How would a Dewey (R) vs Eisenhower (D) race go?

This is the scenario:

Let's say that the Marshall report recommends a greater level of American support for the Kuomintang. Thanks to American advisors and support along with some KMT progress on domestic reform and some luck, the KMT troops hold the line slightly better.

But soon, bodybags start making their way home and Truman loses the election to a Dewey-Taft ticket running on a platform of troop withdrawal, a moderate domestic policy and an isolationist foreign policy.

This leads to Nanking being overrun by mid 1951 and Eisenhower, disgusted by Dewey's isolationism decides to allow himself to be drafted for the Democratic party nomination.

The party bosses support him overwhelmingly - leading to a Eisenhower-Stevenson ticket.

In November 1952 - the battle lines are drawn.
Eisenhower runs the campaign on a mixture of "I LIKE IKE" - punctuated by occasional critiques of Dewey's 'appeasement' of communism.

President Dewey runs a pugnacious campaign - accusing Eisenhower of 'warmongering for votes' and campaigning on a strong economy.

How does the map look?
 
I think it would look like FDR's map in 1944 against Dewey. Without a left-wing Wallace candidacy, Eisenhower should probably even win New York.
 

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This is actually very interesting. Ike as a Democrat could have huge implications for the rest of American history. Eisenhower would probably have a good presidency, and maybe even get elected to a second term. Whoever is the Republican nominee will win in 1960, and that could have huge effects on the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam.
 
Thing is, Ike would not be a Democrat. He kept his personal convictions close to his vest, so lots of people could fool themselves into thinking he might run for the Democrats, but his beliefs were such that he would only run for the Republicans. I don't see a plausible reason why he should change his mind on this.
 
Thing is, Ike would not be a Democrat. He kept his personal convictions close to his vest, so lots of people could fool themselves into thinking he might run for the Democrats, but his beliefs were such that he would only run for the Republicans. I don't see a plausible reason why he should change his mind on this.

When you look at Eisenhower's actions during his administration - there isn't anything he did which I wouldn't see a conservative Democrat also doing? In fact in some ways - he probably was more liberal than some Southern democrats?
 
Thing is, Ike would not be a Democrat. He kept his personal convictions close to his vest, so lots of people could fool themselves into thinking he might run for the Democrats, but his beliefs were such that he would only run for the Republicans. I don't see a plausible reason why he should change his mind on this.
It's certainly true he was much more likely to run as a Republican for reason of personal conviction, but if he felt that running as a Democrat suited him better, he would have taken that option. Perhaps, for instance, he felt ITTL that running against the incumbent Dewey in the GOP would have been harder...it is very hard to primary a sitting President after all...
 
Thing is, Ike would not be a Democrat. He kept his personal convictions close to his vest, so lots of people could fool themselves into thinking he might run for the Democrats, but his beliefs were such that he would only run for the Republicans. I don't see a plausible reason why he should change his mind on this.

He did, but his convictions were not fundamentally incompatible with the Democrats. If the opportunity arose in 1952 to run for the Dems but not the GOP, I can’t imagine he doesn’t take it.

Also, Ike was popular enough that he could have run for the Monster Raving Loony Party and he would have at least been a very tough out.
 
The swap in party positions will be faster for one thing I suspect, Eisenhower was one of the last left wing Republicans IOTL.
 
