ram his domestic program through without much opposition as per OTL. The votes will be close but ultimately successful. So there will be federal aid to education, healthcare, much of the OTL Great Society legislation will pass. If there's one area where the Kennedys epicly failed IOTL, it was the legislative process. Civil Rights: things will go through. Johnson was a CR advocate long before the Kennedys arrived on the national scene in the mid-1950s. As a Southerner (who was once thought a potential Dixiecrat leader by Dick Russell IOTL) , he has much more credibility than the Yankee Kennedy.

1964: LBJ in a landslide.

1968: Butterflies make this near-impossible to predict, but my money is on Nixon.
 
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(D) Lyndon B. Johnson/ Stuart S. Symington: 279 EV, 49.7%
(R) Richard M. Nixon/ Henry C. Lodge II: 247 EV, 49.8%
(I) Harry F. Byrd/ J. Strom Thurmond: 11 EV, 0.2%

Incumbent President: Dwight Eisenhower (R)
President-elect: Lyndon Johnson (D)

Here's the thing with that scenario. I don't see how LBJ keeps New York, let alone the other Northern states he needs to win, because he's not going to get anywhere near the level of support from black voters that Democrats needed at that time, or from the unions for that matter.

Keep in mind that LBJ in 1960 is a very different creature than he was in 1964. He'd spent his political career in the Senate as a very visible Dixiecrat. All it would take for for the GOP to circulate copies of his maiden speech in the Senate, "We of the South," and he's toast.

EDIT: also, why does Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond run against the first Southerner to win the Democratic nomination since Woodrow Wilson?
 
Nixon was different in 1960: seen as an uber-partisan and polarizing figure. Labor is not going to vote for Tricky Dick, and blacks would probably prefer Nixon to LBJ. IOTL they preferred Nixon until the famous dual phone calls: Jackie Robinson and MLK Sr. both endorsed Nixon.

One thing's for certain: there will be no debates. If there are, Nixon will curbstomp LBJ, being a much better public speaker.
 
Labor isn't going to vote for Nixon, but they might stay home, and at the least aren't going to hit the bricks on behalf of LBJ.

And the black vote is a real issue in the North, given how close the election is. IOTL, Kennedy takes New York with only 383,666 more votes than Nixon. If LBJ loses 191,834 of them to Nixon, he's lost New York.

And again, why is there a third party Dixiecrat candidacy with LBJ as the Democratic nominee?
 
Here's a revised map. Even losing NY, LBJ still wins narrowly.

genusmap.php


(D) Lyndon B. Johnson/ Stuart S. Symington: 272 EV, 50.1%
(R) Richard M. Nixon/ Henry C. Lodge II: 265 EV, 49.8%

Incumbent President: Dwight Eisenhower (R)
President-elect: Lyndon Johnson (D)
 
I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass, but New York wasn't the only state where the black vote might have made the difference. Pennsylvania was won by 116,326 votes, losing 58,164 loses the state; Michigan was won by 66,841 votes, losing 33,421 loses the state - and we all know about Illinois.
(http://www.historycentral.com/elections/1960state.html)

I'm not saying it's impossible for LBJ to win in 1960, but given the substantial factor of the black vote as a swing constituency that the Democratic Party had to win - Ike winning it or even coming close in 1952 and 1956 was a major reason for his sweeping victories in those elections - I think we need an equally convincing explanation for how LBJ manages to overcome this obstacle.

EDIT: I mean, let's not forget that there was so much uproar on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party when Kennedy chose LBJ for V.P that the liberals tried (and momentarily succeeded) in getting Kennedy to dump LBJ from the ticket. Significant chunks of the Democratic base are going to be really unhappy with LBJ as Presidential nominee. We need to explain how LBJ gets around it.
 
The liberals will accept it because the alternative is Nixon. No Democrat will miss a chance to vote against Nixon. You can flip various states, and the exact electoral map is a moot point IMO. The point is that LBJ can win the election. With regards to the liberal 'revolt': that means absolutely nothing. The presidential balloting is finished, and Hizzonor & Co. control 80% of the delegates. No vocal labor leaders or intellectuals can do anything other than blow hot air at the Kennedy brothers, which is what they did IOTL. What does that mean long-term? Nothing.
 
