who would you have voted for?

[AuH2O]

1860: Bell or possibly Breckenridge
1864: McClellan
1868: Seymour
1872: Greeley
1876: Tilden
1880: Hancock
1884: Cleveland
1888: Cleveland
1892: Cleveland
1896: Bryan
1900: Bryan
1904: Roosevelt
1908: Bryan
1912: Roosevelt
1916: Hughes
1920: Cox
1924: Coolidge
1928: Hoover
1932: Hoover
1936: Landon
1940: Willkie
1944: Dewey
1948: Thurmond
1952: Eisenhower
1956: Eisenhower
1960: Nixon
1964: Goldwater
1968: Wallace
1972: Nixon or Schmitz
1976: Ford
1980: Reagan
1984: Reagan
1988: Paul
1992: Perot
1996: Dole
2000: Buchanan
2004?: Peroutka/write-in

Party totals:
Democratic: 11
Republican: 18
Other: 7 (+1?)

[AuH2O]

War was completely unnecessary. Anyone other than Lincoln and the US would have been saved 600,000 lives (5% of the population) and untold suffering and destruction.

Bell was dedicated to preserving the Union (hence his party name) while being fair to Southern grievances. Breckenridge was a terrific statesman that would have solved the problem... he was definitely the most qualified. Douglass likewise would have probably succeeded.

Lincoln was hellbent on war because of his economic views... i.e. anti-trade socialism (he was admired by Marx).

In fact, the election of Lincoln was probably the single most destructive event in US history.

[AuH2O]

Slavery was no longer benefitial economically because of the cotton gin. The South only kept it to spite the North... many Southerners had no use for it. Virginia almost banned it around 1830 but it fell a few votes short-- and that was because they wanted help recolonizing freed slaves from the national government.

Lincoln precipitated the Civil War because 1) the South only seceded because he won the election and 2) he was sending ships to resupply Fort Sumter, which was a violation of Confederate territory and an act of war in itself.

With a real leader, say Breckenridge, the US would have been that much stronger... a superpower long before WW2.

In Lincoln's defense, he was moderate by Republican standards of the time. A large number of Republicans wanted to kill every white in the South, or at the very least kill all the men and force all the women to be sex slaves of freed black men (including Lincoln's successor as Governor of Illinois). Reconstruction was equivalent to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, though several illegal state governments were overthrown by the people.

[AuH2O]

Do you hate 5% of the national population?



You know, it's funny, but if people on this board were to vote in historical elections (maybe we should try that sometime), there would be some weird results.

In 1900, the choice is a bit tough. I put Bryan because otherwise I would be wildly random. Keep in mind the Congress had more power back then, relative to the White House.

[AuH2O]

Guys, BRTD has a point... Nixon was anti-communist. What an evil man indeed.

Though pragmatic in the case of China. It is VERY possible the Soviets would have attacked the ChiComs if Nixon hadn't "suggested" the US would enter the war on the side of Chinese. The Soviets were less than impressed with China's nuclear weapons program.

In some ways though, Nixon was too politically astute to truly stand for what he knew to be true. He knew, of course, that the honorable Sen. McCarthy was essentially correct (McCarthy's main error was underestimating the number of communists in the government and the media), but he was much less vocal about the problem.

And, he should have talked to JFK and asked him not to invent the "missile gap." Nixon did not want to tip off the Soviets to our intelligence (they had virtually no reliable ICBMs in 1960, and a very poor bomber force composed of the ponderous "Bear"), so he let JFK claim Ike and himself had been asleep at the helm. He paid the price...