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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 Democratic President Harry S. Truman defeated heavily favored Republican New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, and third-party candidates, becoming the third president to succeed to the presidency upon his predecessor's death and be elected to a full term.

Truman had been elected vice president in the 1944 election, and succeeded to the presidency in April 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He won his party's nomination at the 1948 Democratic National Convention only after defeating attempts to drop him from the ticket. The convention's civil rights plank caused a walk-out by several Southern delegates, who launched a third-party "Dixiecrat" ticket led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, where they could extract concessions from either Dewey or Truman in exchange for their support. Former vice president Henry A. Wallace also challenged Truman by launching the Progressive Party and criticizing his confrontational Cold War policies. Dewey, the leader of his party's liberal eastern wing and the 1944 Republican presidential nominee, defeated conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and other challengers at the 1948 Republican National Convention. This was the first election to have primary and general election debates, with Dewey debating Harold Stassen in the Republican primary, while Norman Thomas debated Farrell Dobbs in the general election.

Truman's feisty campaign style energized his base of traditional Democrats, consisting of most of the white South, as well as labor unions, and Catholic and Jewish voters; he also fared surprisingly well with Midwestern farmers. Dewey ran a low-risk campaign and avoided directly criticizing Truman. With the three-way split in the Democratic Party, and 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 Dewey would win the 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 the Democrats, and the longest 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. This was the last presidential election before the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, which would establish term limits for a president. This did not apply to the incumbent Truman, but as he chose not to run in 1952, this was the last presidential election with no future disqualification effect for second-term winners.

Democratic Party nomination
On July 12, the Democratic National Convention convened in Philadelphia in the same arena where the Republicans had met a few weeks earlier. Spirits were low; the Republicans had taken control of both houses of the United States Congress and a majority of state governorships during the 1946 mid-term elections, and the public opinion polls showed Truman trailing Republican nominee Dewey, sometimes by double digits. Furthermore, some liberal Democrats had joined Henry A. Wallace's new Progressive Party, and party leaders feared that Wallace would take enough votes from Truman to give the large Northern and Midwestern states to the Republicans. Conservatives dominated the party in the South, and they were angered by the growing voice of labor unions and black voters in the party outside the South. The hope that Truman would reverse course faded when he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Law, which sought to reduce the power of labor unions. Congress voted to override Truman's veto, and the Taft-Hartley Law went into effect on June 23, 1947. Finally, Truman's appointment of a liberal civil rights commission convinced Southern conservatives that to re-establish their voice they had to threaten third-party action to defeat Truman in 1948. 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 that Eisenhower declined. Truman's offer to Eisenhower did not become public knowledge during the campaign.

As a result of Truman's low standing in the polls, several Democratic party bosses began working to "dump" 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. 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.

Democratic Convention
At the Democratic Convention, Truman initially proposed a civil rights plank to the party platform that moderated the strong vocal support for civil rights that he had expressed at the NAACP convention in 1947, and to Congress in February 1948. This proposal disappointed Northern and Western liberals who wanted more swift and sweeping reforms in civil rights, but it also failed to placate Southern conservatives, and both sides decided to present their own amendments and proposals to Truman's civil rights plank. Former Texas Governor Dan Moody proposed a plank that supported the status quo of states' rights; a similar but shorter proposal was made by Cecil Sims of the Tennessee delegation. On the liberal side, Wisconsin Representative Andrew Biemiller proposed a strong civil rights plank that was more explicit and direct in its language than Truman's convention proposal. Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey led the support for the Biemiller plank. In his speech to the convention, Humphrey memorably 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!"

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. 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. 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, and Barkley was nominated by acclamation.

Truman gave a fighting acceptance speech, he stated 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."

Republican Party nomination
For both Republicans and Democrats, there were movements of support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular general of World War II and a favorite in the polls. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. His candidacy was enthusiastically supported by William Randolph Hearst in all of his newspapers.

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. 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.

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."

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. 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. 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 nomination for a second straight time.

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. 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." 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."

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. 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.

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." 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.

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 fired Wallace as Secretary of Commerce when Wallace publicly opposed Truman's firm moves to counter the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Wallace's 1948 platform opposed the Cold War, 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 possibility of communist spies within the government and labor unions. Wallace and his supporters charged that the Committee was violating the civil liberties of government workers and labor unions. 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."

