1948 United States Senate elections, North Carolina
Umstead supported the conservative Taft-Hartley Act. The Democratic former Governor of North Carolina J. Melville Broughton was seen as a "rather liberal alternative" to Umstead. Broughton beat Umstead in the Democratic primaries and then won the general elections.


1948 United States Senate elections, North Carolina, North Carolina (Regular)
Broughton was seated December 31, 1948 to finish the current term but died March 6, 1949, just after the new term began. His death lead to another appointment (Democrat Frank Graham) in 1949 and another special election in 1950 of Democrat Willis Smith. Smith also died during the term, leading to yet another appointment (Democrat Alton A. Lennon) and 1954 special election (of Democrat W. Kerr Scott). In all, five senators held the seat during the 1949–1955 term.


1948 United States Senate elections, South Carolina
Senator Burnet R. Maybank was opposed in the Democratic primary by U.S. Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn and three other candidates. Maybank obtained over 50% in the primary election on August 10 to avoid a runoff election.


1948 United States Senate elections, South Carolina
Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of South Carolina and its statewide candidates were never seriously challenged. Maybank did not campaign for the general election as there was no chance of defeat.


1948 United States Senate elections, Virginia
Incumbent Democrat Absalom Willis Robertson defeated Republican Robert H. Woods and was re-elected to his first full term in office.


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum
A referendum on councils and treasury was held in the United States Virgin Islands on 2 November 1948. Governor William H. Hastie had requested the local parliament to draw up six referendum questions. While this referendum was held alongside elections, turnout was only 60% that of the general election.


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Territorial Legislature
Do you favor the creation of a single Legislature for the Virgin Islands?


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Independent Councils
Do you favor two separate municipal Councils as at present?


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Common Treasury
Do you favor the creation of single treasury for the Virgin Islands?


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Separate Treasuries
Do you favor two separate municipal treasuries for the Virgin Islands?


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Popular election of the Governor
Do you favor the election of the Governor by the people of the Virgin Islands?


1948 United States Virgin Islands referendum, Results, Representative in US Congress
Do you favor a Resident Commissioner from the Virgin Islands in the Congress of the United States?


1948 United States elections
The 1948 United States elections were held on November 2, 1948. The election took place during the beginning stages of the Cold War. Democratic incumbent President Harry S. Truman was elected to a full term, defeating Republican nominee New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and two erstwhile Democrats. The Republicans, who had just won both the House and the Senate two years earlier, ceded control of both chambers of Congress to the Democrats. Puerto Rico also elected Luis Muñoz Marín of the Popular Democratic Party as its first democratically elected governor.


1948 United States elections, President
In what is considered by most historians as the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics, Democratic incumbent President Harry S. Truman defeated Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. Going into Election Day, virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that Truman would lose. Truman took most states outside the Northeast and Deep South, and won the popular vote by four points. Dewey won his party's nomination for the second straight election, defeating Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen on the Republican convention's second ballot.


1948 United States elections, President
Truman won the Democratic nomination on the first ballot, but the party's platform on civil rights caused a third party run by Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the Governor of South Carolina. Thurmond took four states in the Deep South. Former Vice President and former Democrat Henry A. Wallace ran as the Progressive nominee, but took only two percent of the popular vote.


1948 United States elections, United States House of Representatives
As in the Senate, Truman's labeling of the Republican-controlled Congress as "obstructionist" helped the Democrats win a net gain of 75 seats in the House, giving them control of the chamber.


1948 United States elections, United States Senate
The Democrats gained nine seats in the Senate, enough to give them control of the chamber over the Republicans. Truman successfully campaigned against an "obstructionist" Congress that had blocked many of his initiatives. In addition, the U.S. economy had recovered from the postwar recession of 1946–1947.


1948 United States gubernatorial elections
United States gubernatorial elections were held in 1948, in 33 states, concurrent with the House, Senate elections and presidential election, on November 2, 1948 (September 13 in Maine).


1948 United States gubernatorial elections
This was the last time Connecticut elected its governors to 2-year terms, switching to 4-years from the 1950 election.


1948 United States men's Olympic basketball team
The 1948 United States men's Olympic basketball team competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics, along with 22 other basketball teams. The basketball tournament was held in London, England at Wembley Stadium. Team USA won their second straight gold medal after 1936 (Summer Olympic Games were cancelled in 1940 and 1944, due to World War II). The team was made up of Amateur Athletic Union and college basketball players.


1948 United States men's Olympic basketball team, Team USA
Alex Groza led Team USA with an average of 11.1 points per game. Bud Browning was the head coach, Adolph Rupp was the assistant coach, and Louis Wilke was the manager.


1948 United States presidential election
The 1948 United States presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. In one of the greatest election upsets in American history, incumbent President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey.


1948 United States presidential election
Truman had ascended to the presidency in April 1945 after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Defeating attempts to drop him from the ticket, Truman won the presidential nomination at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The Democratic  convention's civil rights plank caused a walk-out by several Southern delegates, who launched a third-party "Dixiecrat" ticket led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. 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.


1948 United States presidential election
Truman also faced a challenge from his party in the form of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who launched the Progressive Party and challenged Truman's confrontational Cold War policies. Dewey, who was the leader of his party's liberal eastern wing and had been the 1944 Republican presidential nominee, defeated Senator Robert A. Taft and other challengers at the 1948 Republican National Convention.


1948 United States presidential election
Truman's feisty campaign style energized his base of traditional Democrats, consisting of most of the white South, as well as Catholic and Jewish voters; he also fared surprisingly well with Midwestern farmers. Dewey ran a low-risk campaign and largely avoided directly criticizing Truman. With the three-way split in the Democratic Party, and with Truman's low approval ratings, Truman was widely considered to be the underdog in the race, and virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that Truman would be defeated by Dewey.


1948 United States presidential election
Defying these predictions, Truman won the election with 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. Truman also won 49.6% of the popular vote compared to Dewey's 45.1%, while the third party candidacies of Thurmond and Wallace each won less than 3% of the popular vote, with Thurmond carrying four southern states. Truman's surprise victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, the longest winning streak for either party since the 1880 election. 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.


1948 United States presidential election, 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination
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 had faded by 1947, when he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Law, which would have helped control union power. 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. 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 which Eisenhower declined. Truman's offer to Eisenhower did not become public knowledge during the campaign.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination
As a result of Truman's low standing in the polls, several Democratic party bosses began working to "dump" Truman 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 presidential candidate. On July 10, Eisenhower officially refused to be a candidate.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination
There was then an attempt to put forward Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas also declared that he would not be a presidential candidate. Finally, Senator Pepper declared his intention to challenge Truman for the presidential 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination, Democratic Convention
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 which 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 stated that "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!"


