The Truman surprise: in the election of 1948, Harry Truman fooled pollsters (and almost everyone else) when he beat Thomas Dewey to win a full term in the White House.

On Nov. 4, 1948, The New York Times published a letter from James Reston that was unusual for two reasons: Reston was the newspaper's own political correspondent; and his letter represented a public admission that the press was as guilty as all the pollsters and politicians who had predicted that Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican Governor of New York, would handily defeat President Harry S. Truman, who was running for a full term after becoming President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office in April 1945.

Nearly two months before the election, Elmo Roper was so certain of the outcome that he announced that his national polling organization would stop surveying voters. "My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin, and devote my time and efforts to other things."

Roper's mistake, shared by most politicians and reporters that year, holds valuable lessons for political campaigns and elections today. "In a way, our failure was not unlike Mr. Dewey's," Reston wrote in his letter. "We overestimated the tangibles and underestimated the intangibles ... and we, too, were far too impressed by the tidy statistics of the polls."

To be sure, there were plenty of good reasons to assume that Truman couldn't win. Before FDR tapped him as his running mate in 1944, he was a little known Senator from Missouri (and before that, a failed men's clothing salesman) who made his name in Washington by crusading against war profiteers and military mismanagement. He was a voracious reader, but never attended college (the only 20th century President who didn't).

The Democrats had lost control of Congress in 1946, and after World War 11 ended in 1945, inflation took off when wartime price controls were lifted and organized labor began striking for higher wages. Making matters worse, opposition to Truman's agenda prompted two Democrats to run for President as independents: Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, whose Dixiecrats stormed out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest Truman's commitment to civil rights; and Henry Wallace, whom Roosevelt had dumped as Vice President in favor of Truman in 1944. Wallace's fellow Progressives objected to, among other things, Truman's hard line policies against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War.

WHISTLE-STOP TOUR 

What Truman's critics neglected to take into account was the appeal of a bare-fisted fighter who, in a Chicago speech, compared Dewey and the Republicans to the totalitarian movements in Germany. Italy, and Japan. The speech came during a 30,000-mile whistle-stop train tour of 30 states, during which Truman delivered about 300 speeches (including the first by a presidential candidate to black voters in I Harlem), and denounced the "do-nothing" Republican Congress--earning him the nickname Give 'Em Hell Harry.

By 1948, income, wages, and employment were all on the rise. Many Americans hadn't forgotten the legacy of Roosevelt's New Deal, which helped lift the nation from the Depression. Truman's version, the "Fair Deal," advocated universal health insurance, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and contain Soviet expansion, support for organized labor, and modest civil rights legislation.

THE LURE OF A FIGHTER

There was another intangible, as Reston later wrote: "Personality is a force in American politics equally as strong as principle, and ... the American people have always loved a fighter." On the flip side was Dewey's complacency in the face of those polls and his personality, which, to put it mildly, was considered stuffy and aloof. In a passage that probably crossed the boundaries of journalistic objectivity, Reston decided Dewey's efforts to be folksy, writing from the campaign train: "'Goodbye, everybody,' shouts the governor, 'goodbye,' and the 'victory special' pulls out--usually with a jerk."

Truman had insisted publicly that he would win--the "Truman poll," people called it. The other polls failed to detect the depth of his support or its rise in the closing days of the campaign. In fact, some pollsters said that by predicting an easy victory, the polls were ultimately self-defeating for Dewey: They encouraged a heavy Democratic turnout and gave Republicans a false sense that Dewey's election was a foregone conclusion.

TV'S SELECTION DEBUT

The 1948 Republican and Democratic conventions, both in Philadelphia, were the first to be televised, and television was blamed for the sparse turnouts on election night in Times Square and other places where pre-TV crowds had traditionally gathered to await results.

Voters returned control of Congress to the Democrats and gave Truman the most-dramatic presidential election victory since 1916, when Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes. Truman (and running mate Alben Barkley of Kentucky) won 49.6 percent of the popular vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent, which produced a lopsided electoral vote of 303 to 189, and 39 for Thurmond's Dixiecrats. (Thurmond and Wallace won about 5 percent of the popular vote.)