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

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." 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.

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." 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." 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."

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

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

Thomas debated Farrell Dobbs, the nominee of the Socialist Workers Party, during the general election. This was the first debate between general election presidential candidates. Edward A. Teichert, the nominee of the Socialist Labor Party of America, had challenged Thomas to a debate, but Teichert declined after Thomas asked for Dobbs to also be invited.

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 for which he was presidential candidate (1944).

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: "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."

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." 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." 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.

Truman nicknamed the Republican-controlled Congress as the "worst", "do-nothing" Congress, a remark that 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. 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. 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. 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).

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. 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. 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.

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." 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."

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.

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. 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."

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.

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 administration, had already bought homes in Washington.

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, snuck 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. 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. 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 staccato 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.

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." 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.

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% – 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." 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."

The key states in the 1948 election were Ohio, California, and Illinois. Truman won each of these states by less than 1 percentage point; 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.

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.

Of the 3,096 counties/independent cities making returns, Truman won the most popular votes in 1,639 (52.94%) while Dewey carried 1,190 (38.44%). Thurmond prevailed in 265 counties (8.56%) while two counties (0.06%) in South Dakota split evenly between Truman and Dewey.

Truman's net vote totals in the twelve largest cities, which was around 1,481,000, had decreased by 750,000 from Roosevelt's results in the 1944 election, which was around 2,230,000.

Journalist Samuel 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. 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.

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."

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. 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, and all of which listed Thurmond as the official Democratic candidate; Thurmond did not come close to carrying any of the other states in which he ran, with his best showing among these being second place with 20.3% of the vote in Georgia. The Dixiecrats also failed to draw off enough Truman voters to throw any of his states to Dewey, with the nearest they came in this regard being in Virginia, where the 25.0% margin won by Roosevelt in 1944 was reduced to 6.9% this time. 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. The split of the Democratic party, while failing to defeat Truman, did hold the Democrats back in several narrow states. Had the Wallace and Thurmond vote been in the Democratic column, Truman would have won all the Thurmond states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina), and the Wallace vote would have flipped Michigan, Maryland and New York into Truman's states. Winning these states would have put Truman at 416 electoral votes to Dewey's reduced 115 electoral votes. This still would have been a decline of Democratic electoral votes since 1940 but percentage-wise Truman would have gotten 54.33% of the popular vote, an increase of 0.94% from Roosevelt's last victory.

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 election (Churchill and De Gaulle both left office shortly after the end of the war). This was the first election since 1836 in which a Democratic presidential candidate won the presidency without South Carolina, and the first ever in which a Democrat won the presidency without Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Furthermore, this is the last time a Democratic presidential candidate won without New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. It is also the first of two occasions since 1916 that Oregon and Washington did not support the same party (the other being in 1968).

States that flipped from Republican to Democratic

 * Colorado
 * Iowa
 * Ohio
 * Wisconsin
 * Wyoming

States that flipped from Democratic to Republican

 * Connecticut
 * Delaware
 * Maryland
 * Michigan
 * New Jersey
 * New Hampshire
 * New York
 * Oregon
 * Pennsylvania

States that flipped from Democratic to Dixiecrat

 * Alabama
 * Louisiana
 * Mississippi
 * South Carolina

Close states
Margin of victory less than 1% (138 electoral votes):
 * 1) Ohio, 0.24% (7,107 votes)
 * 2) California, 0.44% (17,865 votes) (tipping point state for Truman victory)
 * 3) Indiana, 0.80% (13,246 votes)
 * 4) Illinois, 0.84% (33,612 votes) (tipping point state for Dewey victory)
 * 5) New York, 0.98% (60,959 votes)

Margin of victory less than 5% (131 electoral votes):
 * 1) Delaware, 1.28% (1,775 votes)
 * 2) Maryland, 1.39% (8,293 votes)
 * 3) Connecticut, 1.64% (14,457 votes)
 * 4) Michigan, 1.67% (35,147 votes)
 * 5) Iowa, 2.73% (28,362 votes)
 * 6) Idaho, 2.73% (5,856 votes)
 * 7) Nevada, 3.11% (1,934 votes)
 * 8) Oregon, 3.39% (17,757 votes)
 * 9) Pennsylvania, 4.01% (149,771 votes)
 * 10) Wyoming, 4.35% (4,407 votes)
 * 11) New Jersey, 4.39% (85,669 votes)
 * 12) Wisconsin, 4.41% (56,351 votes)
 * 13) South Dakota, 4.80% (11,998 votes)