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination, Democratic Convention
Truman and his staff knew it was highly likely that any civil rights plank would lead to Southern delegates staging a walk-out 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; so the President supported and defended the "Crackpot" Biemiller plank, which passed by 651.5 votes to 582.5.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination, Democratic Convention
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 for the Democratic nomination as a rebuke to Truman.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination, Democratic Convention
Nonetheless, 947 Democratic delegates voted for Truman as the Democratic nominee, 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, with this nomination being made by acclamation.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Democratic Party nomination, Democratic Convention
Truman gave a fighting acceptance speech, stating that "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 claimed that 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."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Former Chief of Staff of the Army, General of the ArmyDouglas MacArthurfrom New York


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Speaker of the United States House of RepresentativesJoseph William Martin Jr.,from Massachusetts


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Former Chief of Staff of the Army, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhowerfrom New York(declined – January 24, 1948)


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
For both Republicans and Democrats, there was a boom for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular general of World War II and a favorite in the polls. Unlike the latter movement within the Democratic Party, however, the Republican draft movement came largely from the grassroots of the party. By January 23, 1948, the grassroots movement had successfully 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Stating that soldiers should keep out of politics, Eisenhower declined to run and requested that the grassroots draft movement cease its activities. After a number of failed efforts to get Eisenhower to reconsider, the organization disbanded, with the majority of its leadership endorsing the presidential campaign of the former Governor of Minnesota, 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
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 re-elected governor of New York by the largest margin in state history. Dewey's handicap was that many Republicans disliked him on a personal level; he often struck observers 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Taft called for abolishing many New Deal welfare programs, which he felt were harmful to business interests, and he 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 being too conservative and controversial to win a presidential election.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Both Vandenberg and Warren were highly popular in their home states, but each refused to campaign in the primaries, which limited their chances of winning the nomination. Their supporters, however, 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. He did make it known, however, that he would accept the GOP 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.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
The "surprise" candidate of 1948 was Stassen, a liberal from Minnesota. In 1938, Stassen 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; Stassen's surprise victory virtually eliminated General MacArthur, whose supporters had made a major effort on his behalf.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Stassen defeated Dewey again in the Nebraska primary, thus 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 his native Ohio, and Stassen earned the hostility of the party's conservatives. Even so, Stassen was still leading Dewey in the polls for the upcoming Oregon primary. Dewey, however, realized that losing another primary would end his chances at the nomination, and he decided to make an all-out effort in Oregon.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
In April 1948, Dewey sent Paul Lockwood, one of his top aides, to build a strong grassroots organization in the state. 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 in the state. 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."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Dewey also agreed to debate Stassen in Oregon on national radio. Held on May 17, 1948, it was the first-ever radio debate between presidential candidates. The sole issue of the debate concerned whether to outlaw the Communist Party of the United States. Stassen, despite his liberal reputation, argued in favor of outlawing the party, stating his belief that a network of Soviet-directed Communist spies "within the U.S. demanded immediate, and punitive, response... Why did Dewey oppose such a ban? Stassen wanted to know." "We must not coddle Communism with legality", Stassen insisted.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
Dewey - while criticizing Communist totalitarianism and Soviet actions in the Cold War - still forcefully argued against banning the Communist Party: "This outlawing idea is nothing new...for thousands of years despots have tortured, imprisoned, killed, and exiled their opponents, and their governments have always fallen into the dust." Dewey ended his turn in the debate by stating that "I am unalterably, wholeheartedly, and unswervingly against any scheme to write laws outlawing people because of their religious, political, social, or economic ideas.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination
I am against it because it is a violation of the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights... I am against it because I know from a great many years of experience in law enforcement that the proposal wouldn't work. Stripped to its naked essentials...this is nothing but the method of Hitler and Stalin. It is thought control...an attempt to beat down ideas with a club. It is a surrender of everything we believe in." Surveys showed that from 40 to 80 million people nationwide listened to the debate, and most observers rated Dewey as the winner. Four days after the debate, Dewey defeated Stassen in the Oregon primary. From this point forward, the New York governor had the momentum he needed to win his party's second nomination.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
The 1948 Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the first presidential convention to be shown on national television. At this time, there were 27 television stations in full operation in the U.S. and an estimated 350,000 TV sets in the whole country. As the convention opened, Dewey was believed to have a large lead in the delegate count.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
His campaign managers, such as Herbert Brownell Jr., Edwin Jaeckle, and J. Russell Sprague, were "as skillful a group of operators as ever manipulated a convention...it was said at the convention that the Dewey forces "could have won even with Taft" as their candidate."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
His main opponent, Senator Taft, was hobbled by an ineffective campaign team that one writer called "bumblers", and another historian noted that Taft's campaign manager, Ohio Congressman Clarence J. Brown, "seemed no match for Herbert Brownell...while the Dewey forces were busy flattering delegates and hinting at promises of patronage, Brown was still worrying about such mundane matters as hotel rooms and seats in the gallery for his friends."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
Taft and Stassen, Dewey's leading opponents, met in Taft's hotel suite to plan a "stop-Dewey" movement. A key obstacle soon developed, however, as both men refused to unite behind a single candidate to oppose Dewey: "The essence of their impasse was simple. Neither Stassen nor Taft hated Dewey enough to withdraw [in favor of the other], and neither man thought he could get his delegates to follow if he did." Instead, both Taft and Stassen, along with Senator Vandenberg, simply agreed to try to hold their own delegates in the hopes of preventing Dewey from obtaining a majority.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
This proved to be futile, as Dewey's efficient campaign team methodically gathered the remaining delegates they needed to win the nomination. Stassen tried to contact General Eisenhower to ask him to reconsider becoming a candidate, but Eisenhower "could not be reached." After the second round of balloting, Dewey was only 33 votes short of victory. Taft then called Stassen and urged him to withdraw from the race and endorse him as Dewey's main opponent. When Stassen refused, Taft wrote a concession statement and had it read to the convention at the start of the third ballot; at this point the other candidates also dropped out, and Dewey was then nominated unanimously by acclamation.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
Dewey's campaign team originally wanted Illinois Governor Dwight Green to be his running mate, but the opposition of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the powerful publisher of the Chicago Tribune, nixed his chances. According to journalist Jules Abels, Dewey managers Brownell, Sprague, and Jaeckle then appeared to offer the vice-presidential nomination to influential Indiana Congressman Charles Halleck, in exchange for Halleck delivering the entire Indiana delegation to Dewey. Halleck did so, but Dewey, who had not been present at the meeting between his managers and Halleck, decided to reject his candidacy, telling his aides "Halleck won't do."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Republican Party nomination, Republican Convention
After Dewey told Halleck of his decision, Halleck "was first speechless with disbelief and then overcome with emotion." He told Dewey that "you're running out on the Eightieth Congress, and you'll be sorry!" Abels wrote that Dewey's decision to deny Halleck the vice-presidential bid "may have been a fateful one...Halleck with his forceful personality might have changed the tone of the Dewey campaign, and certainly the issue of the record of the GOP-controlled Eightieth Congress would have to have been met heads on." Instead, Dewey chose popular governor (and future Chief Justice) Earl Warren of California as his running mate. Following the convention, most political experts in the news media rated the Republican ticket as an almost-certain winner over the Democrats.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party fragmented. A new Progressive Party (the name had been used earlier by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert M. La Follette in 1924) was created afresh in 1948, with the nomination of Henry A. Wallace, who had served as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President of the United States, and Secretary of Commerce under Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1946, President Truman had fired Wallace as Secretary of Commerce when Wallace publicly opposed Truman's firm moves to counter the Soviet Union in the Cold War.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Wallace's 1948 platform opposed the Cold War policies of President Truman, including the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. The Progressives proposed stronger government regulation and control of Big Business. They also campaigned to end discrimination against blacks and women, backed a minimum wage, and called for the elimination of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating the issue of communist spies within the U.S. government and labor unions. Wallace and his supporters believed that the committee was violating the civil liberties of government workers and labor unions.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
The Progressives also generated a great deal of controversy because of the widespread belief that they were secretly controlled by Communists who were more loyal to the Soviet Union than the United States. Wallace himself denied being a Communist, but he repeatedly refused to disavow their support and, at one point, was quoted as saying that the "Communists are the closest thing to the early Christian martyrs." Walter Reuther, the president of the influential United Auto Workers union, strongly opposed Wallace's candidacy, stating that "people who are not sympathetic with democracy in America are influencing him." Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), stated in April 1948 that "the Communist Party is directly responsible for the creation of the third party [Progressive Party] in the United States."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Wallace was also hurt when Westbrook Pegler, a prominent conservative newspaper columnist, revealed that Wallace as vice president had written coded letters discussing prominent politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to his controversial Russian New Age spiritual guru Nicholas Roerich; the letters were nicknamed the "Guru letters."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
In his book Out of the Jaws of Victory, the journalist Jules Abels wrote: "Personalities were referred to by symbolic titles—Roosevelt was 'The Flaming One', Churchill 'The Roaring Lion', and Cordell Hull 'The Sour One'... some of the letters were signed 'Wallace', others 'Galahad'", the name that Roerich had assigned Wallace in his cult. This revelation—including direct quotes from the letters—led to much ridicule of Wallace in the national press.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
The Progressive Party Convention, which was also held in Philadelphia, was a highly contentious affair; several famous newspaper journalists, such as H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Thompson, publicly accused the Progressives of being covertly controlled by Communists. The party's platform was drafted by Lee Pressman, the convention secretary; he later admitted that he had been a member of the Communist party. John Abt served as legal counsel to the convention's permanent chairman, Albert Fitzgerald; he also testified years later that he was a Communist.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Rexford Tugwell, a prominent liberal in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, served as the Chairman of the party's platform committee. He became convinced that the party was being manipulated by Communists, and was "so heartsick about Communist infiltration of the party that he discussed . . . with his wife disaffiliating [from the party] the night before the convention" started. Tugwell later did disassociate himself from the Progressive Party and did not participate in Wallace's fall campaign.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
A number of other Progressive Party delegates and supporters would quit the party in protest over what they perceived as the undue influence Communists exerted over Wallace, including the prominent American socialist Norman Thomas. In the fall, Thomas would run as the Socialist Party presidential candidate to offer liberals a non-Communist alternative to Wallace.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Senator Glen H. Taylor from Idaho, an eccentric figure who was known as a "singing cowboy" and who had ridden his horse "Nugget" up the steps of the United States Capitol after winning election to the Senate in 1944, was named as Wallace's running mate. Although he was a member of the Democratic Party, Taylor accepted the Progressive Party's vice-presidential nomination, saying "I am not leaving the Democratic Party. It left me. Wall Street and the military have taken over the Democratic Party."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
After receiving the vice-presidential nomination, Taylor told reporters that there was a difference between "pink" Communists and "red" Communists. Taylor claimed that "pink" Communists would support the Wallace-Taylor ticket because they believed in a "peaceful revolution" to turn the government to left-wing beliefs, but "red" Communists would support the Republican ticket in the belief that they would cause another Great Depression, which would give Communists the chance to take over the government.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
In the fall campaign the Wallace-Taylor ticket made a Southern tour, where both Wallace and Taylor insisted on speaking to racially integrated audiences, in defiance of Southern custom and law at the time. In several North Carolina cities Wallace was hit by a total of "twenty-seven eggs, thirty-seven tomatoes, six peaches, and two lemons." When he left the state he announced: "As Jesus Christ said, if at any time they will not listen to you willingly, then shake the dust off from your feet and go elsewhere."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
He ate only in unsegregated restaurants, traveled with a black secretary, and in Mississippi had to be escorted by police for protection. His aide Clark Foreman admitted that Wallace wanted to stir up controversy for the publicity it would receive in more liberal areas in the North and West. As the campaign progressed, however, Wallace's crowds thinned and his standing in the polls dropped. Wallace was hurt by the successful effort of labor unions to keep their members in the Democratic column, and by controversial statements from Progressives supporting "appeasement with Russia."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
Wallace himself attacked Winston Churchill as a "racist" and "imperialist", and Senator Taylor earned criticism for a speech in which he claimed that the "Nazis are running the US government. So why should Russia make peace with them? If I were a Russian . . . I would not agree to anything . . . we are aggressively preparing for war."