The liberals will accept it because the alternative is Nixon. No Democrat will miss a chance to vote against Nixon. You can flip various states, and the exact electoral map is a moot point IMO. The point is that LBJ can win the election. With regards to the liberal 'revolt': that means absolutely nothing. The presidential balloting is finished, and Hizzonor & Co. control 80% of the delegates. No vocal labor leaders or intellectuals can do anything other than blow hot air at the Kennedy brothers, which is what they did IOTL. What does that mean long-term? Nothing.

But in their view, LBJ might even be worse than Nixon. At least Nixon is for civil rights.

Bolting the party is not an impossibility; the South has done it before in 1948. Why not the North?
 
Because all that would do is deliver the White House to Nixon, and they have nowhere to go. Keep in mind that LBJ had his liberal allies too, such as Humphrey, Jim Rowe, Orville Freeman, etc. Civil rights was not really an issue in the campaign until MLK's arrest, and the dual phone calls, made it an issue. But as a policy issue in and of itself, JFK and Nixon said virtually the same things on CR. It was not a serious threat, more like a kid who doesn't get a lollipop and throws a temper tantrum. IOTL they were very suspicious of even JFK's liberalism, because it was not their standard-issue New/Fair Dealism. ADA et al. were in their own way as ideologically narrow-minded as Teabaggers. If you're not their type of liberal or conservative you're not a liberal or a conservative. Labor has more substantive grievances given LBJ's vote for Taft-Hartley, but they are not voting for Nixon, who was one of its principal authors in the House and campaigned in the '58 midterms on union-busting.

The South in 1948 had grievances that were very real from their POV: the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, which the more realistic of them knew would eventually happen. By then it was just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was why they were simmering against FDR by the 1944 election (including the short-lived Texas Revolt, destroyed by Rayburn and LBJ): the GI Bill of Rights was an indirect yet massive assault on Dixie by allowing black servicemen the right to a post-secondary education.
 
Because all that would do is deliver the White House to Nixon, and they have nowhere to go. Keep in mind that LBJ had his liberal allies too, such as Humphrey, Jim Rowe, Orville Freeman, etc. Civil rights was not really an issue in the campaign until MLK's arrest, and the dual phone calls, made it an issue. But as a policy issue in and of itself, JFK and Nixon said virtually the same things on CR. It was not a serious threat, more like a kid who doesn't get a lollipop and throws a temper tantrum. IOTL they were very suspicious of even JFK's liberalism, because it was not their standard-issue New/Fair Dealism. ADA et al. were in their own way as ideologically narrow-minded as Teabaggers. If you're not their type of liberal or conservative you're not a liberal or a conservative. Labor has more substantive grievances given LBJ's vote for Taft-Hartley, but they are not voting for Nixon, who was one of its principal authors in the House and campaigned in the '58 midterms on union-busting.

The South in 1948 had grievances that were very real from their POV: the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, which the more realistic of them knew would eventually happen. By then it was just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was why they were simmering against FDR by the 1944 election (including the short-lived Texas Revolt, destroyed by Rayburn and LBJ): the GI Bill of Rights was an indirect yet massive assault on Dixie by allowing black servicemen the right to a post-secondary education.

Right, but in a close election, you need the base not only voting, but also pulling people out to vote with all its ability. Labor isn't going to do that for LBJ, neither are liberals, and there's going to be huge black voter defections.

That has to be dealt with substantively.
 
Would they cut off their nose to spite their face, and thus elect Nixon twice? Blacks might defect to Nixon, but LBJ might be able to pick up more Southern states than JFK if he leads the ticket. I understand what you mean about professional GOTV operations making or breaking a close election: 1960, California 1968, Ohio 2004. I think the only issue are blacks as you said, labor and liberals have much more to fear from Nixon than LBJ. So they'll go Republican, but not in enough concentrations to turn the tide. If Nixon had picked an industrial-stater like Jerry Ford or Hugh Scott, or even a Roman Catholic like Ken Keating, then LBJ (and quite probably JFK as well) would be finished.

Here's another map. NY and MI go GOP but LBJ picks up a few Dixie states.

genusmap.php


(D) 282 EV
(R) 255 EV
 
Now that I can buy - although still not sure about Illinois.

God only knows what that does to Democrats in the House and Senate, though. Best chance is a LOT of ticket-splitting up-North.
 
Hizzonor will produce the graveyard votes as usual- he was a good friend of Lyndon's and a supporter of JFK. Re Congress: this was the long era of Democratic congressional control that lasted until the rise of Newt: the '58 midterms had given the Democrats 2-1 majorities in both the House and Senate. I don't see things changing that much.
 
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