When you look at Eisenhower's actions during his administration - there isn't anything he did which I wouldn't see a conservative Democrat also doing? In fact in some ways - he probably was more liberal than some Southern democrats?
A straight ideological polarization was a much less reliable guide to partisan loyalties in this period. He was a Republican, and just about every Republican in 1948-52 was measurably more liberal than many a Dixiecrat. He was a moderate Republican--and even Taft wing had some points where they were less doctrinaire than modern "conservatives" tend to be. Ike was not on the left of the Republican party even--that would be some others such as Rockefeller. He was just the ultimate Centrists. It does not at all mean, in this era, that he would just as soon switch at the drop of a hat. There is cultural identity involved, and convictions against certain specific things, or rather images of things. Republicans and Democrats had certain iconic images about what the common nature of their enemies was that tied them together into one more or less despicable package that explained more why their own side held together than any recognized common bond among yourself. If you grew up culturally Republican, "all Democrats" would seem to be guilty of certain nasty traits, and if you worked closely with one who didn't seem to consistently show that nasty trait there would be some rationalization to cover it--bottom line, a Democrat who was rarely or never remotely guilty of the common bond nasty trait would at any rate be guilty by association. And the same for people growing up culturally Democratic--Republicans "all" do or think this or that, and again exceptions somehow or other prove the rule. So--Eisenhower spent a major part of his career subordinated to a highly popular Democrat, rising to levels where he and the President were close to face to face. In modern terms, where people do switch parties going in both direction, the parties are taken to be labels of a certain ideology and as these evolve people filter back and forth, but in these times I think the partisan split was more deeply cultural and so in a modern context, if a general is serving a "liberal" administration one comes to suppose they are going to either dissent and resign or find some way to get assigned out of the White House, or that they come to see the dominant policy is a good one and identify with it--and therefore the President's party. Even now military professionalism is supposed to put the military at the service of any President with equal competence and creativity in carrying out clear orders. But in my lifetime, I have gotten the distinct impression that the military high establishment got a sense of entitlement to a Republican administration in the Reagan years, and would drag its feet and generally be cranky during a Democratic one, while snapping to attention (at first anyway) to be 100 percent on board in a Republican one. Actually the experience of Bush the younger may have completed their disillusionment. They went in thinking "the grownups are in charge again!" and were pleased, then it seemed stuff got serious with 9/11, then gradually they came to polarize between fanatics and people who were coming to realize lunatics had taken over the asylum. Meanwhile there also always "Democratic generals" happier to work with the "wrong" party. I mention all this to suggest it is a relatively modern mentality; Democrats had higher esteem among some military people back before Vietnam, and partisanship did exist within the military commands, but professionalism was taken very seriously precisely to shunt that sort of conflict aside. Some were better at it than others--MacArthur never hid his preferences and was thus a pretty slovenly example of a military "professional" in that respect. Ike was very very good at it. Dealing with a Democratic President, he had no visible trouble forgetting all about American partisan politics, and if you asked him what he thought on such matters he would demur and change the subject or politely excuse himself remembering some very important duty he has to carry out elsewhere. Since there were Democratic generals, it was possible to kid yourself into hoping he would be one.

And also, there were people who were not very partisan and could be persuaded to support either depending on circumstances.

I am saying Eisenhower was not one of these latter. He was a deeply cultural Republican who saw Democrats as people who could be respected and lived with but were fundamentally wrong and when it came time to stand up and be counted politically, he would stick with the Republicans. That is my impression.

Looking over CCA's OP, if we stipulated that somehow "Dewey Sweeps Nation" in 1948 it would create a tough dilemma for Eisenhower if the scenario then played out. It gave me some pause to wonder, would Ike in fact support the Democratic party after all if it seemed the national interest required it?

I have not made any deep study of his character and I don't suppose I can prove my impression is true, but it remains my impression that even if he felt duty called on him to bite the bullet and try to be a Democratic leader, he would never be comfortable with it, and that would cost him points despite his widespread popularity.

As I said, looking at a bunch of people's attitudes, I think we are looking at things through a modern lens that doesn't work in the mid century. In our lifetimes, since Vietnam and Watergate and the Reagan years, the two parties have been drastically recast into new roles and people have been shaken out of old cultural identities and forced into new ones. Part of our modern experience is lots of leaders as well as regular voters shifting back and forth, picking and choosing between the parties on a one-dimensional ideological spectrum. But several generations back, most people fell into a cultural division that made some people traditionally Democratic and others traditionally Republican, and so both parties had an internal ideological spectrum that various processes have largely scoured out of both today. A Progressive Republican and Progressive Democrat would have much in common, and yet feel that something deep separated them as well, and conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats would agree on much policy and support each other on many points, but still feel that a gulf separated them too. This was not an entirely rational thing, but it was real.