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Progressive Party nomination
The Wallace-Taylor ticket finished in fourth place in the election, winning 1,157,328 votes (2.4%). This was slightly less than the States' Rights Party, but the Progressive Party received no electoral votes.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
Southern Democrats had become increasingly disturbed over President Truman's support of civil rights, particularly following his executive order racially integrating the U.S. armed forces and a civil rights message he sent to Congress in February 1948. At the Southern Governor's Conference in Wakulla Springs, Florida, on February 6, Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright proposed the formation of a new third party to protect racial segregation in the South.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
On May 10, 1948, the governors of the eleven states of the former Confederacy, along with other high-ranking Southern officials, met in Jackson, Mississippi, to discuss their concerns about the growing civil rights movement within the Democratic Party. At the meeting, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond criticized President Truman for his civil rights agenda, and the governors discussed ways to oppose it.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
The Southern Democrats who had walked out of the Democratic National Convention to protest the civil rights platform approved by the convention, and supported by Truman, promptly met at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 17, 1948, and formed yet another political party, which they named the States' Rights Democratic Party. More commonly known as the "Dixiecrats", the party's main goal was continuing the policy of racial segregation in the South and the Jim Crow laws that sustained it.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
Governor Thurmond, who had led the walkout, became the party's presidential nominee after the convention's initial favorite, Arkansas Governor Benjamin Laney, withdrew his name from consideration. Governor Wright of Mississippi received the vice-presidential nomination. The Dixiecrats had no chance of winning the election themselves, since they could not get on the ballot in enough states to win the necessary electoral votes.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
Their strategy was to take enough Southern states from Truman to force the election into the United States House of Representatives under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment, where they could then extract concessions from either Truman or Dewey on racial issues in exchange for their support. Even if Dewey won the election outright, the Dixiecrats hoped that their defection would show that the Democratic Party needed Southern support in order to win national elections, and that this fact would weaken the pro-civil rights movement among Northern and Western Democrats. The Dixiecrats were weakened, however, when most Southern Democratic leaders (such as Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia and "Boss" E. H. Crump from Tennessee) refused to support the party. Despite being an incumbent president, Truman was not placed on the ballot in Alabama.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, States' Rights Democratic Party nomination
In the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, the party was able to be labeled as the main Democratic Party ticket on the local ballots on election night. Outside of these four states, it was only listed as a third-party ticket.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Socialist Party nomination
Although it had initially appeared that the Socialist Party would refrain from nominating its own candidate and instead endorse Wallace's run, policy differences and Wallace's refusal to publicly repudiate the support of communists caused them to break with the Progressive Party and nominate their own ticket. The party therefore nominated Norman Thomas, a five-time Socialist nominee and the former party chairman, as president, and Tucker P. Smith, an economics professor, as vice president.


