alternatehistory.com

Now hear me out before you denounce me as a heathen for suggesting this, let me give you some backstory.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but on a website (americanhistoryusa.com) there’s a game called the Campaign Trail, it’s pretty fun - I’m sure you can guess what it’s about.

Now, I just played a game through of it as Thomas Dewey in 1948 and the end result was that I had a 33 vote advantage in the Electoral vote, but not enough to win the election outright since Truman won California but lost 38 votes in the south to Thurmond.

The result of this was that the House of Reps now gets to decide the outcome. That’s where the game ends and this part begins. Since I had won the electoral vote but Truman had managed to win the popular vote (by around 300,000) and the southern states would be demanding concessions, it got me thinking.

Here’s the text the game gave at the end:
No candidate captured an Electoral College majority.
This leaves everyone in a bad situation. Segregationists from the South are demanding concessions before they will support a candidate, leaving the House deadlocked. Perhaps you can work out a deal with Truman to circumvent this, based on who has the plurality of popular and electoral votes. It's always possible that one of you could serve as the other's Vice President.


Now - since Truman won the popular vote and is the incumbent, I’d assume Dewey might be able to let the campaign be in the past in exchange for a promise of an influential Vice-Presidency.

While neither would be thrilled about it naturally, it would allow them both, especially Truman to avoid making deals with the segregationists in this case.

So, obviously this might not be the most plausible, but it’s interesting. Let’s say everything goes roughly as I said it does and Truman keeps his word making sure Dewey has regular access to him (weekly or even daily meetings with just the two of them, or something along those lines) and taking his opinions into consideration, making it a partnership of sorts, if an unbalanced one, after all he still gets the final say of course.

What are some short term effects of this? Obviously if we get this far into the future it might be too butterflyey to accurately predict it but with a “Coalition” government of sorts how might this play out over the course of the next four years?


EDIT: Oh, yes and since Dewey is relatively moderate, or even liberal (though of course whether those views are sincere are up in the air) it would make it a far easier pill to swallow
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