Margin of victory between 5% and 10% (59 electoral votes):
 * 1) Colorado, 5.35% (27,574 votes)
 * 2) New Hampshire, 5.75% (13,304 votes)
 * 3) Virginia, 6.85% (28,716 votes)
 * 4) Nebraska, 8.31% (40,609 votes)
 * 5) North Dakota, 8.76% (19,327 votes)
 * 6) Utah, 8.96% (24,749 votes)
 * 7) Kansas, 9.02% (71,137 votes)
 * 8) Washington, 9.93% (89,850 votes)
 * 9) Montana, 9.94% (22,301 votes)
 * 10) Arizona, 9.97% (17,654 votes)

Statistics
Counties with Highest Percent of Vote (Democratic)
 * 1)  Duval County, Texas 96.52%
 * 2)  Greene County, North Carolina 96.45%
 * 3)  King County, Texas 95.85%
 * 4)  Bertie County, North Carolina 95.71%
 * 5)  Martin County, North Carolina 95.53%

Counties with Highest Percent of Vote (Republican)
 * 1)  Jackson County, Kentucky 86.31%
 * 2)  Sevier County, Tennessee 84.11%
 * 3)  Johnson County, Tennessee 82.98%
 * 4)  Grant County, West Virginia 80.83%
 * 5)  Lincoln County, Maine 80.47%

Counties with Highest Percent of Vote (Dixiecrat)
 * 1)  Choctaw County, Alabama 98.83%
 * 2)  Wilcox County, Alabama 98.81%
 * 3)  Bullock County, Alabama 98.76%
 * 4)  Edgefield County, South Carolina 98.20%
 * 5)  Monroe County, Alabama 97.86%


text:
1952 United States presidential election

The 1952 United States presidential election was the 42nd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Democratic Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II in a landslide victory, becoming the first Republican president in 20 years. This was the first election since 1928 without an incumbent president on the ballot.

Stevenson emerged victorious on the third presidential ballot of the 1952 Democratic National Convention by defeating Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, Georgia Senator Richard Russell Jr., and other candidates. The Republican nomination was primarily contested by Eisenhower, a widely-popular general for his leadership in World War II, and the conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft. With the support of Thomas E. Dewey and other party leaders, Eisenhower narrowly prevailed over Taft at the 1952 Republican National Convention. He selected youthful California Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate. In the first televised presidential campaign, Eisenhower was charismatic and very well known, in sharp contrast to Stevenson.

Republicans attacked Truman's handling of the Korean War and the broader Cold War, alleging Soviet spies infiltrated the U.S. government. Democrats faulted Eisenhower for failing to condemn Senators Joseph McCarthy, William E. Jenner, and other reactionary Republicans, who, the Democrats alleged, engaged in reckless and unwarranted attacks. Stevenson tried to separate himself from the unpopular Truman administration. Instead, he campaigned on the popularity of the New Deal and stoked fears of another Great Depression under a Republican administration.

Eisenhower retained his enormous popularity from the war, as was seen in his campaign slogan, "I Like Ike". Eisenhower's public support, coupled with the unpopularity of Truman, allowed him to win comfortably with 55.18% of the popular vote and carry every state outside of the South; he even managed to carry Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas, Southern states that voted for Democrats since the end of Reconstruction, with the exception of 1928. Republicans gained among Democrats, especially urban and suburban Southerners, and white ethnic groups in the Northeast and Midwest.

Republican Party

Republican candidates:

The fight for the Republican nomination was between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became the candidate of the party's moderate Eastern Establishment; Senator Robert A. Taft from Ohio, the longtime leader of the party's conservative wing; Governor Earl Warren of California, who appealed to Western delegates and independent voters; and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota, who still had a base of support in the Midwest.

