If we can go WAY back, how about Cresap's War blowing open to the point of more forceful Crown intervention? The idea of Maryland being partitioned a couple of generations before the ARW would be massive. Say Virginia cedes their share of the Delmarva, and the Susquehanna River is used as the boundary between Virginia and Pennsylvania, with the Mason Dixon line continuing to the Ohio River for the PA-VA border?
Underused American Political PODs/Scenarios?
- Thread starter Whanztastic
- Start date
I've been toying with an idea like this a while. Except the Populists fade after 1896 with prosperity, leaving an opening for Debs' Social Democrats...
This actually figures in a Tarheel-wank I'm working on not nearly as hard as I should
. Separated from such a longer-term perspective, one very interesting possibility is that Gantt skips the big event with Helms in 1990, Terry Sanford sees his health issues coming and decides as a final political statement to step aside on the assumption that Gantt will run for the seat in 1992. I suspect in the confusion of the '92 elections (the 1990 change is not a butterfly strong enough to blow that away by itself, AH conventions aside) he might take Faircloth. Then you can build on some very interesting developments from there. (Sidebar: I was up close to that 1990 campaign, knew his youngest daughter in college -- she was an RA one dorm over from mine -- and it was the first major election in which I was eligible to vote. A formative experience and one of the modern Democratic Party's great missed opportunities.)As for the question of what has and hasn't been done, the suggestion about "not unused but underused" gets at it well. However, pace Japhy and others: um, no, not even. (Really like that SCOTUS-oriented list a few posts back.) That's not meant to be bluntly and uselessly provocative: it's a matter of site searches as well. Either subjects that simply haven't come up (except perhaps a passing nod in a "US Presidents list" thread or alternate Wikiboxes and the like), or that produced timelines that withered on the vine far too soon. I'd love to see a Republican/Democratic flip as some have suggested (there was a recent TLIAD with a remarkably recent lurch towards Democratic conservatism), which could have any number of PODs. One pleasant little prospect is a rift in the friendship between Grover Cleveland and the Hyde Park Roosevelts. There are plenty of others esp. around the contested Democratic conventions of the 1900s through 1920s.
A thoughtful "Flip the Gipper" TL could get interesting, galvanizing the neocon tendency sooner (I've wargamed that one for an abandoned Alternate Elections entry: Reagan stays depressed over his divorce longer, misses the husband-hunting campaign of young Nancy, and gets close to Rosemary Clooney just at the point when IOTL he was courting Nance and she became involved with Jose Ferrer. This tethers him just enough to the Dems and, via Clooney, could make him a Kennedy fellow-traveler, but I doubt it would alter his black-and-white triumphal idealism, making him an even better magnet than Scoop Jackson for the proto-neocon crowd.)
Just to tackle, at a chronological micro-history level (one decade), things I simply haven't seen done here on a favorite decade of mine, the 1970s:
- There have been several threads ruminating about a second Ford term but no one, yet, has actually taken it on and run with it in any thorough, lasting way. There's a huge amount of meat on those bones, and that's just the cutthroat West Wing politics just beyond Jerry's desk, much less the state of the country and the world.
- Some years back someone began a Mo Udall timeline but it, too, withered early just past the primaries-porn, general, and Cabinet selection. Good fun to be had there.
- A deeper cultural-structural political timeline, with a different course in the civil wars within the union movement, or over busing and abortion, could get very interesting.
- We've had nothing at all, much less anything of substance, about the two Southern candidates who (I think) would have been far better choices than Carter for that opening for an upstanding Southern reformer: Terry Sanford of North Carolina and Reuben Askew of Florida. Derail Jimmy C's iron determination somehow, write the missing grandfather clause on second terms into North Carolina's 1969-71 constitutional reforms, or get some hitch in Askew's get-along in 1975, and you have a rich and informative variation on the "New Southerner in the White House" theme.
- A modern cross-party Progressive movement in the early Seventies juiced by a far more chaotic 1972 election (disclosure again: I've got that in development), based on trends and even personnel that had never fully died from the 1910s-20s dynamics. And, with them temporarily relegated from power in the mid-Seventies, what if it gives more, not less, energy and cohesion to the New Right in response?