So Eisenhower was broad minded and pragmatic, accustomed to dealing with a President who stood iconically for hope and progress, and thus would often be wide open to a respectably Republican form of progressivism, if it made the case well for not trampling on more moderate and conservative concerns. To modern eyes, we see that and think, "gosh, he might as well have been a Democrat," not seeing that perhaps these words would send a shudder of self-horror down his spine. We think we see a contradiction between Republican identity because we assume based on projection of modern experience that Taft and people like him were the natural owners of the Republican party and more moderate to progressive people were interlopers somehow. Nope, that is not how it was in the 1950s.

---Meanwhile, having looked over the OP scenario, it too seems pretty heavily divorced from probable reality. There was simply no way in hell anyone would advise Harry Truman to give Chiang Kai-Shek American lives to play with. After the Axis powers were definitively subdued and despite the ongoing requirement of occupation duty in both Germany and Japan, under Truman--not entirely at his own direction; Republican controlled Congresses certainly were keen to vote for major budget cuts too--the troops demobilized and flooded back into civilian life, and the size of the US military establishment plummeted. Some elements of the services such as the Air Force suffered less than others; the Army was the most drastically transformed, just as it had grown far more than other services, relatively speaking, so now it plummeted back toward prewar levels which to our Cold War dominated eyes were absurdly tiny. And when the crises of his second term swooped down on him, Truman was left OTL with tiny resources in the GI department. Lots of Air Force planes, not so many troops! If by not so many we mean, practically zero reserve left after accounting for duties that tied them down in various places, practically nothing then to respond to a new frontline somewhere.

Money is only money. We can talk about the KMT getting more financial support and more support in the form of shipments of arms. We can even talk about air support a la the pre-Pearl Harbor Flying Tiger volunteers and all that. But the notion that Truman would casually commit US Army or even his scarce Marines to the Chinese meat grinder assumes a very different reality. The whole genius of things like the Marshall Plan was that it did not entail sending the Marines to be on the front line. Troops did stand on the front line, and had there been none at all in Europe, the MP surely would have been a fiasco. But Truman just did not have them to spare in the way Kennedy did in the early Sixties regarding Vietnam. I am not saying it would have been categorically impossible for the USA to get seriously bogged down against Mao in the latter half of the 1940s, but for that to happen a process to bring it to the highest levels of public policy debate would have been necessary. It might not be the White House's initiative at all--for it to happen Truman has to be persuaded it is necessary to get ahead of the parade on this.

That's really a better scenario, except maybe for timing--the Republicans make a big stink, after taking over the House in 1946, over the debacle Chiang is suffering in China, over Reds taking over China, and make a big bombastic demand the President do something about it. Then Truman's staff comes back quietly saying "we'd need to send troops, lots of troops. But the American people are tired of playing soldier. You (Republicans) control Congress, you vote us a war and we'll see, but right now our hands are tied and China is not America's problem."

Meanwhile the idea of engaging American troops on the ground in an Asian land war was pretty unappetizing.

I think, given the larger commitment stretched over the next several years and past the '46 midterm to the then-stiill-popular hope that our conflicts with the Soviets could be ironed out diplomatically and the basic alliance of the war years perpetuated, and the focus of events on Europe such that if the USA was keeping some powder dry it was for the European theater mainly, that absolutely no one in the USA would advocate or expect any American warm bodies be sent to Asia (beyond occupation of Japan and SK). All debate would be about how much money to throw at the KMT, in the increasingly glum realization that this was often like throwing money into a waterfall. Money might take the form of munitions, true volunteers might accompany some of it for training and advising and a bit of freelance sniping.

But there would not be any body bags, because it cannot be the policy of a postwar US government to mobilize troops we didn't even have in uniform any longer, and would not until the Korean War developed and we had to scramble from near zero to build up the army.

No body bags, no strong reason to think Dewey will sweep the nation. Truman's margins were actually quite strong despite being undermined by both left and right defections from the Democratic monolith. I know about the narrowly won states, but honestly I think you will find that in just about any election there are always states the victor wins by thin margins; it may be that he "only had to lose three" that were on that chancy boundary...but if one state that was pro Truman OTL flips to Dewey in the ATL, why are we sure that some other state that did not go to Truman OTL might flip back his way?