The moderate Eastern Republicans were led by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the party's presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948. The moderates tended to be interventionists who felt that the country needed to fight the Cold War overseas and confront the Soviet Union in Eurasia. They were also willing to accept most aspects of the social welfare state created by the New Deal in the 1930s but sought to reform the programs to be more efficient and business-friendly. The moderates were also concerned with ending the Republicans' losing streak in presidential elections and felt that the popular Eisenhower had the best chance of beating the Democrats. For that reason, Dewey declined the notion of a third run for president despite his large amount of support within the party. The Republicans had been out of power for 20 years, and there was a strong sentiment that a proper two-party system needed to be re-established. It was also felt that the party winning the White House would have more incentive to rein in radicals and demagogues such as Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The conservative Republicans, led by Taft, were based in the Midwest and parts of the South. The Midwest was a bastion of conservatism and isolationist sentiment. Dislike of Europeans, in particular the British, was common, and there was a widespread feeling that the British manipulated American foreign policy and were eager to kowtow to the Soviet Union, although such attitudes had begun to change among the younger generation who had fought in World War II. In addition, the conservatives opposed much of the New Deal, regarding these programs as diminishing individual liberty and economic freedom. Taft had unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1940 and 1948 presidential elections but lost both times to moderate candidates from New York: Wilkie and Dewey respectively. At the age of 63, Taft felt that it was his last chance to run for president so his friends and supporters, encompassing many party regulars, worked diligently on his behalf. His feelings were correct, as he died about nine months after the election.

Warren, although highly popular in California, refused to campaign in the presidential primaries, which limited his chances of winning the nomination. He retained the support of the California delegation, and his supporters hoped that in the event of an Eisenhower–Taft deadlock, Warren might emerge as a compromise candidate.

After being persuaded to run, Eisenhower scored a major victory in the New Hampshire primary in which his supporters wrote his name onto the ballot and gave him an upset victory over Taft. However, until the Republican National Convention, the primaries were divided fairly evenly between the two, and when the convention opened, the race for the nomination was still too close to call. Taft won the Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, and South Dakota primaries, and Eisenhower won those in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon. Stassen and Warren won only their home states of Minnesota and California respectively, which effectively ended their chances of earning the nomination. General Douglas MacArthur also won the support of ten delegates from various states (mostly in Oregon) but had made it clear from early in the race that he had no interest in being nominated.

Republican National Convention
When the 1952 Republican National Convention opened in Chicago, most political experts rated Taft and Eisenhower as about equal in delegate vote totals. Eisenhower's managers, led by both Dewey and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., accused Taft of "stealing" delegate votes in Southern states such as Texas and Georgia, and claimed that Taft's leaders in those states had unfairly denied delegate spots to Eisenhower supporters, putting Taft delegates in their place. Lodge and Dewey proposed to evict the Taft delegates in those states and replace them with Eisenhower delegates and called the proposal "Fair Play." Although Taft and his supporters angrily denied that charge, the convention voted to support Fair Play 658 to 548, and Taft lost many Southern delegates. Eisenhower's chances were boosted when several uncommitted state delegations, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, decided to support him and also when Stassen released his delegates and asked them to support Eisenhower. The removal of many Southern delegates and the support of the uncommitted states decided the nomination in Eisenhower's favor.

However, the convention was among the most bitter and emotional in American history. When Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, a Taft supporter, pointed at Dewey on the convention floor during a speech and accused him of leading the Republicans "down the road to defeat," mixed boos and cheers rang out from the delegates, and there were even fistfights between some Taft and Eisenhower delegates.

In the end, Eisenhower narrowly defeated Taft on the first ballot. To heal the wounds caused by the battle, he visited Taft's hotel suite and met with him. Taft issued a brief statement congratulating Eisenhower on his victory, but he was bitter about the accusation that he had stolen delegates and withheld his active support for Eisenhower for several weeks after the convention. In September 1952, Taft and Eisenhower met again at Morningside Heights, in New York City. Taft promised there an active support of Eisenhower in exchange for the fulfillment of a number of requests such as a demand that Eisenhower would offer Taft's followers a fair share of patronage positions if he won the election and that Eisenhower would agree to balance the federal budget and "fight creeping domestic socialism in every field." Eisenhower agreed to the terms, and Taft campaigned assiduously for the Republican ticket. In fact, Eisenhower and Taft agreed on most domestic issues, and their disagreements were primarily on foreign policy.

