Every presidential election, there are usually a bunch of smaller parties running for president, although they might get 16 votes.
One of them was (is?) the Communist party. What would happen if they had won? Would we have scrapped the Constitution?
Not necessarily. The Soviet Union had a constitution, believe it or not. Actually, “constitutions”, plural.
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1918toc.html
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/ussr1924.html
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html
This is the 1977 Constitution.
http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/law/r100000_.html
This is probably the biggest difference between the “Brezhnev Constitution” and the U.S. Constitution.
We’d have to change the Preamble to read:
The real thing is here.
And I have to say that, in terms of literary merit, the 1977 Soviet preamble sucks, big-time. Pile the rhetoric high, boys. Egad. 
The mere election of the Communist Party to power (Presidency? one or both houses of Congress?) would have had no immediate effect on the Constitution unless the majority of the people were really mad at the outgoing establishment.
The Constitution still requires the confirmation of any amendments by three fourths of the states (although Congress can specifiy whether the ratification will be by legislature or by convention in the states). A newly elected Communist Government would still need to get changes to the Constitution past the populace. If the election wins were by the typical 51%-58% majorities, a three-fourths majority would be unlikely unless three-fourths of the state legislatures were swept in the same movement.
Given that the people had elected them, that might have been easy enough (or not), but then, that was the intent of the framers, anyway.
The original Russian constitution was actually a very good document. The problem was that was about all it was, no one paid any attention to it.
what an intiruging notion, ignoring your own constitution when it suits your authoritarian aims…hmmmmmmm.
tom, there’s another problem with changing the Constitution. The fact that Senate elections are rotated. So to get two-thirds of the Senate, you would have to sweep two elections in a row. That’s hard stuff.
Neurotik, the Senate doesn’t have to be involved in any way with amending the Constitution.
Tomndebb, it is not that the Congress can specify the method of ratification, only that Congress may specify the method.
If two thirds of the states call a Constitutional Convention and propose amendments, and three quarters of the state legistlatures ratify the amendments, its done. Congress would play no role.
Cite: Article V of the US Constititution
P.S. To date, none of the amendments took this path.
To the OP: No, without a broad mandate of the people - significantly more than Dubya got - the election of a President from the Communist party would only mean stagnant, ineffective government for four years. Not because Communists are ineffective (which they might be), but only because dramatically changing the system is purposefully difficult.
Yipes!
Should, by some disastrous bit of ill fortune, the Communist Party win the presidency…well, first thing, Europe would freak out. They’d go apey. They might be a bunch of no-good socialists, but communists, that’s where they’d draw the line. So the international community would be in turmoil pretty much right away.
At home, the people who opposed the Communist candidate would freak out, probably start an armed revolution, and video stores around the country would run out of copies of Red Dawn. The South would secede again and march against the Red Union. Any constitutional convention called would only gather delegates from the states that supported the Red candidate.
All in all, it would be a fun time to own a TV set and cable, with 3 24-hr news channels to choose from.
You’d be ripe for a Canadian takeover.
Hmmm…would Canadian socialism be a political compromise with the Communists? Perhaps Communism is the antithesis, not the synthesis, so the dialectic would predict Canadian socialism-lite as the result. I doubt the Canadians could take us by military might regardless of inner turmoil, but with the consent of the urban proletariat…hmmmm. In the name of the peace-loving workers and peasants of Canamerica, I just don’t know.
I guess it would open relations with Cuba.