Meanwhile if Dewey does win, can he win on on the Taft-Lite line the OP suggests? It is suggested in reaction to an unrealistic "body bags coming back from a collapsing China" scenario that has no realistic foundation. Without Truman committing legions of phantom troops we didn't actually have in uniform OTL and would require a major political action to get into uniform in the ATL, the more likely scenario is that Dewey takes a more hawkish stance and runs on Truman being unfit for the tough job, implying that this is because Truman and the Democrats generally are pinko and don't really want to stand against the Reds. So no Taft on the ticket, no post-election neo-isolationism--to win, the Republican strategy is to go full on Cold War earlier. Having talked up Truman's incompetence to keep China, it will be the Republicans who have to double down in Asia--or, betting as Truman did that a light hand can keep American interests covered there and having Mao rip a big gaping hole in that banner, Dewey winds up with all the egg on his face Truman had to endure.

So maybe there is a route for a patriot to come in on a white horse offering among other things military credibility. Just maybe, but in a case like this, with Dewey as baby hawk not grown up enough to know what he was getting into when tangling with the Chinese Communists, Eisenhower can indeed hope to primary Dewey out and the Republicans generally can wash their hands of a debacle that honestly is their own mess across the board by piling it all on Dewey, and flocking to Eisenhower's banner. So again, Eisenhower runs and wins in '52, but not as a Democrat. Conventional wisdom fails again because a likely Dewey '48 win is liable to demand a hawkish Dewey who either somehow manages to enable the KMT to survive, perhaps at the cost of body bags...which will be forgiven if they win success... or more likely if we assume Mao was essentially invincible without invoking WWIII, is so weakened Eisenhower is called in by the Republicans he is comfortable and confident among to save their bacon. In these circumstances he would not enjoy the easy sweep of victory he did OTL, but he will win I suppose.
 
God, are people seriously perceiving Eisenhower as "left wing?" Tolerant of the existence of other people who are left wing, within limits, maybe. Actually left wing himself? Actually flipping the Dixiecrat South to be the bastion of a party to the left of the Democrats?

What is he, wizard or shapeshifter?

He's a moderate. It was no oxymoron to speak of moderate Republicans in his day. It was common enough to have quite radical progressive Republicans in his day too, but he was not one of them. Any tendencies we see today as "left" relative to modern Republicans is due to the extreme collapse of that party to a truly astonishing degree rightward, and say nothing about how his positions would be read in his own day.

He is most certainly not going to be able or even particularly inclined to wave a wand and turn the reactionary South into a bastion of progressivism. Progressive Southerners are no oxymoron in this era either, but they don't dominate. As long as the openly white supremacist line is deemed legitimate and respectable, Southern progressives must coexist with them and placate them and even be among them. Can a generally leftist and populist policy exist in conjunction with throwing a big part of the Southern population under the bus? As a temporary thing, yes of course it can... but the logic of radicalism is a lively thing. This was realized way back during the American Revolutionary War. In raising the sorts of battle cries against British tyranny the American Patriots did, they automatically and immediately started undermining the legitimacy of slavery, and some of them realized that is what they were doing. So too in semi-modern times--a progressive populism but for whites only cannot endure long, it either collapses into conservative old boy corruption or starts a social avalanche that ends with the African American oppressed either self-liberated or dead. Eisenhower hardly wanted to start such an avalanche. He sent troops to Little Rock because SCOTUS had ordered integration and when some Southern venue actually complied he wasn't going to let it get mobbed...but neither was he interested in a crusade to attack Jim Crow on all fronts.

I mentioned a vague identity politics defining Republicans and Democrats based on broad caricature images of what is evil about the Other in each's eyes. Part of Republican identity is the Party of Lincoln, versus the racist Democrats. Conveniently because Republican jurisdictions did not generally include actual people of color in large numbers, the Republicans never had to actually accomplish anything (beyond what their sainted ancestors had done) to demonstrate or actualize their being racially tolerant...all they had to do was look at the Solid South and shake their heads and thank the Good Lord they did not have the shame and moral inadequacy inflicted on all those benighted fools who were born to inherent the Democratic mantle. Indeed better to deal with a forthright racist perhaps than some northern weasel who says "I'm not a white supremacist, really I'm not!" but relies on all those Dixiecratic votes in Congress.

