YMMV / New Deal Coalition Retained

• Broken Base: Some of the odder choices for this timeline (Julie Nixon marrying Prince Charles, Ted Bundy's political career, etc) are fairly divisive among the readers.
  • There is also the debate over the author's potential sympathy for hard-right figures-his depictions of people like Gerhard Frey and Augusto Pinochet come off to many as overly sympathetic to figures who held authoritarian viewpoints and in some cases (eg: Pinochet) acted on them.
  • The update in which Jane Fonda is convicted of treason and executed for aiding the Viet Cong is a point of contention among fans, in no small part due to an incident in which the author was banned for a week for allegedly using the timeline as a revenge fantasy (a month and several dozen updates later no less). While the ban was swiftly overturned after outcry from the fanbase, it generated significant controversy over the Fonda plot point, not least because it uses the unsubstantiated claims that Fonda gave secret messages from POWs to the Viet Cong to justify her execution. Debate over whether this was plausible, whether the actions of staff were fair and whether the author's response was correct raged on for several pages before readers moved on.
• Complete Monster: Vladimir Kryuchkov is the head of the KGB and the instigator of the 1985 coup against the reformist government of Alexander Yakovlev when the latter tried to reform the USSR away from Focoist ideology. Upon taking power, Kryuchkov helps other hardliners across the Warsaw Pact launch massive purges against their political opponents. In response to the failing Soviet economy, Kryuchkov takes advantage of border skirmishes between West and East Germany as a means to kickstart World War III. As the war progresses, Kryuchkov uses increasingly brutal tactics to achieve victory, such as using chemical weapons, leading to insurmountable loss of life and massive cultural damage. When the war starts turning in NATO's favor, Kryuchkov and the KGB resort to even more brutal tactics such as launching a massive purge of moderates across the Warsaw pact; using non-Russian Soviet minorities as human shields; wiping out entire cities and villages; conscripting serial killers from prisons to terrorize their subjects into submission; and launching a poison gas attack on the East Coast to weaken the US. At the end of the war, with the fall of Moscow, Kryuchkov orders a nuclear strike at the US and other key NATO targets.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: It's hard to talk about this timeline without discussing what many see as it being sympathetic towards right-wing populism.