Could Huey Long have finished ahead of Alf Landon in 1936?

[Senator Incitatus]

Title is somewhat self-explanatory; Could Long have finished ahead in the popular or electoral vote in 1936?

Polling before Long's death had him at somewhere between 6–7M votes. Landon finished with 16.6M. It's somewhat hard to say if Long would have finished ahead of Landon's 8 electoral votes. On the one hand, he likely would have won more electoral votes than 8. His home state of Louisiana alone had 10. But he'd probably eat into Roosevelt's votes in enough places for Landon to pick some more up.

Follow-up question: Could his party (the Union Party or some other) have supplanted the Republicans as the alternative to Roosevelt's Democrats?

[Orwell]

Well Long never planned on "running" for President in 1936. IIRC he planned to challenge FDR at the convention and then the American Union Party would form from his faction of the party with another candidate. Burton K. Wheeler, William Borah, and Floyd Olson were considered for the role of sacrificial lamb candidates. Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, Huey Long and Gerald Smith were going to use their own bases of support to fracture the Democratic party and lead Alf Landon to victory. 4 years later Huey Long was going to win the Presidency on the American Union Party line.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Well Long never planned on "running" for President in 1936. IIRC he planned to challenge FDR at the convention and then the American Union Party would form from his faction of the party with another candidate. Burton K. Wheeler, William Borah, and Floyd Olson were considered for the role of sacrificial lamb candidates. Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, Huey Long and Gerald Smith were going to use their own bases of support to fracture the Democratic party and lead Alf Landon to victory. 4 years later Huey Long was going to win the Presidency on the American Union Party line.

This is why some conspiracy theorists have speculated that FDR feared that Long could have been a spoiler and was behind his assassination. It's nonsense of course and I honestly don't even buy the premise. A third party like that could have taken a significant number of votes away from FDR and even cost him a few states but I don't think it would be enough to allow Landon to win. There's no way in hell any Republican was winning that election, Republicans were about as reviled nationally as they would be during Watergate or the 2008 financial collapse and the New Deal was so popular that it effectively neutralized any threat that a third party could have posed.

To answer the original question, it's possible but unlikely. They may have come close though.

[TheElectoralBoobyPrize]

Well Long never planned on "running" for President in 1936. IIRC he planned to challenge FDR at the convention and then the American Union Party would form from his faction of the party with another candidate. Burton K. Wheeler, William Borah, and Floyd Olson were considered for the role of sacrificial lamb candidates. Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, Huey Long and Gerald Smith were going to use their own bases of support to fracture the Democratic party and lead Alf Landon to victory. 4 years later Huey Long was going to win the Presidency on the American Union Party line.

This is why some conspiracy theorists have speculated that FDR feared that Long could have been a spoiler and was behind his assassination. It's nonsense of course and I honestly don't even buy the premise. A third party like that could have taken a significant number of votes away from FDR and even cost him a few states but I don't think it would be enough to allow Landon to win. There's no way in hell any Republican was winning that election, Republicans were about as reviled nationally as they would be during Watergate or the 2008 financial collapse and the New Deal was so popular that it effectively neutralized any threat that a third party could have posed.

To answer the original question, it's possible but unlikely. They may have come close though.

Yeah....Roosevelt was popular enough in 1936 to survive a third party challenge from the left. New Hampshire was the only close state...that doesn’t get Landon elected. Only a few more states were within single digits.

[Alben Barkley]

No. Alf Landon got 36.5%. To surpass that, he'd need to either win over a bunch of Landon voters to effectively replace him as the main anti-FDR candidate or cut FDR's support basically in half to make it a three-way race. The first is preposterous; Landon's voters were diehard Republicans who weren't budging that year, least of all to Huey Long. And the second isn't much less preposterous; Long was too extreme and Roosevelt was too popular. He might have spoiled him in NH but that's about it. Well, he also had enough power in LA to win it or maybe even keep FDR off the ballot, but in most other states it's hard to see him doing well enough to have a significant impact. And there's just no conceivable way he does well enough nationwide to reach the upper 30s as a third party candidate.

Most likely outcome is that he does indeed get around 7.8%, which again could be enough to spoil FDR in NH, maybe KS, maybe LA for other reasons, but that's about it. That would be roughly equivalent to Perot 1996 as far as third party candidates go. Not even Perot 1992, much less Wallace 1968 or Roosevelt 1912 or anything.