A presidential election was held in the United States on November 2, 1948. The Democratic ticket of incumbent President Harry S. Truman and Senator Alben Barkley defeated the Republican ticket of New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and California Governor Earl Warren and the Dixiecrat ticket of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond and Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright in one of the greatest election upsets in American history.
Truman had been elected vice president in the 1944 election, and succeeded to the presidency in April 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He won his party's nomination at the 1948 Democratic National Convention only after defeating attempts to drop him from the ticket. The convention's civil rights plank caused a walkout by several Southern delegates, who launched a third-party "States' Rights Democratic Party" ticket, more commonly known as the Dixiecrats, led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, where they could extract concessions from either Dewey or Truman in exchange for their support. Former vice president Henry A. Wallace also challenged Truman by launching the Progressive Party and criticizing his confrontational Cold War policies. Dewey, the leader of his party's liberal eastern wing and the 1944 Republican presidential nominee, defeated conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and other challengers at the 1948 Republican National Convention. This was the first election to have primary and general election debates, with Dewey debating Harold Stassen in the Republican primary, while candidates from two different socialist parties, Norman Thomas and Farrell Dobbs, debated each other during the general election campaign.
Truman's feisty campaign style energized his base of traditional Democrats, consisting of most of the white South, as well as labor unions and Catholic and Jewish voters; he also fared surprisingly well with Midwestern farmers. Dewey ran a low-risk campaign and avoided directly criticizing Truman. With the three-way split in the Democratic Party and Truman's low approval ratings, Truman was widely considered the underdog, and nearly every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) favored Dewey. Defying these predictions, Truman won the election with 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. He won 49.6% of the popular vote to Dewey's 45.1%, while the third-party candidacies of Thurmond and Wallace each won less than 3%, with Thurmond carrying four states in the Deep South. Truman became the third of four presidents to be elected to a full term after succeeding to the presidency upon his predecessor's death.
Truman's surprise victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, its longest winning streak ever. With simultaneous success in the 1948 congressional elections, the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress, which they had lost in 1946. Thus, Truman's election confirmed the Democratic Party's status as the nation's majority party. This was the last presidential election before the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, which established presidential term limits. This did not apply to the incumbent Truman, but as he chose not to run in 1952, this was the last presidential election with no future disqualification effect for second-term winners.
Nominations
Democratic Party nomination
On July 12, the Democratic National Convention convened in Philadelphia in the same arena where the Republicans had met a few weeks earlier. Spirits were low; the Republicans had taken control of both houses of the United States Congress and a majority of state governorships during the 1946 mid-term elections, and the public opinion polls showed Truman trailing Republican nominee Dewey, sometimes by double digits. Furthermore, some liberal Democrats had joined Henry A. Wallace's new Progressive Party, and party leaders feared that Wallace would take enough votes from Truman to give the large Northern and Midwestern states to the Republicans. Conservatives dominated the party in the South, and they were angered by the growing voice of labor unions and black voters in the party outside the South. The hope that Truman would reverse course faded when he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Law, which sought to reduce the power of labor unions. Congress voted to override Truman's veto, and the Taft-Hartley Law went into effect on June 23, 1947. Finally, Truman's appointment of a liberal civil rights commission convinced Southern conservatives that to re-establish their voice they had to threaten third-party action to defeat Truman in 1948.
Alexander F. Whitney, who was previously critical of Truman and threatened to finance a third-party campaign, praised him after Truman vetoed the Taft–Hartley Act and said the veto "vindicated him in the eyes of labor". Whitney and Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen had been supporters of Wallace since the 1944 convention. Wallace said he wanted "to work within the Democratic party realm" in September 1947.
Truman was aware of his unpopularity. In July 1947, he privately offered to be Eisenhower's running mate on the Democratic ticket if MacArthur won the Republican nomination, an offer Eisenhower declined. This offer did not become public knowledge during the campaign. As a result of Truman's low standing in the polls, several Democratic party bosses began working to "dump" him and nominate a more popular candidate. Among the leaders of this movement were Jacob Arvey, the head of the powerful Cook County (Chicago) Democratic organization; Frank Hague, the boss of New Jersey; James Roosevelt, the eldest son of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and liberal Senator Claude Pepper from Florida. The rebels hoped to draft Eisenhower as the Democratic nominee. On July 10, Eisenhower officially refused to run. There was then an attempt to put forward Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas also refused. Finally, Pepper declared his intention to challenge Truman for the nomination. His candidacy collapsed when the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and the Congress of Industrial Organizations withheld their support, partly due to concerns over Pepper's attacks on Truman's foreign policy decisions regarding the Soviet Union. As a result of the refusal by most of the dump-Truman delegates to support him, Pepper withdrew his candidacy for the nomination on July 16. Lacking a candidate acceptable to all sides, the leaders of the dump-Truman movement reluctantly agreed to support Truman for the nomination.
Democratic Convention
At the Democratic Convention, Truman initially proposed a civil rights plank to the party platform that moderated the strong vocal support for civil rights that he had expressed at the NAACP convention in 1947, and to Congress in February 1948. This proposal disappointed Northern and Western liberals who wanted more swift and sweeping reforms in civil rights, but it also failed to placate Southern conservatives, and both sides decided to present their own amendments and proposals to Truman's civil rights plank. Former Texas Governor Dan Moody proposed a plank that supported the status quo of states' rights; a similar but shorter proposal was made by Cecil Sims of the Tennessee delegation. On the liberal side, Wisconsin Representative Andrew Biemiller proposed a strong civil rights plank that was more explicit and direct in its language than Truman's convention proposal. Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey led the support for the Biemiller plank. In his speech to the convention, Humphrey memorably said, "the time has come for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!"
