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x: "“If the Democrats and other anti-Republican forces had gotten behind a single candidate and Lincoln had lost those three states but carried the rest, he would still have won the election..."

JCBreckenridge: "And that was my point.
The south saw that this was the case, CA and OR notwithstanding."

I don't agree, I think a united Democrat candidate in 1860 had a fighting chance, for the same reason that they had won in 1856: many people, then as now, vote for the party they think will win.
Plus, in those days Democrats were the "fusion party", uniting Free and Slave states.
Before 1860, to vote Democrat was to vote for the Union.

But, once Democrats split, North versus South, they were obviously neither the majority nor the "party of union".

Therefore many Democrats switched to Republicans, or in the Upper South to John Bell's Constitutional Union ticket.

You can see this clearly in the Pennsylvania vote, where Democrats lost 35,000 votes, Republicans picked up those votes and carried the state.
And the vote was still close enough in other 1856 Democrat states to give a united ticked a fighting chance to win.

That's why I say, in 1860 Democrats committed political suicide, under the direction of Southern Fire Eaters, who engineered Lincoln's election for the purpose of justifying secession in the minds of average white Southerners.

I was going to use the phrase "blood in the water" in my last post, but couldn't work it in. A strong, united Democratic party would have performed better in 1860 than the divided party did. They could have carried not just California, Oregon, and New Jersey, but also New York or Illinois and Indiana, especially if they portrayed themselves as the party of union. But that wasn't to be. Tempers and animosities had already become too inflamed.

I think it's likely that the fire-eaters did recognize that the party split would doom the Democrats chances and the resulting Republican victory would spark secession. Another thing to take into account, though, was the possibility that no candidate would win a majority of electoral votes. In that case, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. Each state would have only one vote.

Since there were almost as many slave states as free states and the Breckenridge faction was strong in states like Oregon and California, the Southern Democrats might have seen some hope in this. If the election did go to the House and Breckenridge prevailed with a minority of the popular vote we would likely have seen a very different commotion and uproar in 1860 from what happened in our own timeline.

I'm pretty sure, that the House of Representatives scenario occurred to some of the Constitutional Unionists (the John Bell supporters). Their party was positioned where the cooler heads in Congress (if any remained) could be expected to converge. I always considered Bell's bunch a no-hope fourth party, but if you think of them as the remnant of the conservative and Southern Whigs or as the successors to the American Party (the Know-Nothings) then they were actually the third party. Fillmore had won over 20% of the vote in 1856 and Bell's prospects might have looked even brighter if things came together for him.

Faced with a situation where no candidate would get a majority of the popular vote (or even perhaps of the electoral vote, leaving the election would be decided in the Senate) the Democrats splitting their own party doesn't look quite so crazy as it otherwise might. I mean, it was crazy for them to do so, but not quite as crazy as it would appear at first. And those were crazy times, and crazy people were in politics then.

Lincoln's nomination did a lot to prevent this possibility. It was a brilliant gamble. Brilliant, because nominating a candidate from Douglas's own state meant that the Republicans would have a fighting chance in the West. They could beat Douglas in his own region and possibly lock him out of the electoral college. If Seward or another Easterner had been nominated it would have been possible for Republicans to carry the Northeast and lose the Old Northwest to Douglas, and that would have made a congressional resolution much more likely. But it was a gamble because there was no guarantee that the unknown Lincoln would win either region.