The 1948 U.S. presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Truman’s victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, the longest winning streak for either party since the 1880 election.
About 1948 United States presidential election in brief
The 1948 U.S. presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Truman’s victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, the longest winning streak for either party since the 1880 election. The Democratic convention’s civil rights plank caused a walk-out by several Southern delegates, who launched a third-party 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. Truman also faced a challenge from his party in the form of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who challenged Truman’s confrontational Cold War policies. Truman was widely considered to be the underdog in the race, and virtually every prediction indicated that Truman would be defeated by Dewey, but he won the election with 303 electoral votes. The Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress, which they had lost in 1946, with Truman’s election confirming the Democratic party’s status as the nation’s majority party. The Republicans had taken control 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 Dewey,. sometimes by double digits, sometimes by up to 10%. 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.
In July 1947, he privately offered to be Eisenhower’s running mate on the Democratic ticket if the Republican nomination won. Eisenhower’s offer to Truman did not become public knowledge during the campaign. There was an attempt to draft Eisenhower as the Democratic presidential candidate on July 10, 1948, but Eisenhower refused to be a candidate. The rebels hoped to draft Truman and nominate a more popular candidate, but Truman was then an unpopular unpopularity. The party leaders feared that Wallace would take enough votes from Truman to give the large Northern and Midwestern states to the Republicans. Truman 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 a popular vote, with Thurmond carrying four southern states. The Republican Party won the presidency for the first time in its history, and Truman was re-elected as president in 1952. The election was also the last time the Democrats had held the White House for more than a decade, from 1946 to 1953. The last election to be held without a Democratic president was in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson was elected to a second term as the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning the use of napalm as a weapon of war in the Korean War.
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