Talk:United States Presidential Election, 1920 (Southern Victory)

Ok, another one that could stand some trimming:

"The historical election of 1920 was preceded by fairly vigorous nomination battles in both parties, though nothing like the fierce conflict that had divided the Republican Party eight years earlier. The incumbent President, Woodrow Wilson, suffering from poor health, was retiring after two terms, and his Vice President, Thomas Marshall, did not seek the nomination. (In the 20th century it would grow increasingly rare for an election to include neither the incumbent President nor Vice President as a major party's nominee. It had last happened in 1908. It would next happen in 1952, and then not again till 2008.)

The Republican Party ran a ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The Democrats ran James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harding and Cox shared the home state of Ohio: Harding was that state's senior senator (and he became the first of, as of 2010, three sitting senators elected to the White House) and Cox was the governor.

Cox, in deference to Wilson, ran on a platform promoting the very unpopular idea of US membership in the League of Nations, which resulted in a very unpopular platform which greatly hamstrung him. Harding promised "a return to normalcy" (a word which he failed to define) in the wake of World War I and the economic and social unrest which had followed. Harding won in a landslide, even making inroads into the Democratic Solid South : He won Tennessee, becoming the first Republican to win the electoral votes of a state which had attempted to secede and form the Confederate States. The other ten Confederate states and Kentucky were the only states Cox and Roosevelt carried.

With the election of Harding, the Progressive Era was over. "Normalcy" soon proved to be a lie as a period of great technological innovation led to social and economic uncertainty. Harding proved to be an incompetent president, even admitting himself that he was very bad at the job. He died on August 2, 1923 and Coolidge became the sixth Vice President to assume the Presidency.

1920 saw Socialist Eugene V. Debs make the final of his five runs at the White House. This time his running mate was Seymour Stedman, and though he was once again shut out of the Electoral College, he won his highest vote total yet in the popular vote, taking almost a million votes despite serving a prison sentence for advocating non-compliance with the draft during World War I.

Perhaps the real winner of the election was Franklin Roosevelt. Although he was on the losing ticket, he campaigned energetically and gained a national following for the first time. In 1928 he would parlay this into a successful bid for Governor of New York, and in 1932 he would win his first of a record four Presidential elections.

Theodore Roosevelt had been the front runner for the Republican nomination. However, his health began to decline in 1918. He died on January 6, 1919."

Thoughts?

===Parallelism Between OTL and Southern Victory=== Just as 1920 marked the end of the Progressive Era in OTL, it also marked the end of an era of American political history in Southern Victory, with the Remembrance culture losing its forty-year hold as the dominant political ideology.

Many characters had assumed that, should the popular Theodore Roosevelt seek a third term, he would be reelected easily. Roosevelt seems to have been surprised at his defeat. Similar though not identical assumptions were made about Roosevelt's political stock in the historical 1912 election.

As of the end of the Southern Victory series, Roosevelt remains the only President in American history to attempt to be elected to a third consecutive term. In factual history, that distinction is held by his kinsman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who began his rise to national prominence during the 1920 campaign.

Just move the parallelism to the Parallelism in Southern Victory page. TR (talk) 20:53, October 10, 2016 (UTC)