I was doing a bit of research of Orson Welles, who was quite political in his life, and once considered running for the US Senate in his home State of Wisconsin in 1946, which in OTL went to Joseph McCarthy. What if Welles had decided to run? Could he have beaten McCarthy? What sort of political career could he go on to have? Dare I say..."President Orson Welles"?
It depends on which party, honestly (and I don't know enough about Orson Wells' political views to rally make a blanket statement.) If Wells runs as a Republican, he is going to find himself in a feirce three-way battle between McCarthy, incumbant senator Bob Lafollette Jr., and himself. The problem, of course, being that, if Wells is on the left, he is going to be struggling to compete with votes from the very established, and respcted, Senator LaFollette.
The other option is to run as a Democrat. Te Dems would love to have him; there is no doubt about that, seeing as how the Democratic Party in the state was only just building itself into a viable second-party.
There are, of course, problems. The first being, of course, that the party apparatus was very weak throughout the state at this point. The starpower of Mr. Wells might well be able to overcome this, however. Second is the fact that in OTL, the Democrats spent much of the primary attacking LaFollette, who they felt would be their opponent in November (and who they were still angered with for not running as a Democrat that year. LaFollette, up until 1946, had spent the last ten years as a member of the Wisconsin Progressive Party). These attacks worked better than expected, and played a part in LaFollette's narrow loss to McCarthy in the primary. However, if Wells is in the Democratic field, he may not take to such a strategy, and could end up facing LaFollette in November ... at which point he loses.
Even if all goes perfectly, and Wells ends up going up against McCarthy, the weaker candidate, we still have the problem of the Democrats having praticly no existence outside of SE Wisconsin and Madison, at that point. In OTL, the Dems would not coem to power in the state for another 12 years, after all.
So, COULD Orson Wells make a run in 1946 and win? Well, it certainly plausible, but not at all likely during that year. At least if he wants to run for Senate.