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

[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.