1948 United States presidential election, Nominations, Christian Nationalist Party nomination
This Party nominated Gerald L. K. Smith, a leader of the Share Our Wealth movement during the Great Depression, founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, and founder of the America First Party (1943) for which he was presidential candidate (1944).


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Given Truman's sinking popularity and the seemingly fatal three-way split in the Democratic Party, Dewey appeared unbeatable to the point where top Republicans believed that all their candidate had to do to win was to avoid major mistakes. Following this advice, Dewey carefully avoided risks and spoke in platitudes, avoiding controversial issues, and remained vague on what he planned to do as president, with speech after speech being nonpartisan and also filled with optimistic assertions or empty statements of the obvious, including the famous quote: "You know that your future is still ahead of you." An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up:


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Another writer noted the "one broad issue that Dewey set forth in the campaign was unity...but [he] was oversold on an issue which had no visceral appeal to the average American. It was hard to understand what Dewey was driving at. Sometimes it seemed that he was asking Americans to achieve unity by being united behind him." On the other hand, Truman's campaign strategist, Clark Clifford, said that Truman's campaign was "pitched to four distinct interest groups - labor, the farmer, the Negro, and the consumer. Every move had these four interest groups in mind."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Since he was trailing in the polls, Truman decided to adopt a slashing, no-holds-barred campaign. He ridiculed Dewey by name, criticized Dewey's refusal to address specific issues, and scornfully targeted the Republican-controlled 80th Congress with a wave of relentless and blistering partisan assaults. Truman claimed that "the Communists are rooting for a GOP victory because they know it would bring on another Great Depression." In several speeches, Truman stated that "GOP" actually stood for "gluttons of privilege", and said that Republicans were "princes of privilege" and "bloodsuckers with offices on Wall Street."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
He told one audience that "The Republicans have begun to nail the American consumer to the wall with spikes of greed." At the National Plowing Contest in Dexter, Iowa, Truman told 80,000 farmers in attendance that "this Republican Congress has already stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back" to rapturous applause.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Truman nicknamed the Republican-controlled Congress as the "worst", "do-nothing" Congress, a remark which brought strong criticism from Republican Congressional leaders (such as Taft), but no comment from Dewey. In fact, Dewey rarely mentioned Truman's name during the campaign, which fit into his strategy of appearing to be above petty partisan politics. Under Dewey's leadership, the Republicans had enacted a platform at their 1948 convention that called for expanding Social Security, more funding for public housing, civil rights legislation, and promotion of health and education by the federal government.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
These positions were unacceptable to the conservative Congressional Republican leadership; Truman exploited this rift in the opposing party by calling a special session of Congress on "Turnip Day" (referring to an old piece of Missouri folklore about planting turnips in late July) and daring the Republican Congressional leadership to pass its own platform. The 80th Congress played into Truman's hands, delivering very little in the way of substantive legislation during this time.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Truman simply ignored the fact that Dewey's policies were considerably more liberal than most of his fellow Republicans, and instead concentrated his fire against what he characterized as the conservative, obstructionist tendencies of the unpopular 80th Congress. Truman toured much of the nation with his fiery rhetoric, playing to large, enthusiastic crowds. "Give 'em hell, Harry" was a popular slogan shouted out at stop after stop along the tour. The polls and the pundits held that Dewey's lead was insurmountable and that Truman's efforts were for naught. Truman's own staff considered the campaign a last hurrah.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Even Truman's own wife, Bess, had private doubts that her husband could win; the only person who appears to have considered Truman's campaign to be winnable was the president himself, who confidently predicted victory to anyone who would listen to him. Near the end of the campaign, Truman privately wrote a state-by-state electoral vote prediction and gave it to his aide, George Elsey. Truman believed that he would win the election with 340 electoral votes, to 108 for Dewey, 42 for Thurmond, and 37 marked doubtful (he accidentally left out four electoral votes).