Truman and his staff knew it was highly likely that any civil rights plank would lead Southern delegates to stage a walkout in protest, but Truman believed that civil rights was an important moral cause and ultimately abandoned his advisers' attempts to "soften the approach" with the moderate plank. He supported and defended the "Crackpot" Biemiller plank, which passed by 651.5 votes to 582.5. It also received strong support from many of the big-city party bosses, most of whom felt that the civil rights platform would encourage the growing black population in their cities to vote for the Democrats. The passage of the civil rights platform caused some three dozen Southern delegates, led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, to walk out of the convention. The Southern delegates who remained nominated Senator Richard Russell Jr. from Georgia as a rebuke to Truman. Nonetheless, 947 Democratic delegates voted for Truman, while Russell received only 266 votes, all from the South. Truman's first choice for his running mate was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, hoping that it might make the ticket more appealing to liberals. Douglas refused the nomination. Needing an alternative, Truman then selected Senator Alben W. Barkley from Kentucky, who had delivered the convention's keynote address, as his running mate, and Barkley was nominated by acclamation.
Truman gave a fighting acceptance speech, saying, "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it—don't you forget it! ... We will do that because they are wrong and we are right." He said the Republican Party had, "ever since its inception ... been under the control of special privilege; and they have completely proved it in the Eightieth Congress." At the end of the speech, the "delegates rose to their feet and cheered loudly for two minutes ... for a moment Truman had created the illusion—few regarded it as more than an illusion—that the Democrats had a fighting chance in November."
Republican Party nomination
For both Republicans and Democrats, there were movements of support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular general of World War II and a favorite in the polls. But unlike the movement within the Democratic Party, the Republican draft movement came largely from its grassroots. By January 23, 1948, the movement had entered Eisenhower's name into every state holding a Republican presidential primary, and polls gave him a significant lead against all other contenders. With the first state primary approaching, Eisenhower was forced to make a quick decision. Saying that soldiers should keep out of politics, Eisenhower declined to run and requested that the draft movement cease. After several failed efforts to get Eisenhower to reconsider, the organization disbanded, with most of its leadership endorsing former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen.
With Eisenhower refusing to run, the contest for the Republican nomination was between Stassen, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Senator Robert A. Taft from Ohio, California Governor Earl Warren, General Douglas MacArthur, and Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg from Michigan, the senior Republican in the Senate. Dewey, who had been the Republican nominee in 1944, was regarded as the frontrunner when the primaries began. Dewey was the acknowledged leader of the Republican Party's Eastern Establishment. In 1946 he had been reelected governor of New York by the largest margin in state history. Dewey's handicap was that many Republicans disliked him personally; he often came off as cold, stiff, and calculating. Taft was the leader of the Republican Party's conservative wing, which was strongest in the Midwest and parts of the South. He called for abolishing many New Deal welfare programs, which he felt were harmful to business interests, and was skeptical of American involvement in foreign alliances such as the United Nations. Taft had two major weaknesses: He was a plodding, dull campaigner, and he was viewed by most party leaders as too conservative and controversial to win a presidential election.
Both Vandenberg and Warren were highly popular in their home states, but each refused to campaign in the primaries, limiting their chances of winning the nomination. Their supporters hoped that in the event of a Dewey-Taft-Stassen deadlock, the convention would turn to their man as a compromise candidate. General MacArthur, the famous war hero, was especially popular among conservatives. Since he was serving in Japan as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers occupying that nation, he was unable to campaign for the nomination, but he did make known that he would accept the nomination if it were offered to him, and some conservative Republicans hoped that by winning a primary contest he could prove his popularity with voters. They chose to enter his name in the Wisconsin primary. His candidacy was enthusiastically supported by William Randolph Hearst in all his newspapers.
The "surprise" candidate of 1948 was Stassen, a liberal from Minnesota. In 1938, he had been elected governor of Minnesota at the age of 31; he resigned as governor in 1943 to serve in the wartime Navy. In 1945 he served on the committee that created the United Nations. Stassen was widely regarded as the most liberal of the Republican candidates, yet during the primaries he was criticized for being vague on many issues. Stassen stunned Dewey and MacArthur in the Wisconsin primary; his surprise victory virtually eliminated MacArthur, whose supporters had made a major effort on his behalf. Stassen defeated Dewey again in the Nebraska primary, making him the new frontrunner. He then made the strategic mistake of trying to beat Taft in Ohio, Taft's home state. Stassen believed that if he could defeat Taft in his home state, Taft would be forced to quit the race and most of Taft's delegates would support him instead of Dewey. Taft defeated Stassen in Ohio, and Stassen earned the hostility of the party's conservatives. Even so, Stassen still led Dewey in the polls for the upcoming Oregon primary. Dewey realized that losing another primary would end his chances at the nomination, and made an all-out effort in Oregon.
In April 1948, Dewey sent Paul Lockwood, one of his top aides, to build a strong grassroots organization in Oregon. Working with $150,000 sent by Dewey's powerful New York political organization (three times the previous record spent in an Oregon primary), Lockwood paid "for 126 billboards, hundreds of sixty-second radio spots on every station in the state, and half-hour broadcasts each noon ... The daily Portland Oregonian carried five Dewey advertisements a day." Dewey also extensively campaigned in Oregon, spending three weeks there. He "invaded every hamlet, no matter how isolated, speaking at rural crossroads and shaking hands in hamburger stands. One journalist commented that Dewey was the greatest explorer of Oregon since Lewis and Clark."