Shortly following the election, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Republican of Massachusetts, brought a resolution to abolish the electoral college in favor of a new system. It was an antiquated algorithm that functioned clumsily, he argued, and the major example in 1948 was Tennessee. The state had given Truman eleven of its electoral votes, Strom Thurmond one rogue vote, and Thomas Dewey zero, even though Dewey had drawn well more than twice as many votes in the state than Thurmond did. How was that fair? Still, Senator Lodge’s resolution to alter the system got nowhere. The highly controversial electoral college system remains in debate today.
Monday-morning quarterbacks claimed that Dewey was simply the wrong guy. “We should have known he couldn’t win,” Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth said. Referring to Dewey’s 1944 campaign, she famously added, “A soufflé never rises twice.” “My own opinion,” Speaker of the House Joe Martin later wrote, “is that Taft, if nominated, could have won in 1948, and he could have won in 1952.” Richard Nixon, at the time a freshman congressman, later told an interviewer that Harold Stassen was “the most interesting candidate.” “Stassen, if he could have been nominated, would have been the strongest candidate,” Nixon said in 1983. “I think he would have won.”
Numerous voices called out Dewey for running a campaign that was a monument to hubris, claiming that if he had come out swinging and if he had spoken more on specific policy, the result would have been the landslide that nearly everyone expected. This was a logical conclusion, though impossible to prove.
After digesting the events and the shock of it all, Dewey himself came to a simple and poignant conclusion. “The short answer on the election was that the farmers switched and that’s that and I am going to go ahead and enjoy life and live longer,” he wrote his uncle George Thomas of Whittier, California, five weeks after the election. “The farmers switched in the mid-West,” he wrote to Joseph Robinson of San Francisco, in January. “We carried the industrial East and lost the farm vote. That is the entire answer to the election.”
According to statistical analysis, Dewey was correct that the farmers had delivered a mighty blow—particularly in Ohio and Illinois, two states that had huge weight in the ultimate outcome. Truman had effectively campaigned on the issue of the Commodity Credit Corporation’s failure to supply storage bins to farmers. As the election was progressing, farmers found themselves with a bumper corn crop and record-high wheat and oat crops; they were crippled by lack of storage, and very angry about it. In the end, Truman carried the farming states of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even Iowa, which had voted Republican in all but three presidential elections going back to 1856. “It had been taken for granted generally that this area [farmers] was still staunchly Republican,” commented the columnist Thomas L. Stokes. “That is, taken for granted by all but a few which included a fellow named Harry S. Truman.”
Others chalked up Truman’s victory to laborers and the president’s fierce opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act, which stripped away power from labor unions and was passed by the Republican Eightieth Congress over Truman’s emphatic veto. Reportedly, the first words out of Truman’s mouth when he entered the presidential suite at the Muehlebach on the morning of November 3 were: “Labor did it.” The Taft-Hartley law provided Truman with an easy opportunity to inflame the passions of working people against Wall Street and the Republican Party.
Then there was the “Negro vote.” Four days after the election, Philleo Nash sent the president a memorandum, for “some light reading on your vacation,” as Truman was off for a break at his favorite vacation spot—Key West, Florida. “Over the country as a whole,” Nash wrote, “your majority in the Negro districts is the highest ever. The average will be above 80%.” In Philadelphia, nine out of ten black voters went for Truman. In Harlem, he won 65 percent of the vote, to Dewey’s 19 percent (Wallace claimed 16 percent). More importantly, the black vote went heavily to Truman in two of the most decisive states: Ohio and Illinois. In both cases, Truman came out on top. His success among black voters in Los Angeles and Oakland also gave him a boost in California, which he won by the narrow margin of roughly eighteen thousand votes out of a total of over four million.
Truman would forever argue that his civil rights stance was not about politics but about morality. Nevertheless, in terms of votes, it had helped him at least as much as it may have hurt him.
Counterintuitively, the president also gained momentum due to the many crises he was facing throughout 1948. When the Berlin Blockade began, many Americans were sure it would lead to war. Newsweek called the blockade “the greatest diplomatic crisis in American history.” The Truman administration was vastly credited with the success of the Berlin Airlift. At the time of the election, no war had started, and the airlift was working.
And what of Truman’s attack on the Eightieth Congress? Was this strategy coldhearted and misleading, as the Republicans had charged throughout? After all, the Eightieth Congress had passed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. “It always galls me to think that Harry Truman won in 1948 by attacking the Congress which gave him his place in history,” the conservative Republican senator Charlie Halleck of Indiana later said. The truth was, though Truman and the Eightieth Congress were allies in foreign policy, in domestic policy, they were far from it, and that was the root of Truman’s ire. He could not attack Dewey on policy matters, but Congress was fair game. The strategy worked.
And what of economics? A huge majority of Americans were happy with their incomes in 1948. Just days before the election, the
