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Sherman Logan: "In fact, there WAS no North vs. South split in a political sense until southerners overreached themselves in 1850.
For the previous 50 years the regional split had been North(east) vs. South vs. West."

So, why am I hearing Ray Stephens verse 2 of "Everything is Beautiful" -- "There are none so blind as he who will not see..."? ;-)

You're looking right at just one archetypal election -- 1828 -- and telling me there is no north-south split?
I'm telling you: that's a north-south split, where non-New England Northerners -- Dough-Faces -- joined their Southern allies in electing Democrats, in this case, Andrew Jackson.

And in every presidential election where the choice is a Southern Democrat versus a Northern non-Democrat (Federalist / Whig / Republican) the results are the same, beginning in 1796 -- not 1852!

The only times the South ever split its votes came when the choice was not so clear-cut -- i.e., two Southerners, two Northerners or a Northern Democrat vs. Southern non-Democrat on the ballot.
Yes, then you did see a more-or-less random splitting of states for each candidate.

So, who were these Northern Democrat Dough-Faces?
Well, then as now, Northern Democrats were largely big-city and/or immigrants.
In places like New York City and Philadelphia their numbers dominated state politics, and through their alliance with the Southern Slave-Power, kept the Union united, and the slaveocracy dominant.

So, what happened in the 1850s was: suddenly, after all those years, such Northerners began to see slavery as not just some quaint Southern institution, but as a growing, expanding existential threat to them.
Suddenly, slavery was coming North and West to take away their jobs, and their future farmland, as settlers out west.
Now it was personal, and now they began to vote for the political party which promised to restrict slavery, and protect them -- the Republicans.

Presidential election of 1856.
Note New York, Ohio & some other Northern states switched from Democrat in 1852 to Republican in 1856.
By 1860, they will all vote Republican.

So, what happened in the 1850s was: suddenly, after all those years, such Northerners began to see slavery as not just some quaint Southern institution, but as a growing, expanding existential threat to them.

I'm a little vague on why you think you need to say this, since it's pretty much what I said in my post.

The point is that during the 1850s both North and South began to think of themselves as threatened by the other. The South a few years before the North, which is why they insisted on the various measures to protect, as they saw it, the future of slavery, from 1850 on.

The irony, of course, is that by doing so they created the very opposition to the institution that they thought they were heading off.

But I think the most relevant factor in the history of the 1850s, in many ways the most interesting decade in American politics, is that both sides of the emerging North vs. South confrontation wholeheartedly believed they were acting defensively against deep-laid plots of the other side.

The truth, of course, is that while there were no doubt abolitionists and proslavery fire-eaters attempting exactly that, at the start of the decade they were all very much on the fringes. Only as the decade progressed did they move towards greater influence and eventually control.

The Fire-Eaters, of course, got control of the South in 1860, the Abolitionists took two or three more years to get equal influence in the North.