If Taft was nominated and won, would that result in a more dovish Republican Party?
Most likely, since he was such a strong isolationist. Then, Truman was unpopular enough that Taft could have won as easily as Eisenhower did, possibly more so in the electoral vote even if the Democrats held a few northeastern states.
Even if more dovish, this GOP might have been just as or more hostile to non-whites than it actually has become since the Reagan Era. As James Löwen showed in his landmark 2005 book
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,
most of the country outside the plantation (“traditional” as Löwen terms it) South was so hostile to blacks that they were not allowed to live there. Löwen also shows that the isolationist Midwest and Plains States were in many ways
more racist than the interventionist plantation South.