Though there were initial suggestions that Warren could earn the party's vice-presidential slot for the second successive election if he withdrew and endorsed Eisenhower, he ultimately chose not to do so. Eisenhower wished to award the vice-presidential nod to Stassen, who had endorsed Eisenhower and held generally similar political positions. However, the party bosses wanted to find a running mate who could mollify Taft's supporters, as the schism between the moderate and conservative wings was so severe that it was feared that party's conservatives would run Taft as a third-party candidate.

Eisenhower had apparently given little thought to choosing his running mate. When asked, he replied that he assumed the convention would pick someone. The spot ultimately fell to the young California Senator Richard Nixon, who was viewed as a centrist. Nixon was known as an aggressive campaigner and a fierce anti-communist but as one who shied away from some of the more extreme ideas of the party's right wing, including isolationism and the dismantling of the New Deal. Most historians now believe that Eisenhower's nomination was the result of his perceived electability against the Democrats. Most of the delegates were conservatives who would probably have supported Taft if they felt that he could win the general election.

Despite not earning the presidential or the vice-presidential nomination, Warren would be appointed as Chief Justice of the United States in October 1953, and Stassen would hold various positions within Eisenhower's administration.

The balloting at the Republican convention went as follows:

Democratic Party
Democratic candidates:

The expected candidate for the Democratic nomination was the incumbent President Harry S. Truman. Since the newly passed 22nd Amendment did not apply to whoever was president at the time of its passage, he was eligible to run again. However, Truman entered 1952 with his popularity plummeting, according to polls. The bloody and indecisive Korean War was dragging into its third year, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade was stirring public fears of an encroaching "Red Menace", and the disclosure of widespread corruption among federal employees (including some high-level members of the Truman administration) left Truman at a low political ebb. Polls showed that he had a 66% disapproval rating, a record that would be matched only decades later by Richard Nixon and surpassed by George W. Bush.

Truman's main opponent was the populist Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who had chaired a nationally televised investigation of organized crime in 1951 and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. The Gallup poll of February 15 showed Truman's weakness. Nationally, Truman was the choice of only 36% of Democrats, compared with 21% for Kefauver. Among independent voters, however, Truman had only 18%, and Kefauver led with 36%. In the New Hampshire primary, Kefauver upset Truman by winning 19,800 votes to Truman's 15,927 and capturing all eight delegates. Kefauver graciously said that he did not consider his victory "a repudiation of Administration policies, but a desire... for new ideas and personalities." Stung by that setback, however, Truman announced March 29 that he would not seek re-election. Truman insisted in his memoirs, however, that he had decided not to run for re-election well before his defeat to Kefauver.

With Truman's withdrawal, Kefauver became the frontrunner for the nomination, and he won most of the primaries. Other primary winners were Senator Hubert Humphrey, who won his home state of Minnesota; Senator Richard Russell Jr. from Georgia, who won the Florida primary, and the diplomat W. Averell Harriman, who won West Virginia. However, most states still chose their delegates to the Democratic Convention by state conventions, which meant that the party bosses, especially the mayors and governors of large Northern and Midwestern states and cities, were able to choose the Democratic nominee. The bosses, including Truman himself, strongly disliked Kefauver since his investigations of organized crime had revealed connections between American Mafia figures and many of the big-city Democratic political organizations. The party bosses thus viewed Kefauver as a maverick who could not be trusted and so refused to support him for the nomination.

Instead, with Truman taking the initiative, they began to search for other more acceptable candidates. However, most of the other candidates had a major weakness. Russell had much Southern support, but his support of racial segregation and his opposition to civil rights for blacks led many liberal Northern and Midwestern delegates, pressed by their many black voters, to reject him. Truman favored Harriman of New York, but the latter had never held an elective office and was inexperienced in politics. Truman next turned to Vice President Alben W. Barkley but at 74, he was rejected as being too old by leaders of labor unions. Other minor or favorite son candidates included Oklahoma Senator Robert S. Kerr, Massachusetts Governor Paul A. Dever, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.

One candidate soon emerged who seemingly had few political weaknesses, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. The grandson of former Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson, he came from a distinguished family in Illinois and was well known as a gifted orator, intellectual, and political moderate. In the spring of 1952, Truman attempted to convince Stevenson to take the presidential nomination, but Stevenson stated that he wanted to run for re-election as Governor of Illinois. However, Stevenson never completely took himself out of the race, and as the convention approached, many party bosses and normally-apolitical citizens hoped that he could be "drafted" to run.

