A lot of attention is paid to third party candidacies of George Wallace in the 60's. He was noted for his support for segregation, and more traditional Democrat labor politics afaik. But I haven't seen much focus on the earlier candidacies of Strom Thurmond in 1948. In OTL he and the "states rights Democratic Party" got primary Democrat ballot access in several Southern States, and third party status in other states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite...ss_in_the_1948_U.S._presidential_election.svg

Basically I'm curious about what would have happened if Thurmond and the other Southern Democrats had succeeded in preventing anyone from getting to the 266 electoral votes necessary to win the Presidency. As was the intent with the later Wallace campaigns, the hope was to extract concessions from one of the two big party candidates in exchange for support. What would the effect of this scenario coming to pass? Could we see some kind of protection for segregation on a federal level until a SC case overturns it? How would this affect the later Civil Rights efforts of the Johnson administration? Perhaps more importantly, if this strategy works early on, would the Dixiecrats try to repeat it down the line as Civil Rights becomes more of a hot button issue.

As for how to accomplish this scenario the only way I see it working is for more Southern States to given the sole Democrat ballot access to Thurmond, and exclude Truman. In OTL the party bosses in Tennessee prevented this, perhaps they could be persuaded? Texas also had a strong minority of Thurmond support, up to 30% in some eastern counties. If the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas flip to Thurmond that's enough to take Truman below 266, and send the election to the Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas,_1948
 
Makes sense to me. Why bend to a third party when you can make concessions to each other and maintain the status quo, more or less?

The Dixiecrats were a faction of the Democratic party, so they seemed to be relying on the party instincts of the Northern Democrats to rally together and create a unified front.
 
The Dixiecrats were a faction of the Democratic party, so they seemed to be relying on the party instincts of the Northern Democrats to rally together and create a unified front.

True, but they're a rebellious faction that's now gone out of their way to screw over the overall party. That won't sit well with the Democratic leaders, and if they can find an acceptable compromise with liberal-to-moderate Republicans like Dewey, they might just take it. Giving an inch to the Dixiecrats gives them incentive to try and take a mile next time around. Now with that said, Truman himself may have been more than willing to broker a deal with Dixiecrats to keep the party from fracturing permanently. I'm just saying I can also see some wisdom in the other option.
 
True, but they're a rebellious faction that's now gone out of their way to screw over the overall party. That won't sit well with the Democratic leaders, and if they can find an acceptable compromise with liberal-to-moderate Republicans like Dewey, they might just take it. Giving an inch to the Dixiecrats gives them incentive to try and take a mile next time around. Now with that said, Truman himself may have been more than willing to broker a deal with Dixiecrats to keep the party from fracturing permanently. I'm just saying I can also see some wisdom in the other option.

The major problem I see though is that any compromise with between the GOP and Northern Democrats would involve one of them giving the presidency to the other. I don't think either party could do that without their voters seeing them as having betrayed them.
 
Interesting idea. I feel like the most plausible way to make it work would be to have Dewey do better in the election- if we throw Ohio (which Truman won by 0.24% of the vote) to the Republicans then Dewey gets to 214 EVs, and if we send Georgia and Arkansas Thurmond's way giving him a total of 60 EVs, we can get Truman down to 257 EVs, throwing the election to the House. Alternatively we could keep Thurmond's results the same and give Dewey Ohio and California (which Dewey only lost by 0.44% of the vote), leaving Truman with 253 EVs, Dewey with 239, and Thurmond with 39.

Dewey winning California and Ohio may actually be a more plausible idea- Thurmond was 40% underwater in Georgia and 45% underwater in Arkansas, and those were the states with his 5th and 6th best showings respectively.

Once the election goes to the House, the state delegations of the 80th US Congress (as it is the outgoing House that picks the President in case of a tie) are probably divided as follows;

Republican: 29
Southern Democratic: 12
Democratic: 5
Tie: 2 (Montana, Utah)

And that's being incredibly generous to the Southern Democrats- I gave them all of the former Confederate states except for Oklahoma, and I highly doubt that Texas and Florida would have broken with Truman (Tennessee and Kentucky are also questionable). So the Republicans have the majority they need to just elect Dewey outright, which would be a bit embarrassing for Truman who has just won a a plurality of both the Popular Vote and the Electoral College and his party has won a majority in the next congress, but would keep the Dixiecrats from extracting any concessions (although they would get to demonstrate that their support is needed to win, which might let them make demands in the future). It's not impossible for Thurmond to try and pull something with the electoral college- only 13 of his electors would need to vote for Truman to let Truman win, but I don't necessarily see Truman taking a deal to do that. Certainly Dewey isn't cutting any deals.
 
