1940 Presidential Election

[Senator Spiral]

President Arthur Vandenberg, who spent much of his political capital to form the American Union in the most notable shakeup in the party system since the Farmer-Laborers and Populists merged twenty years earlier, would find himself betrayed by his very own creation. Surprising political analysts' initial expectations, the moderately popular Vandenberg was upset by Senator Robert Taft, the face of modern conservatism in the AU, who used concerns on Vandenberg's concessions to the former Bull-Meese to his advantage. By the fifth ballot, Taft was decisively the winner. He selected House Minority Leader "Cactus Jack" Garner as his running mate, a vocal opponent of the La Guardia administration, to rally support in the Southern states.

Franklin Roosevelt, last election's BMP nominee, had been in a tough struggle with Henry Wallace over in the Workers' Party. After the other candidates were weeded out during the convention due to insufficient support, Roosevelt was favored by the party establishment and many believed that he would eventually prevail. However, Wallace had connected better with the party delegates, offering a much more ambitious vision for his presidency than Roosevelt. To the great dismay of party bosses, Wallace was nominated after nearly a dozen ballots. Wallace's running mate would be Senator Parley P. Christensen, an elder figure in the progressive movement who was a natural fit for him.

With the general election underway, the contrasts between the two tickets have been called the starkest since the Cannon-Debs duel of 1908. Taft and Garner are running on a robustly conservative platform: eliminating deficit spending, scaling back nationalization of the economy, and limiting the influence of labor unions. Despite favoring limited government interference in many economic matters, Taft has pledged to keep Social Security and public housing intact, programs which he is in favor of. Taft is also running on a strong non-interventionist platform, promising to keep the United States out of the conflict in Europe, where a fascist Germany has made great gains in the last few years. Wallace and Christensen are running on a massive expansion of the programs launched under La Guardia. Among the top priorities of a Wallace administration include introducing universal healthcare, a massive jobs program, further nationalization, and establishing closer ties with the Soviet Union. On racial matters, Wallace is just as radical: equal rights for African-Americans, including the legalization of interracial marriage and a federal ban on segregation.

[Senator Spiral]

Forgot to mention earlier, but these are going for two days now so we can speed things up, so everyone knows.

Taft wins with a good turnout of over forty people. 1944 will be up pretty soon.

[Senator Spiral]

Are you going to bump all these threads?

Only as far as Spiral has run the series [the Primaries and Conventions by Jones/X were grandfathered in because they lead-up into this], because he's the one who has given the greenlights and the President list stopped after 1936 originally.

The original Master and his immediate predecessor (X) pretty gave a big shrug, and Al Jones and Dallasfan have been silent.

How about just posting links to these elections in a post in the Master thread so you don't clog up the board with polls people can no longer vote on?

I agree with this. At some point we all got lazy with providing links in the master thread, but archiving them all would be very convenient and neater.