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
In the final weeks of the campaign, American movie theaters agreed to play two short newsreel-like campaign films in support of the two major-party candidates: both had been created by its respective campaign organization. The Dewey film, shot professionally on an impressive budget, featured very high production values but somehow reinforced an image of the New York governor as cautious and distant.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
On the other hand, the Truman film, hastily assembled on virtually no budget by the perpetually cash-short Truman campaign, relied heavily on public-domain and newsreel footage of the president taking part in major world events and signing important legislation. Perhaps unintentionally, the Truman film visually reinforced an image of him as engaged and decisive. Years later, historian David McCullough cited the expensive but lackluster Dewey film and the far cheaper but more effective Truman film as important factors in determining the preferences of undecided voters.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
As the campaign drew to a close, the polls showed Truman was gaining: though Truman lost all nine of the Gallup Poll's post-convention surveys, Dewey's Gallup lead dropped from 17 points in late September to nine points in mid-October and just five points by the end of the month, just above the poll's margin of error. Although Truman was gaining momentum, most political analysts were reluctant to break with the conventional wisdom and say that a Truman victory was a serious possibility. After 1948, pollsters would constantly test voters through election day.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
On September 9, nearly two months before election day, pollster Elmo Roper announced "Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected. [ ...] I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race." Roper stopped polling voters until the final week before the election, when he took another poll. It showed "a slight shift to Truman; it still gave Dewey a heavy lead, however, so he decided not to hedge his bet."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
One poll showing strong Truman support in the rural Midwest was sponsored by the Staley Milling Company, who "polled farmers by giving them a choice of a donkey or an elephant on chicken feed sacks. When the results among 20,000 farmers showed up as fifty-four percent to forty-six percent for the donkey, the poll was abandoned."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
When Dewey considered adopting a more aggressive stance after noticing that his crowds were dwindling, Herbert Brownell contacted 90 GOP state committeemen and committeewomen in all 48 states. With one exception, they "urged [Dewey] to press forward on the high road" his campaign had taken and to continue to ignore Truman's attacks. The sole exception was Kansas committeeman Harry Darby, who warned Dewey and his managers "that farmers were in a mutinous mood" and recommended that Dewey take a tougher and more aggressive stance. However, given that all the polls still showed Dewey leading, and no other committee member supported Darby, his advice was rejected.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
In the campaign's final days, many newspapers, magazines, and political pundits were so confident of Dewey's impending victory they wrote articles to be printed the morning after the election speculating about Dewey's Presidency: Life magazine printed a large photo in its final edition before the election, entitled "Our Next President Rides by Ferryboat over San Francisco Bay," that showed Dewey and his staff riding across the city's harbor. Newsweek polled fifty experts, with all fifty predicting a Dewey win.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Several well-known and influential newspaper columnists, such as Drew Pearson and Joseph Alsop, wrote columns to be printed the morning after the election speculating about Dewey's possible choices for his cabinet; the day before the election, Pearson wrote that any chance of a Truman victory was "impossible," and his column printed the day after the election stated that Pearson had "surveyed the closely-knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over the White House 86 days from now."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
Walter Winchell reported that gambling odds were 15 to 1 against Truman. More than 500 newspapers, accounting for over 78% of the nation's total circulation, endorsed Dewey. Truman picked up 182 endorsements, accounting for just 10% of America's newspaper readership, being surpassed by Thurmond, who got the remaining 12% from many Southern papers. Alistair Cooke, the distinguished writer for the Manchester Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, published an article on the day of the election entitled "Harry S. Truman: A Study of a Failure." For its television coverage, NBC News had constructed a large cardboard model of the White House containing two elephants that would pop out when NBC announced Dewey's victory; since Truman's defeat was considered certain, no donkeys were placed in the White House model.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Fall campaign
As Truman made his way to his hometown of Independence, Missouri, to await the election returns, some among his inner circle had already accepted other jobs, and not a single reporter traveling on his campaign train thought that he would win, while a number of prominent Republicans, anticipating serving in a Dewey Presidency, had already bought homes in Washington.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
On election night, Dewey, his family, and campaign staff confidently gathered in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City to await the returns. Truman, aided by the Secret Service, sneaked away from reporters covering him in Kansas City and rode to nearby Excelsior Springs, Missouri. There, he took a room in the historic Elms Hotel, had dinner and a Turkish bath, and went to sleep. As the votes came in, Truman took an early lead that he never lost.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
The leading radio commentators, such as H. V. Kaltenborn of NBC, still confidently predicted that once the "late returns" came in Dewey would overcome Truman's lead and win. At midnight, Truman awoke and turned on the radio in his room; he heard Kaltenborn announce that while Truman was still ahead in the popular vote, he could not possibly win. At 4 a.m., Truman awoke again and heard on the radio that his popular-vote lead was now nearly two million votes, and that he was well ahead in the electoral vote.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
He told the Secret Service agents guarding him to drive him back to Kansas City, "because it looks as if we're in for another four years." For the rest of his life, Truman would gleefully mimic Kaltenborn's pedantic voice predicting his defeat throughout that election night. Dewey, meanwhile, realized that he was in trouble when early returns from New England and New York showed him running well behind his expected vote total. He stayed up for the rest of the night and early morning analyzing the votes as they came in, and by 10:30 a.m., he was convinced he had lost; at 11:14 a.m., he sent a gracious telegram of concession to Truman.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
The pro-Republican Chicago Daily Tribune, was so certain of Dewey's victory that on Tuesday afternoon, before any polls closed, it printed "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" as its banner headline for the following day. Part of the reason Truman's victory came as such a shock was because of uncorrected flaws in the emerging craft of public opinion polling. According to historian William Manchester, "many professional pollsters...believed in what some had come to call Farley's Law."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
James Farley, President Franklin Roosevelt's successful campaign manager in 1932 and 1936, had stated that, in his opinion, the great majority of voters decided which candidate to support during the political conventions. The fall campaigns, Farley believed, were simply "ineffective carnivals" that swayed few voters. In 1948 many pollsters, relying on Farley's Law, believed that the election was effectively over after the Republican and Democratic Conventions, and they discounted the impact of Truman's campaigning that fall.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Manchester noted that "Gallup's September 24 report foresaw 46.5% for Dewey to 38% for Truman. His last column, appearing in the Sunday papers two days before the election, showed Truman gaining sharply – to 44 percent – and the interviews on which it was based had been conducted two weeks earlier. The national mood was shifting daily, almost hourly." After the election, a study by the University of Michigan revealed that "14% of Truman's voters, or 3,374,800, had decided to vote for him in the last fortnight of the campaign."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Gallup and Roper also did an analysis of the votes, they "learned that one voter in every seven (6,927,000), made up his mind in the last two weeks before the election. Of these, 75 percent picked Truman", which was more than his margin of victory over Dewey. "Using either the Michigan figures or Gallup-Roper's, one finds that some 3,300,000 fence-sitters determined the outcome of the race in its closing days – when Dewey's instincts were urging him to adopt Truman's hell-for-leather style and slug it out with him, and when he didn't because all the experts told him he shouldn't."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
The key states in the 1948 election were Ohio, California, and Illinois. Truman won each of these states by less than 1%; they gave him a total of 78 electoral votes. Had Dewey carried all three states - which would have required a shift of just 29,000 votes - he would have won the election in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by 2.13 million votes (or 4.36%). If Dewey had won any two of the three, no nominee would have reached the 266 electoral votes required for election, and the Dixiecrats would have succeeded in their goal of forcing the election into the House of Representatives.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
The extreme closeness of the vote in these three states was the major reason why Dewey waited until late on the morning of November 3 to concede defeat. Aside from Ohio, California, and Illinois, Truman carried Idaho by almost as narrow a margin, and Dewey himself countered with similarly narrow victories in New York (the nation's largest electoral prize at the time), his birth state of Michigan, and Maryland. But this was too little to give him the election. Dewey would always believe that he lost the election because he lost the rural vote in the Midwest, which he had won in 1944 (note the Kaltenborn predictions that Truman would joyously mock had taken for granted that the "country vote" would go to Dewey).


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Journalist Sidney Lubell found in his post-1948 survey of voters that Truman, not Dewey, seemed the safer, more conservative candidate to the "new middle class" that had developed over the previous 20 years. He wrote that "to an appreciable part of the electorate, the Democrats had replaced the Republicans as the party of prosperity" during and after the war. Lubell quoted a man who, when asked why he did not vote Republican after moving to the suburbs, answered "I own a nice home, have a new car and am much better off than my parents were.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
I've been a Democrat all my life. Why should I change?" Dewey's promise of a "great house cleaning" in Washington worried an Iowa minister who wanted to retain farm subsidies for parishioners; worried about the consequences of another depression, he voted Democratic for the first time in his church's history. Truman received a record number of Catholic votes, exceeding even the Catholic support of Al Smith in 1928, in part because Wallace drew leftists away from the Democrats.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Another reason for Dewey's surprise defeat was his complacent, distant approach to the campaign, and his failure to respond to Truman's attacks. Journalist Jules Abels wrote that "the election was not thrown away by indifference or lack of effort. Preparation and more preparation had always been the distinguishing characteristic of Dewey and his team throughout his career... The truth is that Dewey's campaign was the result not of careless, but too careful and painstaking, calculation. The Dewey campaign was frozen into inertia not because it had been underthought, but because it had been overthought."


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Other possible factors for Truman's victory included his aggressive, populist campaign style; broad public approval of Truman's foreign policy, notably the Berlin Airlift of that year; and widespread dissatisfaction with the institution Truman labeled as the "do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Republican Congress." In addition, after suffering a relatively severe recession in 1946 and 1947 (in which real GDP dropped by 12% and inflation went over 15%), the economy began recovering throughout 1948. The year 1948 was a banner year for the Democrats, as they not only retained the presidency but also recaptured both houses of Congress.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
It was also an unprecedented fifth consecutive presidential victory for the party, thus continuing what remains the only winning streak of more than two presidential elections by the Democratic Party since the Civil War. Since 1948, there has been only one streak of three consecutive presidential victories by any party (in that case, by the Republicans). The two largest third parties did not hurt Truman nearly as much as expected, as Thurmond's Dixiecrats carried only four Southern states, fewer than predicted.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
The civil rights platform helped Truman win large majorities among black voters in the populous Northern and Midwestern states, and may well have made the difference for Truman in states such as Illinois and Ohio. Wallace's Progressives received only 2.4% of the national popular vote, well below their expected vote total and slightly less than the Dixiecrats, and Wallace did not take as many liberal votes from Truman as many political pundits had predicted. Some analysts, including author Zachary Karabell, have even argued that the separate candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond were beneficial to Truman by removing the separate taints of communism and racism from the Democratic Party.


