WI: Fillmore Vs Buchanan

Who'd win the election

  • Millard Fillmore (Whig)

    Votes: 7 43.8%
  • James Buchanan (Democrat)

    Votes: 9 56.3%

  • Total voters
    16
Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan have gone down as some of the most forgettable and poorly received presidents in American history. Both of which were serious nominees for the Whig and Democrat party respectively in 1852, but lost to Franklin Pierce and Winfield Scott. But what if they didn't? What if the election saw Fillmore seeking re-election and Buchanan seeking to be president in place of Pierce? Who do you think would win? How do you think they would've handled the presidency?
 
You know this actually happened in 1856. In 1852 Buchanan would likely win the Whigs were starting to collapse due to slavery.
 
Looking at the state-by-state results in 1856, if you make the generous assumption that Fillmore (Whig) would have gotten every Fremont vote in addition to his OTL votes as the Know-Nothing/Whig fusion nominee, Buchanan still would have won. The only states Buchanan won with less than 50% of the popular vote (apart from South Carolina, which didn't have a popular vote for President) were Illinois, New Jersey, and California for a combined 25 electoral votes. That would leave Buchanan with 149, exactly the total he'd need to win. Buchanan would have lost the popular vote in this scenario, by a pretty big margin: I'm guessing because the census was six years out of date and many of the western states had gained a lot of voters since 1850.

But you asked about 1852, which had a different political environment than 1856. Still, Pierce won by a pretty convincing margin in 1852 (7% of the popular vote, almost all of the electoral votes, and about 6.5% in the electoral tipping-point state). Buchanan would have needed to be a much weaker candidate than Pierce, and Fillmore a much stronger candidate than Scott, in order to swing that margin.
 
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