Clifford Berryman, political cartoon, Washington Star, October 19, 1948
WARNING - this article is going to discuss and compare Joe Biden and his 2022 campaign for the White House to both Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey and the 1948 presidential election.
Thomas E. Dewey lost the presidential election 4 November 1948. It was his to lose. President Harry S. Truman was not very popular. Truman compared unfavorably to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he succeeded from the vice-presidency when FDR died in April 1945. Truman was neither charismatic, nor an orator. He was a very ordinary man. Dewey had plenty of charisma. He had lost to Roosevelt in 1944. It was Roosevelt’s closest election, with Dewey receiving forty-six percent of the popular vote.
By 1948 the Democratic party was fracturing. The “Solid South” who had made the Democratic party their political home since the Civil War, formed the States-rights Democratic third-party (Dixiecrats) and nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Thurmond would go on to win thirty-nine electoral votes on November 4th. Additionally, Henry Wallace, formerly FDR’s vice president, 1941 - 1945, formally split from the Democrats and formed the United States Progressive Party. Wallace ran as the Progressive’s presidential candidate in 1948. It was universally accepted by almost everyone: Truman’s candidacy was doomed.
Yet Truman won. How? Why? Truman relentlessly attacked Dewey and the Republicans. He told the farmers another depression would soon follow if Dewey was elected president. Farmers made up almost ten percent of the voters in 1948. He gave eight to twelve speeches nearly every. He was travelling on the government’s dime on the Ferdinand Magellan presidential rail car from Labor Day until the election. He hammered the Republican-controlled Congress as ‘do nothing’ and obstructionist.
Photo of United States map of President Harry S. Truman's 1948 Whistle Stop Tour, with ribbons and pins marking the route and stops on the tour.
Dewey, on the other hand, said nothing. Why should he? He was ahead. He travelled a fraction of what Truman did. He never mentioned Truman by name and never responded to Truman’s attacks. His speeches were famously vacuous:
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. Editorial, November 18th, 1948 Louisville Courier-Journal
Elections have consequences. The Democrats won nine Senate seats and seventy-five seats in the House. Truman handily won reelection to the presidency. His coattails were long. Regaining control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats were in complete control when the dust settled.
Republican Senator Vandenberg told his staff on the morning after. “Everyone had counted him out but he came up fighting and won the battle. He did it all by himself. That’s the kind of courage the American people admire.”
Frank, Jeffrey. The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953 (p. 190). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Joe Biden ran a most memorable campaign from his basement in 2020. It was memorable because the candidate went nowhere and said nothing. He was cranky, not feisty. But otherwise, very much like Dewey. Only the results were different, right? It was an unusual election. The Pandemic led to emergency vote-by-mail measures in many battleground states that enabled, especially, the Democratic party to get a record number of ballots cast for their candidate.
The parallels are obvious between Dewey’s loss and Biden’s win - in more than just campaign style. The Democratic losses in the House and Senate are one. Most people in 2020 voted for, or against, Trump. Biden himself was as vacuous as Dewey. Biden’s election victory was not due to his ultra-light campaign but to that peerless get-out-the-vote machine called the Democratic party.
Eighty million votes for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden and they still lost control of the Senate and lost thirteen seats in the house. Biden had no coattails. He ascended to the presidency without political capital. The Americans who voted for Biden, and many others, were certainly more than willing to give him a chance. They were ready to believe he was a decent man, but nobody had invested themselves in Biden. The problem is, Biden doesn’t have ‘his voters.’ He owes his Democratic party for his election, not his voters.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is dominated by its revolutionary wing. These progressives want to make America into a country Americans will not recognize. It’s a deep green and very equal vision. Most of the country wants no part of it. Without a doubt, most Americans are offended by $5 a gallon gas. Americans of every color don’t want the drama of economic and social turmoil. They don’t like inflation. They aren’t afraid of the pandemic anymore, but a sizeable, colorblind, subset is mad as hell about what they went through. The masses suspect the politicians (medical authorities) lied to them. Biden speaks, and they think they are hearing a feckless, politician lying to them. They aren’t his voters. Sixty-plus percent of the country is blaming Biden and the Democrats in large part because they aren’t invested in Biden. Biden got thirteen million more votes than Obama - but ‘his voters’ are nowhere to be found.
Sometimes we lose, even when it looks like we won. Biden and his party are realizing they are living the nightmare. (They will hit the wall in November) Things might be a little different if Joe Biden had campaigned like Harry S. Truman, instead of Thomas Edmund Dewey.
Bidens relative success in November 22 was a shocking surprise and a significant comeuppance for the Republicans.