- Some combination of pressures that give Nixon both the opportunity and the desperate, conniving motivation to nominate Reagan for the vice-presidency (we know the alternate draft speech for RR's nomination rather than Ford's exists IOTL thanks to a recent query thread.) What does that 1976, and the couple of years before, look like?
- Taking a Bayh in '76: Really, this election year should've been Birch Bayh's golden moment. Without the sheer, reflexive anti-Washington disgust of the day, or a more effective way to both channel and counter it, he was just the guy both old-line Dems and a number of New Politics liberals could've coalesced around if he had a damned idea how to run a presidential campaign. Go make that happen and see what you stir up.
- Whites of their Eyes: Dan White misfires, or loses his nerve. Where does that take California politics, national politics for that matter, by the end of the decade?
Elsewhere in the timeline, keeping to post-1900, I would love to see richly detailed and lengthy (two terms plus knock-on effects) studies of Charles Evans Hughes' and Bill Bradley's (Bill the hoops-playing liberal icon, not Tom of the "effect," first and long-serving black mayor of LA) presidencies and their influence on American political life. Though Tom Bradley's presidency could be a thing, too. On the other side of the coin I like that idea about Romney Sr.'s presidency, likewise (leaving aside ABOTL's iconic Icarus Falls) a non-Nixonian 1968 in general is fertile ground for, really, a wide range of Republican possibles at a real hinge point in the party's modern development.
Hell, someone could even have fun rehabilitating poor Fritz Mondale by not yoking him to Carter (maybe Carter went with some of his aides' instincts during the selection process and taps Muskie? Or somehow Carter's real initial favorite, Peter Rodino, backtracks and says yes?), and he returns to MN in the governorship sometime during the '80s, becoming by '88/'92 a better Dukakis than Dukakis? There's a great title waiting there for the old Norskie: "A Fjord, Not A Lincoln..."
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1) Garret Hobart survives. We've seen a few threads (and a couple of TR-less TL's) on McKinley living, but none on Hobart succeeding McKinley after his assassination. It's debatable whether or not McKinley would be in the same place at the same time with a different VP, but imho I see no real reason why he wouldn't be. I did actually try and start a Hobart lives discussion, though got nothing in response.
2) I don't think there have been any TL's based around either the 1904 or 1908 elections, though I could be wrong.
3) Woodrow Wilson doesn't remarry, though does have his near-fatal stroke in 1919.
4) There is a lot of discussion on TR 1912, but not much on the consequences of him either sitting out that election in favour of entering 1916, or surviving long enough to be nominated in 1920.
5) Hoover mounts a more professional campaign in 1920, enabling him to either capture the nomination outright, or to be selected as Harding (or someone else's) running mate.
6) Coolidge "Decides not to run" one election cycle early, something which is entirely plausible given the circumstances he was in OTL 1924. There has been one TL on this where Henry Ford "stepped forward", but this is not likely imho.
7) Someone other than Hoover gets the 1928 GOP nomination. I'm surprised it was as close a thing as it was actually given Hoover's popularity at the time, but someone like Loden could've been nominated instead.
8) There is more ranker at the 1932 Dem convention, leading to someone like Albert Richie becoming the nominee. Most TL's involving FDR not becoming President understandably focus on the 1933 assassination as a Pod-and although fascinating, the other alternatives aren't often explored.
2) I don't think there have been any TL's based around either the 1904 or 1908 elections, though I could be wrong.
3) Woodrow Wilson doesn't remarry, though does have his near-fatal stroke in 1919.
4) There is a lot of discussion on TR 1912, but not much on the consequences of him either sitting out that election in favour of entering 1916, or surviving long enough to be nominated in 1920.
5) Hoover mounts a more professional campaign in 1920, enabling him to either capture the nomination outright, or to be selected as Harding (or someone else's) running mate.
6) Coolidge "Decides not to run" one election cycle early, something which is entirely plausible given the circumstances he was in OTL 1924. There has been one TL on this where Henry Ford "stepped forward", but this is not likely imho.
7) Someone other than Hoover gets the 1928 GOP nomination. I'm surprised it was as close a thing as it was actually given Hoover's popularity at the time, but someone like Loden could've been nominated instead.
8) There is more ranker at the 1932 Dem convention, leading to someone like Albert Richie becoming the nominee. Most TL's involving FDR not becoming President understandably focus on the 1933 assassination as a Pod-and although fascinating, the other alternatives aren't often explored.