There is one that baffles me here, why would the House elect Hall? I feel like they'd rather roll with a nobody than elect an actual open Communist. An interesting way to elect him would be for
Browderism to be more successful in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. Slowly, Communist agents would begin infiltrating the unions and the Democratic Party, running more and more successful candidates as radicalism grows in America (ofc, they wouldn't call themselves Communists, maybe DemSocs or something of that matter idk) in 1972, a shock comes in as Gus Hall (or another Commie idk) wins the Democratic primaries off the back of disaffected liberals/progressives and radicalized workers (maybe this could be part of the Imperial Nixon path). Initially, Hall would seem to destined to lose, but thanks to sublime campaign and the failures of the opponent means he wins by a squeaker.
Once elected president, he'd have three routes: a moderate one, a radical one and a failstate. The moderate one means he basically becomes a SocDem with some more radical opinions, this would be the easiest gameplay wise but it'd be the most boring one. The radical one would be focused on hijacking the state, securing support from the army and generally radicalizing the workers further (maybe an IWW revival comes into play?). Generally, the idea would be that around late '75-early '76 you'd launch what is essentially an self-coup, sidelining congress and ruling by executive order and basically rigging the 1976 election (maybe you could add a constitutional convention for the bicentenary as an epilouge idk). Of course, turning America into a Communist country would not be easy, you'd have Congress, the courts and the army opposing any truly radical actions. Thus, if you fail to seize enough control, three failstates could occur, one where Hall is impeached by Congress (fail to seize enough control early on), leadng to his VP/Speaker of the House taking over and ending with an eplougue they essentially jerk themselves off over how they saved the republic or whatever while ignoring the conditions which led to Hall being elected. Meanwhile, if you are further along the transformation of America, the army would step in if you fail (as Congress would be dominated by you), the army coup would be divided into sub-paths, one AuthDem, where the generals pinky promises of restoring democracy do hold some weight, and a PauAut one, where the army launches McCarthyism on steriods and essentially bullies Congress into complaince (Congress would be led by a conservative coalition which would rubberstamp whatever the generals want).
(Sorry if this is unstructured, I came up with this in like 5 minutes and I'm sure it could use some more work)
