Democratic Party disapears

WI former slaves voting rights were mroe seriously defended, Garfield survived and was elected in 1884,

The version of populism that tried to link dispossessed white and black people made progress.

Could there have been a 2 party system based on Populists and Republicans?

How much further to the left of OTL Democrats could Populists have been and still been competitive?
 
If you want to get rid of the Democrats, your best bet lies not with the Populists, but with their urban brothers, the Socialists. But certainly a stronger Populist movement would help.

Let's say that William Jennings Bryan is passed over for the Democratic nomination in 1896 and the Convention instead decides to renominate Grover Cleveland. Cleveland loses to McKinley, and the Populists run Weaver again. Weaver gets a respectable share of the popular vote and wins much of the west in the electoral college. Four years later, McKinley wins re-election and the general prosperity calms down the Populist vote, though Democrat George Dewey still does relatively OK owing to his position as an admiral in the SpanAm war.

McKinley doesn't bite the bullet (pun intended) the way he did IOTL. The Socialist Party is growing by this point and the Populists, splitting into various factions over the way to go forward (left Populists favor and alliance with the Socialists, right Populists favor continuing on as an independent force) agree to a relatively painful divorce that leaves the right of the party nominating William J. Bryan for the White House in 1904 and the left supporting Eugene Debs. Democrat Alton Parker gets beaten by Charles Fairbanks, though by this point it seems that the rapid growth of the Socialists will allow them to outpace the Democrats at some point in the future.

Keep up the growth of the Socialists with some more conservative Republican leadership, and the Democrats turn out a lot like Britain's Liberals did, as the third (minuscule) party lodged between conservative Republicans and the Socialists.
 
Another way to kill the Dems -- what happens if they lose 1912 (and 1916)? Then the party goes 60 years electing only one guy to the WH, who didn't even get consecutive terms. At that point, the 1910's and 1920's could see the parties realign, between Progressives and Conservatives...
 
Another way to kill the Dems -- what happens if they lose 1912 (and 1916)? Then the party goes 60 years electing only one guy to the WH, who didn't even get consecutive terms. At that point, the 1910's and 1920's could see the parties realign, between Progressives and Conservatives...

Very nice ideas... I like this.
 
Another way to kill the Dems -- what happens if they lose 1912 (and 1916)? Then the party goes 60 years electing only one guy to the WH, who didn't even get consecutive terms. At that point, the 1910's and 1920's could see the parties realign, between Progressives and Conservatives...


They could lose 1916 easily enough, but since that puts them out of office during WW1, in the longer term it is probably to their benefit.

Losing 1912, though, is surely ASB. THey'd have to nominate Senator Bilbo or someone like that.
 
I tend to think that the civil war is a good time for the Democratic Party's demise. For quite some time after the war the Democrats were associated with slavery and rebellion. If it wasn't for the northern democrats in New York, I think the Democratic Party would have faltered after the Civil War. So I think in order to make the Dems dissapear from American Politics, you need to get New York to go Republican. This could have done this by having the republicans going for more free-trade, a 19th century Democratic Platform staple.

Nature abhores a vacum, and the American system is dependent on 2 parties, so when one party bellies up, a new one is bound to take its place. It happened when the Republicans replaced the Whigs, and when the Democratic Republican party schismed into the Democrats and National Republicans.
 
(cough) Teddy Roosevelt* (cough, cough)

*(clears throat)republican-nomination(cough)


Looking at the states where you did get a straight fight between Wilson and TR, it looks doubtful whether even that would have saved the Republicans.

Even if it did, though, it only postpones the problem. As the last year of TR's presidency shows, the Congressional GOP had swallowed about as much reform as they were prepared to, so a restored TR is unlikely to achieve any more than Taft did before him, and almost certainly less than the first-term Wilson did. So at some point voters who want progressive measures still have to turn to the Dems.
 
(cough) Teddy Roosevelt* (cough, cough)

*(clears throat)republican-nomination(cough)

I still would discount discount 1912 as a good year for the Dems to die out.

That's because of this site's stance on TR, I've heard statements literally go as far as to say that the Dems would snap like a dry stick in a storm if TR was the nominee and that they were lucky as all get-out for that to not happen. Discounting of course the fact that they still had a decent following in 1912 even if you combined what Taft and TR had in the popular vote.

I totally agree with Kaiser though. If you find a way for the Dems to not consolidate in their northern bastions in the Civil War, they could've gone belly up during reconstruction.
 
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