1948 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1948 in the United States was a significant political event. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ran against Republican Thomas E. Dewey and others. The election is notable for Truman's unexpected victory, which defied the predictions of many pollsters and newspapers. This election also saw the emergence of the States' Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond.
7 Key excerpts on "1948 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePubDewey Defeats Truman
The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul
- A. J. Baime(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Mariner Books(Publisher)
...In the run-up to his longshot bid to be elected in his own right, Truman faced the founding of Israel and the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He desegregated the military. He launched the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift. The explosive Alger Hiss espionage charges set off the “Red Scare.” The year 1948 saw a brutal and at times deadly struggle in which black southerners sought to exercise their right to vote. It witnessed the beginning of a historic realignment of the Democratic “Solid South,” which transformed states like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia into the Republican strongholds they remain today. Documents of the time express startling fear on both sides of the aisle that Moscow would attempt to meddle in the American election. One campaign official wrote in a secret memo in 1947 that “the Kremlin will sponsor political disturbances everywhere it can throughout the next twelve months . .. It will try to influence the result of the 1948 election by every means conceivable.” The Operation Sandstone atomic-bomb tests, anxiety that World War III could break out at any moment—all of this formed the stage upon which the election campaigns unfolded. The shifts in the tides of power moved with ruthless force, creating the geopolitical world of the future, our world of today. Dewey Defeats Truman will bring readers inside the situation rooms of four campaigns: Harry Truman’s Democratic Party, Thomas Dewey’s Republican Party, Henry Wallace’s breakaway Progressive Party (which was largely controlled by a secret cell of Communists), and Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party (the “Dixiecrats,” a campaign of unapologetic white supremacy). While the election’s victor is the ultimate focus of the book, my goal was not to favor one candidate’s policies over another, but rather to state the facts and how they were perceived at the time...
eBook - ePub- Gary A. Donaldson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...Alton Lee. This phenomenon most likely occurred because Democrats voted for a congressional candidate but chose to cast their presidential vote for Wallace or Thurmond—or not to cast a vote for president at all. Lee has shown that it was the coattails of labor candidates, along with get-out-the-vote campaigns conducted by organized labor, that in many urban-industrial areas dragged Truman over the top when he might otherwise have lost those areas. 3 It is also true, however, that the coattails of strong liberal candidates in some states pulled Truman along, candidates such as Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota, Guy Gillette in Iowa, Lester Hunt in Wyoming, and Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas in Illinois. Table 1. Election of 1948, Returns by State. Sources: CQ Presidential Elections: 1789-1991 (Washington D.C., 1995), 63, 117; NYT, Dec. 11, 1948. a State and national totals include votes cast for minor candidates. Table 2. Election of 1948. Sources: CQ Presidential Elections: 1789-1991 (Washington, D.C., 1995), 63, 117; NYT, Dec. 11, 1948. Note: Total votes cast, including those for minor candidates: 48,793,826. Table 3. Election of 1948, Electoral Vote. Sources: CQ Presidential Elections: 1789-1991 (Washington, D.C., 1995), 63, 117; NYT Dec. 11, 1948. a States won by Truman in 1948 that had voted for Dewey in 1944 b States won by Dewey in 1948 that had voted for Roosevelt in 1944 In Congress, it was a clear mandate for the Democrats—and a disaster for the Republicans not unlike the one they handed the Democrats just two years before. The Democrats now held a majority of 262 to 171 in the House and 54 to 42 in the Senate. Clearly, the Republican-dominated Eightieth Congress had been repudiated by the voters, and just as clearly, Truman had been successful in getting his message across to the people—that the Eightieth Congress had failed. One important factor in the election statistics is the large stay-at-home vote...
eBook - ePubHow Did We Get Here?
From TR to Donald Trump
- Robert Dallek(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Harper(Publisher)
...participation in a military alliance with Western Europe’s democracies. As it would be the first defensive-offensive alliance in U.S. history, it represented a radical shift away from isolationism. And even though Truman was seen as standing up to the communist threat, it did not translate into national popularity. In public opinion polls in the first half of 1948, Truman’s approval ratings had fallen to the mid-to-high thirties and the disapproval response hovered around 50 percent. 6 Throughout the summer of 1948, New York governor Thomas Dewey held a double-digit lead over Truman in a November matchup. Making matters even more difficult, progressive Democrats had abandoned Truman to support former VP Henry Wallace in a third-party bid, and southern conservatives antagonistic to Truman’s civil rights program bolted the Democrats to form the Dixiecrat Party with Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate. In September, despite the dissenting Democrats on the left and the right, Truman began to cut into Dewey’s lead, reducing the gap to between 6 and 7.5 points. In a final Gallup poll on October 25, Dewey still held a five-point lead. But Truman was clearly gaining ground. Because Wallace’s Progressive Party was seen as an anti-American arm of the Communists and the Dixiecrats as advocates of un-American racism and the last vestiges of the South’s “lost cause,” neither fringe group was able to mount a serious challenge to either Truman or Dewey. And Truman now seized the initiative in the campaign by calling the Republican Congress into a special session to make good on legislative promises...