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
This was the last election until 1996 in which the Democrats won Arizona and the last until 1964 in which they won California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. It was also the last election until 1964 in which South Carolina did not vote for the official Democratic nominee. Thurmond's 2.4% is the lowest popular vote percentage for a candidate who won all of a state's electoral votes. The 1948 presidential election contrasted with other elections across the world during this period, for Truman was a war leader who managed to win re-election (Churchill and De Gaulle both left office shortly after the end of the war).


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results
Results by county, shaded according to winning candidate's percentage of the vote


1948 United States presidential election, General election, Results, Close states
Margin of victory between 5% and 10% (59 electoral votes):


1948 United States presidential election in Alabama
In the 1948 United States presidential election, Alabama was the only state in which the National Democratic Party candidate, incumbent president Harry S. Truman, did not appear on the ballot. The state Supreme Court ruled that any statute requiring party presidential electors to vote for that party's national nominee was void. A "Loyalist" group did petition governor "Big Jim" Folsom to allow Truman electors, but Senator John Sparkman, fearing popular defeat at the hands of the Dixiecrats and a hostile state legislature, decided against placing Truman electors on the ballot.


1948 United States presidential election in Alabama
In other Southern states where he was on the ballot, Thurmond was forced to run under the label of the States' Rights Democratic Party.


1948 United States presidential election in Alabama
Thurmond overwhelmingly won Alabama by a margin of 60.71 percent, or 130,513 votes, against his closest opponent, Republican New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Two third-party candidates, Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party and Claude A. Watson of the Prohibition Party, appeared on the ballot in Alabama, though neither had any impact on the election.


1948 United States presidential election in Alabama, Analysis
Southern Democrats walked out at the party's national convention in Philadelphia because of Truman's endorsement of civil rights for African Americans. This segregationist faction met on July 17, 1948, in Birmingham, nominating South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as its nominee for president. Mississippi governor Fielding L. Wright was nominated for vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Alabama, Analysis
Thurmond won 66 of Alabama's 67 counties, with the sole holdout being in the northern part of the state where Winston County gave Dewey over sixty percent of the vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Arizona
The 1948 United States presidential election in Arizona took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose four representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Arizona
Arizona was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 53.79% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 43.82% of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Arizona
As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last election in which Yavapai County voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Maricopa County, which voted straight Republican with Yavapai from 1952 to 2016, broke its streak in the 2020 election.


1948 United States presidential election in Arizona
Coconino County would not vote Democratic again until 1992, Navajo County not until 1976, whilst Apache, Cochise, Mohave and Pima Counties would next vote Democratic for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This is also the last election where a candidate carried every county in the state, as well as the last time a Democrat won the state with an outright majority. Arizona would vote Republican in every election thereafter except 1996 and 2020. Had Bob Dole won the state in 1996, Arizona would have the longest Republican voting streak for any state in recent political history.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas
The 1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose nine representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. This would be the last presidential election where Arkansas had nine electoral votes: the Great Migration would see the state lose three congressional districts in the next decade-and-a-half.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Background
Except for the Unionist Ozark counties of Newton and Searcy where Republicans controlled local government, Arkansas since the end of Reconstruction had been a classic one-party Democratic "Solid South" state. Disfranchisement of effectively all black people and most poor whites had meant that outside those two aberrant counties, the Republican Party was completely moribund and Democratic primaries the only competitive elections.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Background
However, ever since seeing the potential effect on the United States' image abroad (and ability to win the Cold War against the radically egalitarian rhetoric of Communism) of the beating and blinding of Isaac Woodard three hours after being discharged from the army, President Truman was attempting to launch a Civil Rights bill, involving desegregation of the military. This produced severe opposition from Southern Democrats, who aimed to have South Carolina Governor James Strom Thurmond listed as Democratic Presidential nominee and Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as Vice-Presidential nominee.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Background
Unlike Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina or Virginia, Arkansas did not have a major threat from the Republican Party to block local Democratic support for Thurmond, but it had only half the proportion of blacks found in Mississippi or South Carolina. At the time when it became clear that a Southern bolt from the national Democratic Party was on the agenda, Arkansas was deeply divided between a Dixiecrat faction headed by outgoing Governor Ben T. Laney and a loyalist faction led by Sidney S. McMath.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Background
McMath was to win the Democratic gubernatorial primary that was in this one-party state tantamount to election, and despite the efforts of Laney and state party chairman Arthur Adams, it was clear from the beginning of the campaign that they held little sway over the Democratic rank and file who were loyal to Truman.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Background
In May 1948 Governor Laney became chairman of the "States' Rights Democrats"; however on July 12 the possibility of Laney himself becoming the nominee ended when he refused to support anyone. However, as late as the September 22 Democratic Convention the Dixiecrats had hopes of pledging Arkansas' Democratic presidential electors to Thurmond and Wright; however McMath and Congressman Charles Fuller were able to persuade the electors to remain loyal to President Truman.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Vote
With the state's Democratic electors pledged to Truman, the incumbent President and running mate Kentucky Senator Alben W. Barkley easily carried Arkansas with 61.72% of the popular vote, against New York Governor Thomas Dewey and California Governor Earl Warren's 21.02% of the popular vote. Vis-à-vis the 1944 election, Truman picked up Benton County and Searcy County, the latter of which had previously only voted Democratic once since the Civil War.


1948 United States presidential election in Arkansas, Vote
Thurmond, running as a third-party candidate, was able to capture 16.52 percent of Arkansas' vote. The Dixiecrats ran strongest in the Delta region of the state where Truman's Civil Rights and "Fair Deal" policies were most feared by the powerful Black Belt planters; Thurmond carried three counties with entirely nonvoting black majorities and was second in twenty-eight others. However, in the hilly northwestern half of the state, Thurmond failed to crack 5 percent of the vote in eighteen counties. As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last election in which Benton County and Sebastian County voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Arkansas was also the only state in the entire country where Norman Thomas beat Henry Wallace.


1948 United States presidential election in California
The 1948 United States presidential election in California took place on November 2, 1948 as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose 25 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in California
California narrowly voted for the Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman, over the Republican challenger, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, even though Dewey's running mate was incumbent Governor Earl Warren. California was the tipping-point state for Truman's victory.


1948 United States presidential election in Colorado
The 1948 United States presidential election in Colorado took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose six representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Colorado
Colorado was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 51.88% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 46.52% of the popular vote. As of the 2020 election, Truman remains the last candidate to carry Colorado without winning Larimer County.


1948 United States presidential election in Connecticut
The 1948 United States presidential election in Connecticut took place on November 7, 1944, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose eight electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Connecticut
Connecticut was won by Republican candidate New York governor Thomas E. Dewey over Democratic candidate, incumbent President Harry S. Truman.