Actually it's not the outgoing house anymore.

Per the 20th amendment, the new Congress takes office on January 3 and one of the first things they do is count electoral votes.

It was that way prior to 1933 but not in 1949

IIRC from when I researched it a while back the new House would not have had a clear majority based on the assumption of R or D or SD delegations

Probably though Dewey and Truman would have worked a compromise where the winner of popular vote got White House but the other side got some concessions too
 
Actually it's not the outgoing house anymore.

Per the 20th amendment, the new Congress takes office on January 3 and one of the first things they do is count electoral votes.

It was that way prior to 1933 but not in 1949

Don't be quite so certain about that! As I wrote here some time ago:

***

...Certainly that is in accord with the *purpose* of the Amendment--the whole point of pushing back the opening date of the new Congress to January 3 (17 days before the presidential and vice-presidential terms start) was to prevent a lame duck Congress from making the choice. And yet...there is nothing in the text of the amendment which specifically states that only the new Congress can make the choice. In a 1980 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "Deadlock: What Happens if Nobody Wins", Laurence M. Tribe and Thomas M. Rollins argue that "The outgoing Republican Eightieth Congress... could have responded by moving up the date for picking among Democrat Truman, Republican Thomas Dewey, and States' Rights candidate Strom Thurmond. In any year, this tactic would surely stir popular protest, but a partisan Congress could decide to take the heat: the re-elected members are likely to be from safe districts; the lame duck members have little or nothing left to lose." http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/80oct/deadlock2.htm Tribe and Rollins argue that this is so contrary to the history and principle of the 20th Amendment that "the silence of the Constitution's text becomes almost irrelevant. The document should be interpreted to forbid lame duck manipulation of the presidency, although a partisan Congress might decide differently -- and it is anyone's guess how far the courts would go to halt the lame ducks as they tramp across the spirit of the document for their own narrow ends."

Indeed, I could easily see the Supreme Court of 1948 refusing to decide this, holding it was a "political question." (In analyzing the plausibility of the Court so holding, please let's not get into another debate on Supreme Court decisions of 2000. We are talking about the court of the 1940's, which expressed a marked reluctance to get into what Justice Frankfurter in *Colegrove v. Green*, 328 US 549 [1946] described as the "political thicket.")

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ction-goes-to-the-house.395804/#post-12940429
 
I do love a what if debate but I think that this settles the issue

According to the law passed in summer 1948 the counting is January 6th of the year after the election

The only way to change that is to change the law, which would have to overcome a Truman veto, and I don't see them getting 2/3rds

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/15

OK, so it is the new Congress (which I thought very likely anyway). IMO the new Congress simply chooses Truman, and Thurmond has very little leverage. Truman won't make a public deal, and a private one would be denied and unenforceable. Anyway, in the new House the Democrats controlled twenty-five state delegations outright (AL, AZ, AR, CO, CT, FL, IN, KY, LA, MD, MS, MO, NV, NM, NY, NC, OH, OK, RI, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WV) with two ties (ID and MT). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/81st_United_States_Congress Very few members of Congress, even from the states carried by Thurmond, actually endorsed him for president, and very few would dare to vote for him, for fear that a vengeful majority of the Democrats would deprive them of their seniority and committee chairmanships. And what would be the point of a deadlock which would only make Alben Barkley--whose politics were similar to those of Truman--president? Indeed, for that reason Dewey himself would very likely ask House Republicans to vote for Truman--"I can't become president anyway, a deadlock would be terrible for the US and the world in these dangerous times, and we don't want to be seen as being in league with the Dixiecrats" etc.
 
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The simplest way to deprive Truman of an Electoral College majority is just to have better ballot access for Henry Wallace. He was not on the ballot in Illinois, and only "sort of" on the ballot in Ohio. (You could vote for him in Ohio but only by voting separately for each of his electors--whereas for Truman and Dewey, all you had to do was put an X in the box by the candidate's name. By contrast, Wallace himself was not listed as a presidential candidate.)

It does in retrospect seem stupid for the Republican Illinois governor (Dwight Green) and Republican state legislature (of 1946-8) to have made it so hard for Wallace to get on the ballot. (You had to get a sufficient number of signatures from a large number of counties--this hurt Wallace, whose support was overwhelmingly in Cook County.)
 
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