eBook - ePubThe Presidential Image
A History from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump
- Iwan Morgan, Mark White(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
...270–1. 90 Pietrusza, David, 1948: Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America’s Role in the World (New York: Union Square Press, 2011), p. 407. 91 Donaldson, Gary A., Truman Defeats Dewey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 219. 92 Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party, p. 139. 93 Clark, Anthony, How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine Their Legacies (Charleston, SC: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), p. 4. 94 Algeo, Matthew, Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009), p. 3. 95 Ferrell, Truman in the White House, p. 78; Miller, Plain Speaking, p. 195. 96 Leuchtenburg, William E., The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), pp. 151–225; Algeo, Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure, p. 223. 97 Daniels, The Man of Independence, p. 19....
eBook - ePub- Peter J. Ling(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Stevenson in particular denied any wish for a third nomination, yet still hoped to be drafted by his convention supporters. The auguries for Democrats in 1960 were promising. First and foremost, the hugely popular Eisenhower was prevented from running for a third term by the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951. Ironically, it had been championed by the Republicans after the four consecutive terms of Franklin Roosevelt. But in 1960 it promised to benefit their opponents, since no Republican could match Ike's appeal. Four years earlier, in spite of Eisenhower's landslide victory, the Democrats had gained ground in Congress—two further seats in the House for a majority of 33, and one Senate seat for a majority of two in the upper chamber. The midterm elections saw further Democratic gains. Richard Nixon recalled election night in 1958 as one of the most depressing he had ever known. The statistics, he wrote later, “still make me wince” (Nixon 1978: 220). The Democratic majority swelled to 130 in the House and to 28 in the Senate. Admission of Hawaii and Alaska as full states of the union in 1959 confirmed Democratic dominance. Hawaii had one Republican and one Democrat in the Senate, but its sole congressman was a Democrat. Both of Alaska's senators and its solitary representative in the House were Democrats. A series of setbacks for the Republican administration, on both foreign and domestic fronts, strengthened the positive tide for the Democrats. The 1956 Suez Crisis sowed discord among the NATO powers and gave the Soviets scope for influence in Nasser's Egypt. It also made the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt easier, and the inability of the US to respond gave the lie to Secretary of State J. Foster Dulles' lofty words about “rolling back” the Iron Curtain...
eBook - ePubLost in a Gallup
Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections
- W. Joseph Campbell(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 6 “Television’s Version of ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ ” The Trifecta of 2000 It was nearly two months before the election of 2000, but to Will Saletan, a political writer for the online magazine Slate, the polls already were signaling a winner in the race for president. By then, the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, had slipped ahead of his Republican rival, George W. Bush, in most opinion polls. To Saletan, that was enough to declare “the race is over.” In theory, “Bush could win,” Saletan wrote. “The stock market could crash. Gore could be caught shagging an intern. Bush could electrify the country with the greatest performance in the history of presidential debates. But barring such a grossly unlikely event, there is no reason to think Bush will recover.” 1 In offering his prediction, Saletan referred to Bush’s swagger and character defects and declared: “A candidate who puts pride before prudence, refuses to learn from his mistakes, and is capable of living for days in an alternate political universe can only survive while he’s ahead. Once he falls behind, there’s no reason to think he’s up to the task of correcting his course and regaining control of the race.” 2 Stick a fork in Bush, Saletan declared. “He’s done.” 3 Saletan’s supremely confident political obituary for Bush was published at about the same point in the campaign as Elmo Roper’s supremely confident declaration in 1948 that Thomas Dewey was as good as elected president. Both prophesies proved premature and, in retrospect, Saletan’s prediction represents a fitting start to a memorably wrong fall election campaign in 2000, a bizarre time when it seemed opinion polls had never been more numerous, erratic, or unhelpful. Everything about 2000 seemed a bit off, and unprecedented: the polls, the predictions, the television coverage on Election Night...
eBook - ePubRonald Reagan
The American Presidency
- David Mervin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...To be an effective leader, to get bureaucrats and legislators to do what he wants them to do a president must retain the support of the public and, in the modern age, that is hardly possible without consistent command of television. THE 1980 GENERAL ELECTION Reagan’s victory in the 1980 General Election was of landslide proportions. He won 51 per cent of the popular vote against 41 per cent for Jimmy Carter and in the Electoral College led by 489 to 49. At the same election the Republicans gained twelve seats in the Senate and won control of that chamber for the first time in twenty-five years. In elections to the House of Representatives the Republicans made a gain of 33 seats and managed to defeat four incumbent committee chairmen. For Republicans this was a particularly rewarding set of results; in recent decades they had enjoyed considerable success in presidential elections, but the victories of Eisenhower and Nixon had not, with the fleeting exception of 1953–55, been flanked by success in Congressional elections. However 1980, it seemed, just might represent a genuine national shift towards conservatism thereby providing the underpinning for a new alignment of electoral forces to replace the Democratic coalition founded by Franklin Roosevelt. There are no simple explanations for complicated events like general elections, but we shall take as our starting point V. O. Key’s learned view that elections are determined largely by retrospective considerations. 37 The 1980 election, in other words, is to be seen primarily as a referendum on Jimmy Carter’s stewardship during the previous four years. For most voters, evaluations of Carter’s record turned primarily on economic matters. For many years prior to 1976, foreign policy questions had headed Gallup polls as the most important issues in presidential campaigns, but all this had changed by 1980...