1948 United States presidential election in Connecticut
Dewey won the state by a very narrow margin of 1.64%.


1948 United States presidential election in Delaware
The 1948 United States presidential election in Delaware took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose three representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Delaware
Delaware was won by Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 50.04% of the popular vote, against incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 48.76% of the popular vote. This is the last time that New Castle county did not back the statewide winner, when the Democratic candidate would win a presidential election without Delaware, and the last election until 2000 when Delaware failed to support the overall winner of the presidency, and electoral college.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida
The 1948 United States presidential election in Florida was held on November 2, 1948. Voters chose eight electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background
Excepting the 1928 election when fierce anti-Catholicism and Prohibitionism caused Herbert Hoover to defeat the wet Catholic Al Smith, Florida since the end of the Reconstruction era had been a classic Southern one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party. Disfranchisement of African-Americans and many poor whites had virtually eliminated the Republican Party – only nine Republicans had ever been elected to the state legislature since 1890 – and Democratic primaries were the sole competitive elections.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background
Under the influence of Senator Claude Pepper, Florida had abolished the poll tax in 1937, leading to steady increases in voter turnout during the following several elections; however, there was no marked increase in African-American voting and Democratic hegemony remained unchallenged: FDR did not lose a single county in the state during his four elections.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
However, on February 2, 1948, incumbent President Harry S. Truman, fearing that the anti-democratic practices and racial discrimination  of the South would severely denigrate the United States' reputation in the Cold War, launched the first civil rights bill since the end of Reconstruction, along with Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the military. Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright had already sounded a call for revolt, which he took to the Southern Governors Conference at Wakulla Springs to say that calls for civil rights legislation by national Democrats would not be tolerated in Dixie.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
After Truman was renominated at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Southern Democrats walked out and convened at Birmingham, Alabama on July 17, nominating South Carolina Governor James Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright for vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background, To bolt or not to bolt
Largely because it had a smaller proportion of African Americans in its population than Mississippi, South Carolina or Louisiana, Florida was less deeply involved in the bolt from the national Democratic Party. Frank D. Upchurch, a long-time adversary of Senator Pepper, had recommended that the renomination of Truman be fought, whilst the more liberal Pepper argued that unless Dwight Eisenhower replaced Truman as the nominee, the Democrats had no chance of winning. In the primary campaign for electors, bolters won eleven and a half votes out of twenty and control of the state's delegation.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background, To bolt or not to bolt
When Florida's Democrats designated their presidential electors, four were pledged against Truman and four to vote for him, although only names of electors were listed. However, after the "States' Rights" convention in July, Miami Herald publisher Reuben Clein filed a civil suit to disqualify the four original electors who planned to vote for Thurmond. Senator Pepper reversed his earlier pledge to not support Truman, and a special session of the state legislature provided separate lists for all candidates, including the far-left former Vice-President Henry Wallace.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Background, To bolt or not to bolt
Pepper campaigned on Dewey's alleged support of big business over the "little man", and Truman made a whistle-stop tour of the state in mid-October.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Vote
Harry Truman won by 87,708 votes or 15.19 percentage points against Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey. In the socially conservative Panhandle, Truman was able to rely on having a strong economic program – which Thurmond entirely lacked – to hold off Thurmond's racial appeal. In more liberal South Florida – which had seen extensive settlement by Northerners since the war – his economic policies were a winner against Henry Wallace, who received only two percent of the state's vote but did an order of magnitude better in some Tampa precincts.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Vote
Dewey nonetheless made dramatic gains upon previous Republican efforts in Florida. By carrying eleven counties, mostly in the southwest and on the east coast, he was only the fifth Republican to carry any Florida county at the presidential level since the poll tax' original implementation following the 1888 election. The Dewey counties had in earlier Democratic primaries typically backed "conservative" candidates favoring limited or no economic regulation, due to their lack of dependence on the traditionally "Southern" crops of cotton and tobacco, and would become the most consistently conservative and Republican counties in future presidential elections.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Vote
Strom Thurmond, who had had to run as a third-party candidate under the "States' Rights" banner, nonetheless won over fifteen percent of the vote. Thurmond carried three counties but ran second in thirty-one others.


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Vote, Electoral eccentricities
This is the last time, as of the 2020 presidential election, that Florida was won by a Democratic presidential candidate by double digits; not even Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 landslide election nor Jimmy Carter in 1976 managed to win the state by double digits, despite both men being Southern Democrats. Republicans have won Florida by double digits in the following elections:


1948 United States presidential election in Florida, Vote, Electoral eccentricities
This election is also the last time Highlands County have ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Osceola County, which Truman won by two votes, would not vote Democratic again until 1996. Seminole County voted Republican from 1952 until 2020.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia
The 1948 United States presidential election in Georgia took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the wider United States Presidential election. Voters chose 12 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Background
With the exception of a handful of historically Unionist North Georgia counties – chiefly Fannin but also to a lesser extent Pickens, Gilmer and Towns – Georgia since the 1880s had been a one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party. Disfranchisement of almost all African-Americans and most poor whites had made the Republican Party virtually nonexistent outside of local governments in those few hill counties, and the national Democratic Party served as the guardian of white supremacy against a Republican Party historically associated with memories of Reconstruction. The only competitive elections were Democratic primaries, which state laws restricted to whites on the grounds of the Democratic Party being legally a private club.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
However, on February 2, 1948, incumbent President Harry S. Truman, fearing that the antidemocratic practices and racial discrimination of the South would severely denigrate the United States' reputation in the Cold War, launched the first Civil Rights bill since the end of Reconstruction, along with an executive order for desegregation of the military. Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright had already sounded a call for revolt, which he took to the Southern Governors Conference at Wakulla Springs, Florida, to say that calls for civil rights legislation by national Democrats would not be tolerated in Dixie.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
After Truman was renominated at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Southern Democrats walked out and convened at Birmingham, Alabama on July 17, nominating South Carolina Governor James Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright for vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
Given that Georgia had no threat from the Republican Party and a relatively high proportion of African Americans in its population, one would have expected the Peach State to bolt from Truman's civil rights platform and nominate Thurmond as the official Democratic Party candidate. However, leading "conservative" gubernatorial candidate Herman Talmadge had experienced the Three Governors controversy in 1947 which removed him from office until a special election was to be held concurrently with the presidential election. Herman consequently feared that if he supported Thurmond for president, Truman loyalists would challenge him for governor in the concurrent general election. Moreover, neither the Talmadge nor the anti-Talmadge faction wished to be accused of bolting during the summer's Democratic gubernatorial primary.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Background, Dixiecrat revolt
Thus, although most of the Talmadge faction was pro-Thurmond, it did not nominate as Democratic electors candidates pledged to support Thurmond and Fielding Wright, unlike the anti-Long faction in Louisiana. Thurmond and Wright thus had to take their place on the ballot as the "States' Rights" party. Interim Governor Thompson also played an important role in ensuring the "Democratic" label would be given to electors supporting the national ticket.


1948 United States presidential election in Georgia, Vote
Because Southern senators and congressmen had their seniority to worry about as it determined places on committees, few of Georgia's congressmen would risk openly supporting Thurmond once Truman was established as the "Democratic" candidate. Consequently, Truman had no trouble carrying the state by 40.49%, and Thurmond gained a majority in just 10 of 159 counties. Almost all of these Thurmond counties were located adjacent to the South Carolina governor's home county of Edgefield, South Carolina, while in most counties north of Atlanta Thurmond's percentage remained in single figures.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho
The 1948 United States presidential election in Idaho took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose four representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho
In his four election campaigns, Franklin D. Roosevelt had carried Idaho each time, though by steadily decreasing margins. After beating Alf Landon by 29.77 percentage points in 1936, Wendell Willkie lost by only 9.05 percentage points in 1940 and Dewey by only 3.49 percentage points in 1944. However, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse said that Dewey would fail to maintain these gains in the West if Bureau of Reclamation programs were cut as demanded by the House Appropriations Committee.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho
Truman campaigned heavily in the West, including Idaho, arguing that the region was an economic colony of Wall Street under the GOP and that only the Democratic Party could give the West direct access to its natural resources. While in Pocatello, Truman also defended himself against charges of corruption by machine politics from his days in Kansas City.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho, Vote
Idaho was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 49.98% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 47.26% of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho, Vote
This election marks the last before Idaho would turn from a swing state into a Republican Party bastion, which was to be inaugurated with a large-scale landslide in the 1950 state elections. The solitary subsequent Democrat to carry Idaho has been Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and he did so by only 1.83 percentage points in a huge national landslide, while only John F. Kennedy has otherwise passed forty percent of the statewide vote in the subsequent seventeen elections.


