Hypothetical US Presidential Election, 1848: Polk seeks a second term.

[TDAS04]

Well?

[SWE]

MVB

[Murica!]

Martin Van Buren(literally normal), and anyone who votes otherwise should be hanged for treason.

[Famous Mortimer]

Even without the slavery issue, Polk is a war criminal who started a war of aggression against Mexico. That was obvious even as it happened. Too many people forgive Polk, wrongly thinking that invading another country for no reason was acceptable behavior back then. It wasn't. It was more common but educated people still had the common sense to know it was wrong. Both Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams condemned the Mexican War as the travesty it was.

[YaBoyNY]

Obvious vote for Polk.

[The Mikado]

Is the question who wins or who would I vote for?

Polk was an ill man anyway and even if he weren't, van Buren would undermine him considerably in the North just like he did to Cass. I have Polk winning by a very narrow margin, probably in a "Polk wins the electoral vote but loses the popular vote" scenario, by swinging Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee, and perhaps Delaware and Maryland. i suspect Polk would've signed the Compromise of 1850 and been a terrible president in his second term as a result.

Van Buren would've been best, obviously, and if I were voting in New York or something he'd have my vote, but if I were in a swing state like Pennsylvania I might consider voting for Taylor. If Zachary Taylor hadn't died when he did he could've actually done a lot of good. The man might've been a southern slaveholder, but he was firmly committed to the US and had zero tolerance for secessionists, and his opposition to the Compromise of 1850 might have just provoked a premature and half-hearted Southern rebellion crushed at swordpoint by a Southerner that would've put the South in a much harder bargaining position.

[TDAS04]

Is the question who wins or who would I vote for?

Who you'd vote for. 

[sparkey]

Interesting 3-President match up. Reminds me of 1912 in a way.

I'd vote for Van Buren, because he had BY FAR the best platform. Taylor ended up being a pretty good President as well, but did so despite his wishy-washy platform. Polk was effective, and I actually don't find the Mexican-American War to have been entirely unjustified (people forget how belligerent Mexico was at the time), although I wouldn't trust him in peacetime and the slavery issue is an obviously huge concern.

The main concern with Van Buren: How would the South have responded if he had been elected? Is it possible that his Free Soil platform could have pushed America into an early Civil War or similar sort of event? IMO, it's unlikely. Most of the South had voted for him in 1836, so he wasn't disliked in the same way that Lincoln was, and Southern politics wasn't as dominated by fire eaters in 1848 as in 1860. Best-case scenario with a Van Buren election is slavery being strangled early with no Civil War, and I think that possibility would have been worth voting for.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Van Buren without a doubt. Polk is absolutely unacceptable: most people don't realize just how underhanded his conduct in the Mexican-American War was. Taylor turned out to be a decent president with hindsight, but at the time I would have been suspicious of him due to his Southern roots and his seeming lack of a concrete ideology.

The main concern with Van Buren: How would the South have responded if he had been elected? Is it possible that his Free Soil platform could have pushed America into an early Civil War or similar sort of event? IMO, it's unlikely. Most of the South had voted for him in 1836, so he wasn't disliked in the same way that Lincoln was, and Southern politics wasn't as dominated by fire eaters in 1848 as in 1860. Best-case scenario with a Van Buren election is slavery being strangled early with no Civil War, and I think that possibility would have been worth voting for.

I disagree. The South had serious reservations about Van Buren even in 1836: without Jackson's support, I don't think he could have carried the region. Six slave states, including South Carolina, voted for the Whigs that year, and Virginia's electors refused to support Van Buren's running mate. Furthermore, Van Buren's 1848 platform was virtually identical to Lincoln's in 1860. In my opinion, the South would not have tolerated the election of an anti-slavery president, even one who had been their ally in the past.