Democratic Convention
The 1952 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in the same Coliseum that the Republicans had gathered in several weeks earlier. Since the convention was being held in his home state, Governor Stevenson, who still proclaimed that he was not a presidential candidate, was asked to give the welcoming address to the delegates. He proceeded to give a witty and stirring address that led his supporters to begin a renewed round of efforts to nominate him despite his protests. After meeting with Jacob Arvey, the boss of the Illinois delegation, Stevenson finally agreed to enter his name as a candidate for the nomination. The party bosses from other large Northern and Midwestern states quickly joined in support. Kefauver led on the first ballot, but he had far fewer votes than necessary to win. Stevenson gradually gained strength until he was nominated on the third ballot.

After the delegates nominated Stevenson, the convention then turned to selecting a vice-presidential nominee. After narrowing it down to Senators John Sparkman, and A. S. Mike Monroney, President Truman and a small group of political insiders chose Sparkman, a conservative segregationist from Alabama, for the nomination. The convention largely complied and nominated Sparkman as Stevenson's running mate. He was chosen because of his Southern identity and conservative record, which party leaders hoped would create a balanced ticket.

Sparkman remained in the Senate until his retirement in 1978.

Campaign issues
The Eisenhower campaign was one of the first presidential campaigns to make a major and concerted effort to win the female vote. Many of his radio and television commercials discussed topics such as education, inflation, ending the Korean War, and other issues that were thought to appeal to women. The Eisenhower campaign made extensive use of female campaign workers, who made phone calls to likely Eisenhower voters, distributed "Ike" buttons and leaflets, and threw parties to build support for the Republican ticket in their neighborhoods. On election day, Eisenhower won a solid majority of the female vote.

Eisenhower campaigned by attacking "Korea, Communism, and Corruption," issues that the Republicans regarded as the failures of the outgoing Truman administration to solve. The Eisenhower campaign accused the administration of "neglecting Latin America" and thus "leading them into the arms of wily Communist agents waiting to exploit local misery and capitalize on any opening to communize the Americas." Charges that Soviet spies had infiltrated the government plagued the Truman administration and became a "major campaign issue" for Eisenhower. The Republicans blamed the Democrats for the military's failure to be fully prepared to fight in Korea, accused the Democrats of harboring communist spies within the federal government, and criticized the Truman administration for the many officials who had been accused of various crimes.

Stevenson hoped to exploit the rift between the conservative Taft Republicans and the moderate Eisenhower Republicans. In a speech in Baltimore, Stevenson said, "The GOP elephant has two heads nowadays, and I can't tell from day to day who's driving the poor beast, Senator Taft or the General. I doubt that America will entrust its future, its hopes, to the master of a house divided against itself." Stevenson, Truman, and other Democrats campaigning that fall also criticized Senators Joseph McCarthy, William E. Jenner, and other right-wing Republicans for what they believed were reckless and unwarranted attacks and congressional investigations into leading government officials and public servants. In a Salt Lake City speech Stevenson stated that right-wing Republicans were "quick with accusations, with defamatory hints and whispering campaigns when they see a chance to scare or silence those with whom they disagree. Rudely, carelessly, they invade the field of thought, of conscience, which belongs to God, and not to Senators.... McCarthy and men like him can say almost anything, and if my opponent's conscience permits, he can try to help all of them get reelected." Stevenson said that right-wing attacks on government officials such as General George Marshall, who had served Truman as US Secretary of State and US Secretary of Defense, reflected a "middle of the gutter approach" to politics. Truman repeatedly criticized Senator McCarthy's character and temperament and called on Eisenhower to repudiate him. Stevenson ridiculed right-wing Republicans "who hunt Communists in the Bureau of Wildlife and Fisheries while hesitating to aid the gallant men and women who are resisting the real thing in the front lines of Europe and Asia.... They are finally the men who seemingly believe that we can confound the Kremlin by frightening ourselves to death." In return, McCarthy often jokingly confused the names Adlai and Alger, the first name of the convicted Soviet spy Alger Hiss, by stating "Alger, I mean Adlai" in his speeches. McCarthy exploited the fact that Stevenson had defended Hiss as innocent despite all of the evidence otherwise. McCarthy, in response to Stevenson's criticisms, also stated during the campaign that he would like to get on the Stevenson campaign trail "with a club and make a good and loyal American" out of Stevenson.

