United States Presidential Election, 1920 (Southern Victory)

The United States presidential election of 1920 was a landmark event in United States political history. For the first time since 1880 the Democratic Party had lost a presidential election to an opposing political party, which in this election was the Socialist Party. It was also the first time in American history that a sitting president ran for a third-term, though president [Theodore Roosevelt]] was defeated in his bid by Upton Sinclair of New Jersey.

Nominations
Theodore Roosevelt was nominated by the Democrats at their national convention in the summer of 1920, along with Vice President McKenna. At the Socialist Party national convention, held in Toledo, Ohio, Upton Sinclair was chosen; his running mate was Hosea Blackford, a congressman from Dakota. After losing the previous three elections, Senator Eugene V. Debs was no longer the front-runner.

The Election
The Socialists campaigned on enacting reform and welfare for the working and middle classes; the Democrats ran on the fact they had won the Great War, even though they also had to contend with the millions of men killed and wounded in that conflict as the Socialists reminded them. The Democrats wanted to continue spending taxpayers' money on arms and keeping the defeated Confederacy down. However, Americans were fatigued by having the Democrats sit in power for so many decades. The Socialists captured Congress in the midterm election of 1918; this time they had the strength and the right message to land themselves in the Powel House.

Sinclair defeated Roosevelt that November, surprising many who had gotten used to the Democratic candidate always winning and the Socialist candidate always losing. When Sinclair took the oath of office in Franklin Square in Philadelphia on March 4, 1921, he inaugurated a new era in US politics, one in which the Democrats were no longer dominant. With the Great War over and revenge on the CSA gained, the country felt it was time to move on, and the result of that was Upton Sinclair's election. He would guide the country through unprecedented prosperity for the rest of the decade, though that prosperity would ultimate result in economic disaster and the return of the Democrats to Powel House in 1932.