WI: Franklin Pierce renominated in 1860?

According to his wikipedia page, Franklin Pierce was considered by many Democrats to be a good compromise candidate that could unite both the northern and southern Democrats. However, he declined to run, and his name was never put back into consideration.

So firstly, how true was this?

Secondly, if Pierce had been named as a candidate to the Convention, would they have nominated him again?

Thirdly, if he had been the nominee, could he have defeated Lincoln?

And finally, if Pierce, by some miracle, had won a nonconsecutive second term, how does this affect the course of American politics?
 
No idea of the veracity but I'm somewhat skeptical given that his wife was in no condition to be a functional first lady during his only term in OTL (recall their son died in a railroad accident just before Inauguration Day 1853, and Jane Pierce was effectively a recluse throughout her husband's term). However, let's play the game.

An ex-president thrown into the mix would complicate things for the Dems, no question--especially a doughface like Pierce. That might make southern Dems less inclined to split off and run Breckenridge instead, but on the flip side it could well push fence-sitters onto the Republican/northern side.

I think that even had he secured the nomination, Pierce would have lost. The nation was too polarized by then to believe in compromise significantly.

Now: verging on ASB territory, had somehow Pierce pulled off a miracle and won, chances are you're delaying the inevitable by a few years, but probably making it worse by hardening attitudes on both sides to a near-irreconcilable level. Likely you'd get a real fight to the finish, with the Union offering no quarter once it got the upper hand. The south would be ruined completely, effectively scraping by as a subsistence agrarian colony for one, perhaps two generations to come. Anyone who could escape would, going west or (less likely) north, resulting in an area with a tiny middle class, a tiny wealthy oligarchy, and a large underclass living largely hand to mouth.

Bottom line: Pierce was one of the five least competent/worst presidents as it was; another term would have made a bad situation worse yet. Just as well that it never happened.
 
Bottom line: Pierce was one of the five least competent/worst presidents as it was; another term would have made a bad situation worse yet. Just as well that it never happened.

The problem exactly: Pierce was so discredited in 1856 that he wasn't renominated, and it's hard to believe that his administration looked all that much better four years later.

Notwithstanding the quote in the opening post, total spinelessness when dealing with the slaveholder interests -- a fair characterization of Pierce's record -- is not much of a 'compromise'.

If he is nominated, the Democrats lose every northern state. I don't know if that's enough to enable Lincoln to win. If not, maybe the North secedes.
 
Lincoln won every Northern state in OTL anyway, with the sole exception of New Jersey. So a Pierce nomination probably just means Lincoln wins every northern state and the South secedes as OTL.

EDIT: I was looking at Leip's US election atlas, and apparently Lincoln won the electoral vote in New Jersey 4-3, but lost the state popular vote. So I guess you could say Lincoln did in fact win every Northern state IOTL. I didn't know that "lose popular vote, win electoral vote" thing had ever happened at the _state_ level. America's a weird country, isn't it?
 
EDIT: I was looking at Leip's US election atlas, and apparently Lincoln won the electoral vote in New Jersey 4-3, but lost the state popular vote. So I guess you could say Lincoln did in fact win every Northern state IOTL. I didn't know that "lose popular vote, win electoral vote" thing had ever happened at the _state_ level. America's a weird country, isn't it?
The story behind that is actually incredibly stupid. The way the New Jersey ballot was organised was that you actually voted for the electors directly -- the parties distributed ballots with the names of electors supporting their candidate on them, and that's what you voted with. Now, at first the Douglas campaign had printed their own ballots of seven Douglas-pledged electors. But then when it became clear that Lincoln had a plurality of support in New Jersey, the Douglas, Breckenridge and Bell campaigns came together as an "anybody but Lincoln" fusion ticket, and printed new ballots with a mix of electors on them: three for Douglas, two for Breckenridge, two for Bell.

Except that on election day, an election official in one district said "Fuck that!" and distributed the old Douglas-only ballots instead. And so, even though a majority of New Jersey voters voted for either the fusion ticket or the Douglas-only ticket, only the three electors who were on both of those tickets got a majority of the vote. The splitting of the vote between the fusion ballots and the Douglas-only ballots meant that four of Lincoln's electors won a plurality. And so Lincoln got more electoral votes from New Jersey than Douglas even though he got fewer votes.
 
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