TL191-Will Dewey win re-election?
- Thread starter CT23
- Start date
bguy
Donor
I would think so. OTL Dewey was a political moderate who had good relations with labor unions while Governor of New York, so assuming his TL-191 counterpart is similar, he should be able to effectively manage any post-war labor unrest and will probably pursue a moderate domestic agenda that will be broadly popular with swing voters (President Dewey might even be the TL-191 president who finally gets social security enacted since congressional Democrats are unlikely to fillibuster a bill from a president of their own party.) There also shouldn't be any major foreign policy crisis in his first term as the Germans want to work with the U.S. to prevent nuclear proliferation, the Japanese are going to be too busy fighting the British and Russians (and probably won't want to risk another war with the U.S. until they have their own nuclear weapons), and the Confederates and Canadians both appear to be too beaten down to cause any major trouble in the short run. Besides which the Socialist brand has been so discredited by the Richmond Agreement that I doubt the public will be ready to seriously consider a Socialist presidential candidate in 1948.
The only real risk to Dewey would be if Morrell decided to run for president, but that seems very unlikely since Morrell doesn't seem to have any interest in political office (and appears to be a Democrat anyway.) I don't think there is any other TL-191 general with enough prestige to be a plausible presidential candidate against Dewey.
bguy
Donor
No, but only because I think something like the GI Bill would have already been passed by an earlier president (most likely TR). The political pressure to pass a veterans aid program would have been overwhelming after the First Great War (so such a bill is unlikely to be blocked in Congress) and TR in TL-191 is depicted as being a big believer in noblesse oblige, so he would have felt morally obligated to do something for the millions of men he sent off into battle. Thus something akin to the GI Bill probably passed at some point in TR's second term. And if for some reason TR wasn't able to get a generous veterans bill passed then Upton Sinclair certainly would have done so, since enacting such a bill would be both good policy and good politics (guaranteeing the veterans vote to the Socialists).
Probably. I'd be surprised if the Socialists won an election before at least 1960. Why? Because the Democrats can (accurately) point out that Socialist weakness caused the Second Great War, AND the president before that caused the Great Depression.