I spare you the rest of the plot but politically in episode 3:
Wheeler is confirmed to be VP and called a "suckup democrat" by Rachel Maddow, I mean Walter Winchell (I've heard the name), so presumably he he pulled an Andrew Johnson.
And a character says: "We don't have enough democrats left (in Congress) after the landslide."
The producer's remarks and what was portrayed at the end of episode 2 don't jive with it having been a landslide but I guess we got the House (at this point 1876 was the last time we won the Presidency without the House). Baring party switches the Senate was not even mathematically possible I don't think.
Obviously these details were an afterthought to the them but I wouldn't even be able to write something like this without formulating precise election results with at least semi-plausible reasons for each fluctuation. I mean, Georgia? Not unless FDR came out against segregation or something.
I have no idea how dovish or hawkish the South was but Wikipedia has outsourced info that anti League of Nations sentiment in the South helped Harding carry TN in 1920.
There were lots of hawkish Republicans through the years, but, except fir the 1928 election in which the Democrats nominated the Catholic Al Smith (who actually was more conservative than Hoover on some issues), the only Southern states to vote for the GOP presidential candidate in the 68 years between 1880 (the first presidential election after Reconstruction ended) and 1948 were (i) KY for McKinley in 1896, (ii) TN and OK for Harding in 1920, and (iii) KY for Coolidge in 1924 (although NC also was competitive in many such elections, giving the GOP over 45% in 6 of the 8 presidential elections between 1880 and 1908, and giving the GOP over 50% in 1916 and 1920). The states that could have given Willkie an Electoral College victory were in the NE and NW, not in the South.
Impy, why would you exclude NY from the GOP column in your “Willkie wins” map? FDR carried NY by only 3.55%, his third-lowest victory margin among the 38 states that he carried. Willkie would have gotten 266+ EVs (266 was the magic number back then because AK and HI weren’t states yet and the 23rd Anendment (giving DC 3 EVs) hadn’t even been proposed yet) had he carried (in addition to his 10 states with 82 EVs) the seven states that he lost by less than 5% (WI, IL, NY, NJ, MN, OH and MO) plus either (i) PA (which had 36 EVs and Willkie lost by 6.89%) or (ii) WY, NH, MA and CT (all but CT having given FDR smaller victory margins than did PA, with FDR’s nargin in CT being 7.14%),