Wallace won't get nominated. Roosevelt was the glue that held the Democratic Party's different factions together (Tammany Hall and Chicago to the north, the Pendergast-style machines out west, and the Deep South), and his death would make the convention a free-for-all. I could easily see Wallace serving out the rest of FDR's term and giving the nomination to another compromise candidate like Truman or some other Democrat.
If that's the case, I could see Dewey pulling off a victory. FDR is dead and the Democratic nominee won't have the incumbent effect going for them. Really, I think the only thing keeping Dewey from winning in 1944 was FDR. Had it been any other candidate, Dewey would probably win.
I hate agreeing with your final conclusion--Dewey wins--and I was going to jump in and point out the first poster who said this was wrong because New York State would not turn on FDR's party--but then I remembered the clincher:
Dewey was from New York, NYC to be exact.
Anyone ever see
Marked Woman? Quite the
film noir, and ripped from contemporary headlines. Humphrey Bogart plays the crusading anti-Mob prosecutor. He's a very thinly fictionalized version of Dewey.
I'm also remembering Fiorello LaGuardia was a Republican too.
With the Democratic coalition ripping itself apart, New Deal progressive versus Dixiecrat with moderate conservative machine Democrats forming a third (fractious!) faction, if the R's could grab the most populous state in the Union they'd have it.
Well, this also answers that other thread, the one with the poll about under what circumstances would FDR bow out of the 1940 election. The poll focused only on foreign affairs, and I voted (with the majority at the time, as it happened) that under no circumstances would FDR have sat it out, no matter how calm the situation was overseas. To this I'd add, the only circumstance where he'd withdraw would be if there was some obvious successor to himself that stood ready to hold together the whole disjoint Democratic coalition and that had the solid public popularity edge he'd earned. No such person existed, no such would be likely to (because FDR himself would pre-empt them) therefore FDR must run for a third term or toss aside everything he'd worked for.
It doesn't prove, as I also asserted, that he'd
win in 1940 if matters overseas were less dark. But I think he would; he had the political capital with the majority of voters and sufficient support among enough of the nation's big capitalists. Not all of them of course but there was a whole class of industries that rose higher under the New Deal, and they ranged from comfortable with FDR to used to him.
Vice versa, as the kingpin, if he did drop dead shortly before an election the Dems are in big trouble. Maybe in a year where the R frontrunner isn't himself a New Yorker with moderate-reformist credentials, they might pull off putting in whoever they finally settle on, but not in '44 against Dewey, war or no war.
