my Whigs and Rad-Libs aren't really
parties in the sense of "a group of politicians and voters comprising an organization with candidates, platforms, and allied media, then on one day everyone goes to the booths": it's more like the traditional duopolies in Latin America: an election is a public festival for the endorsement of a single list/slate of candidates--they barbecue a steer, hand out hard liquor, and pass out convertible scrip or raffle tickets (so they’re TECHNICALLY not bribing voters): the name of the faction doing this depends on the state (though you’re quite free to double-dip as long as you don’t actually vote twice, your employer and the state militia can see the ink on your finger)
there's the Tocquevillean cracker-barrel orators and brawls between readers of different newspapers, but it's mostly about the direction the Party should go, not which party to choose freely between--electoral violence is a way to discipline the public, not to prevent a rival like OTL's Wilmington 1898 against the Populists and Republicans; this
system's probably content-free and resilient enough to keep the parties tottering onwards past 1917, like a sports team[1]
my TL has basically a Confederate near-civil war 1863-68 as the Anti-Administration faction gathers everyone from states’-rights Fire-Eaters to militarist war heroes leading Negro janissaries against Davis’s men--OTL Grant singled out Lee and Johnston for praise, and Beauregard, Longstreet, and Forrest were downright Reconstructionists (utterly out of personal self-interest): so the bedrock of this CSA is already riven from the start, and each "historic compromise" by the Pro-Administration/Whig Party requires more infilling: the original generals will have their statues raised 1900s and 10s, but only because they're simply
safer dead and bronzed
so Wilson looks and smells and quacks like a Rad-Lib, but 1909 could just be seeing the parties at a low ebb so you just have
a single list of candidates and one of them gets the E-votes (like how all the
1824 candidates were Dem-Reps)
because of patrimonialism freedmen, Uplanders, and vets vote 50/50 (or more like 30/30/40 if you add the socialists who actually bother courting them[2] with more than the elite parties’ “vote for me and imagine I’ll do something really nice, but don’t ever talk to me in person you smelly peasant”); without Reconstruction[3] Black people voting is, itself, NOT a fear of the political class
[1] Richmond also has to present a nice
face to the British and French, so they'll stay on their side (I mean that little matter of the S-word is all cleared up, now
right?)
[2] even the socialist Confederate Workingman’s Party formally segregates meetings, but there’s always a dinner at the end where they happen to walk around and try and hash out race vs. class
[3] which, to reiterate, I believe should had lasted to at least 1965, specifically just to rub the anniversary in their faces
ultimately I based the party systems on Imperial/Old Republican Brazil, Japan throughout the first half of the 20th, and the funny coincidence Liberia's one party 1869-1980 was called the
True Whigs (fused with the Masons, which in turn fused with West African men’s societies): I had the cerebral misfortune of seeing two rival parties where one was described as "liberal conservative" and the other as "conservative liberal"
