President Wilson agreed to send a limited force of American troops into Russian territory in summer 1918 as part of the
Polar Bear Expedition, America's first anti-Communist crusade and one of its first wars of aggression. This amounted to relatively little; American deaths totaled only 110 and killed even fewer Red Army soldiers.
But let's change this, purely for the sake of changing it. Say that, rather than retreat from Arkhangelsk, the Soviets reinforced their position using the captured Allied war materiel and decimate the 85th Division, inflicting six or seven hundred casualties on the Americans before they can take the city. Wilson, as resolved as ever to win the war, begins to expand America's involvement in Russia, forming a relationship with the Whites analogous to that of America and the South Vietnamese, supporting General Pyotr Wrangel, a monarchist, as the most conservative possible leader for the movement.
The situation escalates into an anti-American guerrilla war over the next few years, while events in Europe play out largely the same. The 1920 Presidential election is approaching in the United States, and both major Parties are planning to campaign around the conduct of the Polar Bear Expedition.
The Democrats have nominated Wilson Attorney General
Andrew Mitchell Palmer for President, feeling his anti-Communist Raids as Attorney General make him uniquely qualified to tackle the Red Menace. South Carolina governor
Richard Manning, a Progressive segregationist, is nominated to balance the ticket geographically and ideologically.
The Republicans have taken up a dovish position on the issue of the Polar Bear Expedition, hoping to channel anti-World War sentiment into a broader peace coalition against the Russian intervention. Towards this end they nominate Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette for President and humanitarian Herbert Hoover for Vice-President.
Eugene Debs is mounting a third-party Socialist campaign from prison.
How do you vote, and how does the nation vote? Discuss with maps.
(Comparable elections: 1964, 1968, 1972 IRL)