I suspect Eisenhower was racist in the basic sense that default American culture is permeated with racist imagery across the board and few "white" Americans do not perceive a sort of species gap between themselves and people of color; to him Lincolnesque and Plessy v Fergusson "equal but separate" arguments probably sounded persuasive. But in his day, and perhaps persisting with some people to modern times, the line between "Racist" and "not Racist" was drawn not in terms of whether one perceived "Race" as a real thing--to the vast majority of Americans, it would be "obviously" a real thing...but whether you agreed to white supremacy as a dogma, holding it to be an active duty of "white" people to actively and deliberately sustained against an insurgent drive by the "inferior races" to "usurp" the proper place of white people...versus being what I would call a "casual racist" who just complacently assumes that the superior position of "white" people is due to their naturally belonging at the top, with no invidious activism required, and therefore is impatient with other people seeking to worm or guilt trip or intimidate their way into a stratum of society they just naturally don't belong in and cannot sustain anyway. This latter position if fully realized and recognized stands out as itself still racist--but if people can evade thinking clearly about it and recognizing that this is in fact how they are perceiving things, they can cheerfully deny being racist at all. If you have Strom Thurmond types to compare yourself to, the contrast helps with this enormously. I'm saying Ike was the lite kind of racist that remains common today. From the point of view of someone suffering racist oppression, Lite Racists are perhaps tactically to be preferred to the hard-shell and self-aware kind, but the more success one has dealing with the latter, the more obnoxious the smug and clueless racism of the Lite Racist becomes.

So--in 1952, Eisenhower casting his lot with the Democrats would mean his making a deal with the Devil and putting on Klan robes he would resent wearing, because however racist he might actually have been, he was in no way someone who thought of himself as a racist, certainly not a terrorizing, lynching Klan type white supremacist. He liberated death camps in Germany and made sure it got documented on film. He does not want to get into the mud of Democratic heritage. He can and had and would work with such people, but he would recoil at the notion of becoming one.

But neither is he John Brown. The last thing he wants is to set America on fire. He would probably reason, "if America is as badly messed up as these radicals think, then I ought to go Red and be one myself." The Reds are obviously wrong somewhere because clearly such a good nation as the USA should not be disintegrating in bloody civil war yet again; surely the basic difficulties of slavery days was set right adequately enough--therefore the radical claims of those accusing people like himself of still being racist must be haywire somewhere, and plodding along sensibly without making big waves is obviously the path of wisdom. There is no moderate, gentle, reasonable way to disentangle the Democratic party's schizophrenic mix of pinko progressivism with all the sweet and whining folksongs, and the Solid South, not to mention other tropes of Democratic swinishness he surely was raised to believe in (Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion...the Democrats are the unwashed mob, a smelly mess of immigrants and Papists who obey their Machine Bosses and have no principles; they are less cultured, incapable of proper Anglo-Saxon self-discipline and therefore subject to corrupt masters.) As a moderate, Ike deplores this, knowing there are good elements among the Democrats, but only a baptism of fire is going to disentangle that crazy quilt of shining principle and rottenness, so with gratitude he thanks God there is a Republican Party to belong to. Democrats may win elections and even give orders in a just war that triumphs over evil, but it is because of solid Republicans that America can prevail, and when called on to be the leader himself, he is going to turn to the side he thinks is the more respectable and solid one. As a moderate, he will listen to Democrats and work with them; he will try to see some good done for unfortunate victims of circumstance, but only with careful, deliberate steps and he will not go looking to go kicking sleeping dogs.

If some dire contingency in American history...say, Dewey chose as his running mate not Taft but freshman Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, then meets with an unfortunate accident that makes McCarthy President and Tailgunner Joe goes on a rampage of violations of civil liberty, constructing some ramshackle police state that lacks the integrity to stand...forcing Eisenhower to adopt a Democratic mantle anyway, he still is not going to systematically go about dismantling Jim Crow, and if he does not do that, forget the notion of a Progressive South. Nor is he keen to drive the general center of American politics any farther left than the New Deal had already taken it. Whether Republican or Democratic, Eisenhower is a moderate and a centrist and will wish to preside over a distinct shift to the right--not too far, and maybe not relative to immediate circumstances, but he would surely regard the general consensus as of say 1945 as already dangerous leftist and welcome some grounding moderation.
 
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