Neither Stevenson nor Sparkman had been a part of the Truman administration, and both largely ignored its record, preferred to hark back to the Roosevelt's New Deal achievements, and warned against a repetition of the Great Depression under President Herbert Hoover if Eisenhower was elected. The historian Herbert Parmet stated that, "although Stevenson tried to separate his campaign from Truman's record, his efforts failed to dispel the widespread recognition that, for a divided America, torn by paranoia and unable to understand what had disrupted the anticipated tranquility of the postwar world, the time for change had really arrived. Neither Stevenson nor anyone else could have dissuaded the electorate from its desire to repudiate 'Trumanism.'"

Campaign
Eisenhower's goal to unite the Republican Party for the fall campaign led him to campaign with and endorse several Republicans with whom he was uncomfortable. In particular, he resented having to endorse Senator William Jenner's reelection campaign when campaigning in Indianapolis, due to Jenner's accusations against George Marshall as being "a living lie" who was "joining hands once more with this criminal crowd of traitors and Communist appeasers ... under the direction of Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson." Many Democrats were particularly upset when Eisenhower, on a scheduled campaign swing through Wisconsin, decided not to give a speech he had written criticizing McCarthy's methods without naming him and later allowed himself to be photographed shaking hands with McCarthy as if he had supported McCarthy. Truman, who had once been friends with Eisenhower, never forgot what he saw as a betrayal. He had previously thought Eisenhower would make a good president but said that "he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for."

Eisenhower retained his enormous personal popularity from his leading role in World War II, and huge crowds turned out to see him around the nation. His campaign slogan, "I Like Ike", was one of the most popular in American history. Stevenson attracted the support of the young emerging postwar intellectual class, but Eisenhower was seen as more appealing to Main Street. Stevenson was ridiculed in some quarters as too effeminate to be president, which was sometimes used as a euphemism for a male homosexual. The staunchly-conservative New York Daily News called him "Adelaide" Stevenson even though he had a reputation as a ladies' man, divorced in 1949, and remained single throughout 1952.

Nixon scandal and "Checkers speech"
A notable event of the 1952 campaign concerned a scandal that emerged when Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's running mate, was accused by several newspapers of receiving $18,000 in undeclared "gifts" from wealthy donors. In reality, contributions were by design only from early supporters and limited to $1,000, with full accountability. Nixon, who had been accusing the Democrats of hiding corruption, suddenly found himself on the defensive. Eisenhower and his aides even considered dropping Nixon from the ticket and picking Senator William Knowland as a replacement running mate.

Eisenhower, who barely knew Nixon, waffled and refused to comment on the incident. Nixon saved his political career, however, with a dramatic half-hour speech, the "Checkers speech," on live television. In this speech, Nixon denied the charges against him, gave a detailed account of his modest financial assets, and offered a glowing assessment of Eisenhower's candidacy. The highlight of the speech came when Nixon stated that a supporter had given his daughters a gift, a dog named "Checkers," and that he would not return it because his daughters loved it. The "Checkers speech" led hundreds of thousands of citizens nationwide to wire the Republican National Committee to urge the Republican Party to keep Nixon on the ticket, and Eisenhower stayed with him.

Despite the red-baiting of the Republicans' right wing, the campaign on the whole was conducted with a considerable degree of dignity, and Stevenson was seen as reinvigorating a Democratic Party that had become exhausted after 20 years in power and as refreshing its appeal with younger voters. He accused Eisenhower of silently tolerating McCarthy's excesses. Stevenson went before the American Legion, a bastion of hardline conservatism, and boldly declared that there was nothing patriotic or American about what McCarthy was doing.

Even with the dignified nature of the campaign, the dislike between the two candidates was visible. Stevenson criticized Eisenhower's noncondemnation of McCarthy and his use of television spots, and Eisenhower, who had initially respected Stevenson, came in time to view him as simply another career politician, which he strongly disliked.

Television
The 1952 election campaign was the first one to make use of the new medium of television, partly by the efforts of Rosser Reeves, the head of Ted Bates, Inc., a leading advertising firm. Reeves had initially proposed a series of radio spots to Dewey in the 1948 campaign, but Dewey considered them undignified. Reeves later maintained that Dewey might have won the election if he had been slightly more open-minded.

