1940 Election

[PBrunsel]

Wilkie. Wilkie was a former New Deal Democrat and campaigned in 1940 for the New Deal Policies. He left the Democrats in 1937 after the TVA closed down his power company.

[zachman]

I'll support FDR on this, despite my dissatisfaction at his foreign policy prior to this election.

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

WILKIE!

[PBrunsel]

Love the button!

[12th Doctor]

Win With Wilkie!!

[dazzleman]

I probably would have voted for Roosevelt because he was more advanced than Willkie in his recognition of the Nazi threat.

Willkie was supported by some of the people who were apologists for the Nazis, and that would have scared me off from voting for him.

[dunn]

FDR

[© tweed]

FDR

[ShapeShifter]

FDR

[PBrunsel]

FDR has this one won again!

[opebo]

Good lord the choices were abysmal back then.  GOP, such as it was.

[PBrunsel]

No vote for the Socialist. Tht's surprising.

[JohnFKennedy]

No vote for the Socialist. Tht's surprising.

possibly because siege40 hasn't voted yet . He likes the 3rd party socialist guys.

[Erc]

Willkie (or Wilkie, I don't think anyone's sure) actually was very cognizant of the situation in Europe and wasn't as much of an isolationist as his campaign would have you believe, and had been rather outspoken on the issue before his nomination.  During the campaign, he felt that he had to toe the party line a bit more, and positioned himself as the more isolationist of the two.  Had he been elected, that wouldn't have continued and he would have been doing at least as much as Roosevelt did to help out the UK.

EDIT:  My, this is an old thread...why was this bumped?

[Witiko]

FDR, of course. Willkie wasn't such a bad guy, though. Well to the left of the modern Republican Party.

[NDN]

I definitely would have voted for Wilkie. He was far from an isolationist, was actually fairly progressive for his time, and had a proven success record as a businessman. Plus, frankly after the recession of 1937 and other disasters (e.g. court packing) I wouldn't have trusted him to solve the country's problems either. He really didn't deserve a second term, let alone a third IMO.

[Adlai Stevenson]

Roosevelt!  Roosevelt!  Roosevelt! 

[StateBoiler]

I definitely would have voted for Wilkie. He was far from an isolationist, was actually fairly progressive for his time, and had a proven success record as a businessman. Plus, frankly after the recession of 1937 and other disasters (e.g. court packing) I wouldn't have trusted him to solve the country's problems either. He really didn't deserve a second term, let alone a third IMO.

Whether we like the man or not, I find it ludicrous for a person 71 years into the future to argue that FDR did not deserve a second term when he got 60.8% of the vote and won 523 out of 531 electoral votes. Even Reagan's 1984 win over Mondale and Nixon's 1972 win over McGovern were not as comprehensive a victory.

[War on Want]

FDR, but Wilkie is not bad.

[gorkay]

It's Willkie with two L's, by the way.

Willkie was a good man but a rank amateur as a candidate. He wasn't even a politician, actually-- I don't think he had ever run for elective office before. If not for the anti-third-term sentiment and the turning of the farm-belt states against FDR, he probably would have lost as badly as Hoover or even Landon. I think it's neat that, after the election, FDR sent him on an around-the-world trip as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. (about which Willkie wrote a best-selling book, One World). Imagine G.W. Bush doing that with Gore or Kerry. Just goes to show you how things have changed-- for the worse.

I may have voted for Charles Lindbergh in the 1940 election (you'll know what I'm talking about if you've read Philip Roth's book The Plot Against America).

[wdecker1]

FDR