AHC: Re-elect Hoover in 1932

[Wmh-fanatic]

While having the Great Depression still happen the way it did, how could Hoover possibly win reelection in 1932? Also, how would WW2 and the rest of the Depression have gone if Hoover was in office until 1937?

 

[Wendell]

Have him veto the tariff bill.

 

[Maniakes]

Take FDR out of contention for the Democratic nomination due to a health crisis, so Al Smith instead becomes the frontrunner for the 1932 nomination. Either Smith gets the nomination and he runs into the same anti-Catholic headwinds that helped sink his 1928 campaign, or the convention has another 1924-style deadlock that leaves the eventual nominee in a much weaker position.

Either way, it's far from a foregone conclusion that Hoover wins. The 1928 landslide in favor of Hoover was no doubt influenced by bias against Smith for being a Catholic who was strongly identified with Irish and Italian immigrant communities, but it was far from the only factor: Hoover had been extremely popular in a cross-partisan way at the time, and he was running as a Republican following a popular Republican president with an apparently booming economy. The depression has firmly reversed both of these latter factors, which could well have gotten Smith a second look from a lot of voters, or which could have gone a long way towards overcoming the handicaps faced by whichever compromise candidate eventually came out of a deadlocked convention. Two other factors in Hoover's 1928 landslide were Prohibition politics (where the electorate had shifted towards Smith's "wet" position between 1928 and 1932) and a lack of ideological distinction between Hoover and Smith (both were seen as technocratic progressive reformers) that magnified the importance of the other issues.

Hoover's best shot might be a deadlocked convention that ended in a Dixiecrat walkout with Garner and Smith running on separate tickets in a three-way general election. Garner would probably sweep the South, and Smith would likely pick up his OTL 1928 states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island plus his home state of New York (which he narrowly lost in 1928), but neither of the would likely play well enough in the West or Midwest to overcome the disadvantage of splitting the potential Democratic vote: Gardner was too conservative to appeal strongly to progressive voters, while Smith tended to be unappealing to rural and Protestant communities.

 

[Galba Otho Vitelius]

Smith lost badly in 1928, but it wasn't a total blowout. Hoover won by a nationwide popular vote margin of 17.4%. However, Smith was the first Democratic presidential candidate since Wilson in 1916 to get over 40% of the vote. He nearly doubled the raw vote total of the 1924 nominee, about 15 million as opposed to about 8 million.

In 1932, Roosevelt got 57.4% of the nationwide popular vote, with almost 23 million votes and an 18.8% margin over Hoover.

Since all the issues have turned Smith's way between 1928 and 1932, I think he wins in 1932, but its just a closer rate. I think he does about 5% worse than FDR and Hoover does about 5% better. It appears this doubles both the number of states Hoover carried, from six to twelve, and also his electoral vote total, from 59 to 118.

None of the additional 1932 Hoover states are in the South, and only one, Kansas, is sort of in the West. In 1928, Hoover carried six Confederate states and Smith carried Smith, counting Oklahoma, which Hoover won in a landslide, as a Confederate state. None of the Confederate states were close in 1932. In 1928, Texas was close, and Hoover carried only Florida and Oklahoma by more than 10% of the vote. In 1932, the closest former Confederate state was Tennessee, which Roosevelt carried with a margin of 34%. Roosevelt carried Oklahoma by 47%; Hoover in 1928 carried it by 28%. I suspect some Democratic state parties in the South were secretly aiding Hoover. I don't think that happens in 1932 with a second Smith run.