1948 United States presidential election in Idaho, Vote
This is the last election in which the southeastern Mormon counties of Bonneville, Bingham, Jefferson, Madison, Minidoka and Oneida voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, and like several analogous counties in the Texas Panhandle, these counties have frequently battled for the title of "most Republican in the nation" since the 1970s.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois
The 1948 United States presidential election in Illinois took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose 28 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois
Illinois was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 50.07% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 49.22% of the popular vote. This is the only time since 1888 in which Illinois voted for a different candidate than New Jersey.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Election information
The primaries and general elections coincided with those for other federal offices (Senate and House), as well as those for state offices.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Election information, Turnout
The total vote in the state-run primary elections (Democratic and Republican) was 354,254.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries
Both major parties held non-binding state-run preferential primaries on April 13.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Democratic
The 1948 Illinois Democratic presidential primary was held on April 13, 1948, in the U.S. state of Illinois as one of the Democratic Party's state primaries ahead of the 1948 presidential election.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Democratic
The popular vote was a non-binding "beauty contest". Delegates were instead elected by direct votes by congressional district on delegate candidates.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Democratic
Incumbent president Harry S. Truman won the state's Democratic primary by a large margin.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Democratic
While on the ballot in Illinois, neither Dwight D. Eisenhower nor Scott W. Lucas were declared candidates.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Republican
The 1948 Illinois Republican presidential primary was held on April 13, 1948, in the U.S. state of Illinois as one of the Republican Party's state primaries ahead of the 1948 presidential election.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Republican
The preference vote was a "beauty contest". Delegates were instead selected by direct-vote in each congressional districts on delegate candidates.


1948 United States presidential election in Illinois, Primaries, Republican
Illinois businessman Riley A. Bender appeared only on Illinois' primary ballot, running as a favorite son. He won the primary.


1948 United States presidential election in Indiana
The 1948 United States presidential election in Indiana took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. Indiana voters chose 13 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Indiana
Indiana was won by Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 49.58% of the popular vote, against incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 48.78% of the popular vote. As of 2020 presidential election, this is the last time that Johnson County voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.


1948 United States presidential election in Iowa
The 1948 United States presidential election in Iowa took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. Iowa voters chose ten representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Iowa
Iowa was won by incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman of neighbouring Missouri, running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 50.31% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 47.58% of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Kansas
The 1948 United States presidential election in Kansas took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. Voters chose eight representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Kansas
Kansas was won by Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 53.63% of the popular vote, against incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 44.61% of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Kansas
With 53.63% of the popular vote, Kansas would prove to be Dewey's fourth strongest state in the nation after Vermont, Maine and Nebraska.


1948 United States presidential election in Kentucky
The 1948 United States presidential election in Kentucky took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. Kentucky voters chose 11 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Kentucky
Kentucky was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 56.74 percent of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 41.48 percent of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Kentucky
Dewey performed worse than he had four years previously, with both his margin of loss increasing, and the percentage of the vote he received decreasing, even as he fared a lot better nationally than he had four years prior. This discrepancy was at least in part due to the choice of President Truman's running mate, Senator Barkley, who himself came from the Bluegrass State.


1948 United States presidential election in Louisiana
The 1948 United States presidential election in Louisiana took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose ten representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Louisiana
Louisiana was won by Governor Strom Thurmond (DX–South Carolina), running with Governor Fielding L. Wright, with 49.07% of the popular vote, against incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 32.75% of the popular vote, and Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 17.45% of the popular vote.


1948 United States presidential election in Maine
The 1948 United States presidential election in Maine took place on November 7, 1944, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose five electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Maine
Maine was won by Republican candidate New York governor Thomas E. Dewey over Democratic candidate, incumbent President Harry S. Truman.


1948 United States presidential election in Maine
Dewey won Maine by a margin of 14.47%. With 56.74% of the popular vote, it would be his second strongest state after nearby Vermont.


1948 United States presidential election in Maryland
The 1948 United States presidential election in Maryland took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose eight representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Maryland
Maryland was won by Governor Thomas Dewey (R–New York), running with Governor Earl Warren, with 49.40% of the popular vote, against incumbent President Harry S. Truman (D–Missouri), running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 48.01% of the popular vote. This was the first time since 1888 that Maryland's popular vote had backed a losing candidate nationwide. As of 2020, this is the last time that a Democratic candidate has won the presidency without carrying Maryland and the only time that the state has backed a losing Republican candidate.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
The 1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election, which was held throughout all contemporary 48 states. Voters chose 16 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Massachusetts voted for the Democratic nominee, incumbent President Harry S. Truman of Missouri, over the Republican nominee, former Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Truman ran with Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, while Dewey's running mate was Governor Earl Warren of California.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Truman carried the state with 54.66% of the vote to Dewey's 43.16%, a Democratic victory margin of 11.50%. Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace came in a distant third, with 1.81%.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
As Truman narrowly won an upset victory over Dewey nationally, Massachusetts weighed in as 7% more Democratic than the national average.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Once a typical Yankee Republican bastion in the wake of the Civil War, Massachusetts had been a Democratic-leaning state since 1928, when a coalition of Irish Catholic and other ethnic immigrant voters primarily based in urban areas turned Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island into New England's only reliably Democratic states. Massachusetts voted for Al Smith in 1928 and for Franklin D. Roosevelt four times in the 1930s and 1940s. Truman’s victory thus marked the Democratic Party’s sixth straight win in Massachusetts.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Despite the national race being much closer, Truman in 1948 outperformed any of Roosevelt's four victories in the state of Massachusetts. FDR had never won the state with more than a single-digit margin; Roosevelt’s largest margin of victory was by 9.46% in 1936 and he never took a vote share higher than the 53.11% he received in 1940. In 1944, Roosevelt carried the Bay State with 52.80% to Dewey’s 46.99%, a fairly close margin of only 5.81%. Truman’s victory four years later taking 54.66% and winning by 11.50% thus made 1948 the strongest showing ever by a Democratic presidential candidate in Massachusetts up to that point, a record that would stand until John F. Kennedy ran from Massachusetts in 1960.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Truman would carry 8 of the state’s 14 counties, including the most heavily populated parts of the state surrounding the cities of Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. Notably, Truman flipped highly populated Middlesex County, which had not voted Democratic in any of Franklin Roosevelt’s four victories in the state, into the Democratic column.


1948 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island were the only states in the Northeast to favor Truman over Dewey in 1948, the same split that had occurred in 1928. Both states had large urban Irish Catholic populations, who remained loyal Democrats in the wake of 1928, even as other groups defected back to the GOP.