In a famous journalistic blooper, the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman," which Truman triumphantly held aloft the next day after the tide in the long overnight vote count had turned in his favor.

Dewey himself went to bed election night thinking he had won. imagine his surprise the next morning when he discovered that Truman was the victor. Dewey said he felt like a man who awoke in a sealed coffin with a lily in his hand. "If I'm alive, what am I doing here?" he asked. "And if I'm dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?"

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* Do you believe that results of public-opinion polls influence the way people cast their votes?

* What do you think Times correspondent James Reston mean when he said the press and the pollsters had underestimated the intangibles?

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand the 1948 Dewey-Truman election--one of the most-misjudged contests in American history--and bow imprecise polling may have influenced the election.

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

BEFORE READING: Write "Assumptions" on the board. As students read the article, have them note where assumptions about the election appear and how they may have influenced the outcome.

ELECTION ASSUMPTIONS: After students read the article, go back to the beginning and discuss "assumption" points.

Why would Elmo Roper assume that he could stop polling two months before the election? Did he think that most voters had made up their minds? Or that he had polled everyone worth polling? Might he have been lulled into a false sense of security by early pro-Dewey results? What lessons should he have learned from 1948--besides the fact that he should have kept polling. (One lesson is that earlier successes do not predict future success.)

ECHO FROM THE PAST?: Note that most people assumed that the split in the Democratic Party and Truman!s "barely known" factor put him at a natural disadvantage. Was there an echo from the 1948 presidential election in the 2004 Democratic primaries? Remind students that earlier this year former Vermont Governor Howard Dean looked unstoppable, while Massachusetts Senator John Kerry trailed far behind in the polls.

POLL-PLAY: Ask students to play campaign managers for a friend who is running for student council. Which questions would they ask fellow students to help their friend tailor his of her campaign to students' interests?

FAST FACTS: Polls of crowds were done in the early 19th century. In the 1920s, a magazine, The Literary Digest, sent ballots to its subscribers and to people with driver's licenses. Modern polling was started by George Gallup in 1935.

WEB WATCH; www.polkonline.com/stories/10 1998/nat_ponsters.shtml offers an article in which the children of 1948 pollsters recall how their fathers reacted to Truman's election upset.

Upfront QUIZ 4

1. There were several reasons to assume that Harry Truman would lose to Thomas Dewey. For one thing,

a Truman had risen to the presidency after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in April 1945.

b Truman had once been a Republican:

c .Roosevelt had not been a popular President.

d Democrats had lost control of Congress in 1946.

2. While serving as a Senator from Missouri, Truman had made a name for himself by crusading against

a war profiteers and military mismanagement.

b child labor.

c excessive subsidies for big farmers.

d illegal drug use.

3. Truman faced opposition from two corners of the Democratic Party. Dixiecrats opposed his

a farm policy.

b foreign policy.

c economic policy.

d civil rights policy.

4. Progressives in the Democratic Party opposed Truman's hard-line policy

a on aid to Europe after World War II.

b the military.

c toward the Soviet Union,

d on immigration.

5. Truman's "Fair Deal" policy advocated, among other things,

a universal health insurance.

b higher pay for the military.

c tax relief for business.

d a national highway system.

6. Democrats reacted to the public-opinion polls predicting a Dewey victory with

a complacency.

b acceptance of the probable loss to Dewey.

c fear.

d renewed effort to get out the vote.

ANSWER KEY

1. (d) Democrats had lost control of Congress in 1946.

2. (a) war profiteers and military mismanagement.

3. (d) civil rights policy.

4. (e) toward the Soviet Union.

5. (a) universal health insurance.

6. (d) renewed effort to get out the vote.

1948 Election
Results

   Candidate    Popular    Electoral
[down arrow]    Vote       Votes

      TRUMAN    49.6%      303
       DEWEY    45.1%      189
    THURMOND     2.4%       39
     WALLACE     2.4%        0

Sam Roberts, who has covered several presidential campaigns for The, New York Times, is an editor at the Week in Review.