1860: South unites behind Douglas

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Indiana and Pennsylvania would almost certainly vote for Douglas before Ohio (which even Frémont won in '56), and I tend to think New York would go Democratic as well in a scenario where Douglas has a national majority. Of course, the greater difficulty is for Douglas to win back the Southern fire eaters who backed Breckinridge IOTL without simultaneously alienating the Old Northwest. I tend to think a Democratic victory was impossible by 1860 short of adjudication by the House; the country was too deeply divided to elect a national candidate, and the mathematics of the electoral college meant the North would outvote the South in a sectional contest.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Also what happened in SC

20% shading indicates the state's electors were chosen by the state legislature.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Lincoln still prevails with 157 EVs with Douglas winning OH and losing IL.

LOL, no. Ohio was a Republican bastion and the center of anti-slavery activity west of the Appalachians going back to the 1840s. Under no circumstances would it vote for Douglas before his own home state.

[snip]

These are . . . very bad. In particular, Bell as the anti-Republican unity candidate makes no sense at all in the context of 1860. Even if Bell somehow convinces the South to back his candidacy, why would Northern Democrats support a Southern Whig? I'd expect Lincoln to do better in the North in a one-on-one race against Bell, who would be unlikely to receive the support of immigrants or wage laborers who backed the Democratic ticket IOTL.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Also, why did Lincoln win majorities in Northern states IRL, that it would have been unlikely to obtain in a two way race.

1860 effectively was a two-way race, or rather two separate head-to-head contests on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. The division of the Democratic Party along sectional lines meant there was no truly national candidate as in 1856: so in the North, the election was between Lincoln and Douglas, while Bell was an afterthought and Breckinridge a nonentity. In New York and Pennsylvania, the Democrats arranged a fusion ticket pledged to both Douglas and Breckinridge, hoping to deny Lincoln an electoral majority —without success. As stated previously, sectional politics meant that no candidate could successfully appeal to North and South simultaneously —so any scenario where Lincoln has a single opponent likely results in him winning by more popular vote-wise than IOTL.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I always have been curious on how much the historical perception would be on Douglas on the event that he somehow won. It would be very interesting to see a timeline of that.

Assuming he still dies in the summer of '61 (and I've never heard of the presidency improving one's health), we'd end up with President Joseph Lane or President Herschel Johnson, which would be . . . not good.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I always have been curious on how much the historical perception would be on Douglas on the event that he somehow won. It would be very interesting to see a timeline of that.

Assuming he still dies in the summer of '61 (and I've never heard of the presidency improving one's health), we'd end up with President Joseph Lane or President Herschel Johnson, which would be . . . not good.

Lane is beyond terrible, but Johnson was one of the more moderate southern Democrats (note lower case "s"), he would basically be James Buchanan, all over again, which is bad, but not anywhere, near as bad as Lane.

Still puzzles me how Lane got elected in Oregon and Confederate sympathizers got elected in California

Buchanan was hardly a moderate: to the contrary he covertly pressured the Supreme Court to back Taney's ruling in Scott v. Sanford and his administration was emptying federal arsenals to outfit the Confederate Army in the months leading up to Lincoln's inauguration. Johnson was a "moderate" Southern Democrat only in the sense that he thought the South should wait for Lincoln to act against slavery and then secede, rather than seceding preemptively. There was nothing moderate about his actual views on slavery or its future in the territories.

As for Oregon and California, the settlers who emigrated there after the Mexican War were hardly Yankee Puritans, and both states leaned Democratic throughout the 1850s in spite of being nominally "free" states. Much like Indiana and Illinois, California outlawed slavery because whites there feared the competition from unpaid slave labor: otherwise, the state remained hostile to blacks and generally Southern in its sympathies. Only the diligent efforts of pro-Union citizens in the months leading up to Fort Sumter prevented secessionists from taking California out of the Union, either as an independent republic or a Confederate state.