# 1948 Presidential Election The canonical American **polling-failure upset election**. Every major poll and most major newspapers predicted Republican [[Thomas E. Dewey]] would defeat incumbent [[Harry S. Truman]]; the *Chicago Tribune* printed an early edition with the headline "**DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN**" before final returns came in. Truman defeated Dewey 303 to 189 electoral votes, 49.6% to 45.1% in the popular vote, while also surviving a **two-front intra-Democratic insurgency**: Strom Thurmond's States' Rights ("Dixiecrat") Party on the right (carrying four Deep South states and 39 electoral votes on an explicit segregationist platform), and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party on the left (drawing 2.4% of the popular vote on an explicitly pro-Soviet, anti-Cold-War platform). Truman won the four-way race by holding Northern Black voters (a critical [[New Deal]] constituency), Midwestern labor, and enough Southern white voters who were not Dixiecrat enough to switch parties. ## Result - **[[Harry S. Truman]]** (Democrat) — 303 electoral votes, 49.6% popular (24,179,347 votes) - **Thomas E. Dewey** (Republican) — 189 electoral votes, 45.1% popular - **[[Strom Thurmond]]** (States' Rights / Dixiecrat) — 39 electoral votes (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina), 2.4% popular - **Henry Wallace** (Progressive) — 0 electoral votes, 2.4% popular - Total: 531 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1948 election is one of the most structurally important elections for understanding the long arc of the right-wing coalition's construction. The **Dixiecrat revolt** of 1948 — Southern Democrats walking out of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia over a civil-rights plank inserted at the urging of Minneapolis Mayor [[Hubert Humphrey]] — is the first major operational signal of the Southern realignment that would eventually deliver the Solid South to the Republican Party. Thurmond's 1948 platform — explicit defense of segregation, denunciation of federal civil-rights enforcement, states' rights as constitutional cover — is the proximate ideological ancestor of the 1964 Goldwater states-rights framing, the 1968 Wallace third-party run, and the Nixon 1968 [[Southern Strategy]]. Thurmond himself switched to the Republican Party in September 1964 after [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] signed the [[Civil Rights Act]], completing the personal arc that started in 1948. The Henry Wallace Progressive run is also significant — the high-water mark for an explicitly pro-Soviet political position in postwar American electoral politics, and one of the operational triggers for the McCarthy-era anti-communist political environment that would dominate the early 1950s. ## Connections - [[Harry S. Truman]] — Winner; the famous upset; military desegregation by executive order in July 1948 was the proximate trigger for the Dixiecrat revolt. - [[Strom Thurmond]] — Dixiecrat candidate; carried 4 Deep South states; would switch parties in 1964 and serve as the operational link between the segregationist Democrat and the Southern Strategy Republican coalitions. - [[Party Realignment]] — The first major operational signal of the post-FDR Southern realignment. ---