Studying Douglas MacArthur's keynote speech at the Republican Convention in July, Reeves believed that the general's words were "powerful" but "unfocused" and "all over the map." Eisenhower's public speeches were even worse since he was unable to make his point to the voting public in a clear intelligible manner. Reeves felt that Eisenhower needed to condense his message down to a few simple easily-digestible slogans.

Eisenhower at first also fared poorly on television and had a difficult time appearing relaxed and at ease on camera. The television lighting was not flattering and made him look old and unattractive. In particular, his forehead tended to glisten under the lights. Eisenhower became upset when the CBS correspondent Dave Schoenbrun pointed that out and suggested him to try to alter his poses to make his forehead less noticeable and to apply makeup so that it would not shine from the lighting. Eventually, he gave in and agreed to those modifications. Reeves also wanted Eisenhower to not wear his eyeglasses on camera to look younger, but since he could not read the prompter board without them, Reeves devised a large handwritten signboard.

Reeves's television work, although pioneering, was the subject of considerable criticism on the grounds that he was attempting to sell a presidential candidate to the public in the same manner that one might sell a car or a brand of toothpaste. The liberal journalist Marya Mannes mocked the approach with this ditty: "Eisenhower hits the spot/One full general, that's a lot/Feeling sluggish, feeling sick?/Take a dose of Ike and Dick!/Philip Morris, Lucky Strike/Alka Seltzer, I like Ike!" For his part, Stevenson would have nothing to do with television at all and condemned Eisenhower's use of the medium by calling it "selling the presidency like cereal." He made a point of the fact that he did not watch or even own a television, and the same for went many members of his inner circle.

Both campaigns made use of television ads. A notable ad for Eisenhower was an issue-free feel-good animated cartoon with a soundtrack song by Irving Berlin called "I Like Ike." For the first time, a presidential candidate's personal medical history was released publicly, as were partial versions of his financial histories, because of the issues that had been raised in Nixon's speech. Near the end of the campaign, Eisenhower, in a major speech, announced that if he won the election he would go to Korea to see if he could end the war. His great military prestige, combined with the public's weariness with the conflict, gave Eisenhower the final boost he needed to win.

Throughout the entire campaign, Eisenhower led in all opinion polls and by wide margins in most of them.

Citizens for Eisenhower
To circumvent the local Republican Party organizations, which were mostly controlled by Taft supporters, the Eisenhower forces created a nationwide network of grassroots clubs, "Citizens for Eisenhower." Independents and Democrats were welcome, as the group specialized in canvassing neighborhoods and holding small-group meetings. Citizens for Eisenhower hoped to revitalize the party by expanding its activist ranks and by supporting moderate and internationalist policies. It did not endorse candidates other than Eisenhower, but he paid it little attention after he had won, and it failed to maintain its impressive starting momentum. Instead, it energized the conservative Republicans, which led finally to the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Longtime Republican activists viewed the newcomers with suspicion and hostility. More significantly, activism in support of Eisenhower did not translate into enthusiasm for the party's cause.

Results
On election day, Eisenhower won a decisive victory by winning over 55% of the popular vote and carrying 39 of the 48 states. Stevenson did not win a single state north of the Mason–Dixon line or west of Arkansas; he did succeed in winning back the four states which Strom Thurmond had won at the previous election, but lost all but five of the states that Truman had won that year. Eisenhower took three Southern states that the Republicans had won only once since Reconstruction: Virginia, Florida, and Texas. Despite the Republican win in Florida, that year was the last time that a Democrat has won Collier County before southwestern Florida was turned into a growing Sun Belt Republican stronghold, and it was also the last time that a Democrat has won Aiken County, South Carolina, before the "Solid South" would collapse in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. That year was also, however, the last time a Republican won Yolo County, California or the Native American Rolette County, North Dakota and Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, and the last until Donald Trump in 2016 that the Republicans won Pacific County, Washington, or Swift County, Minnesota. It was the last time the Republicans won Missouri until 1968 and the last time that a Republican won the election without Kentucky. Stevenson's 700-vote win was the smallest percentage margin in any state since Woodrow Wilson had won New Hampshire by 56 votes in 1916.

Of the 3,099 counties/independent cities making returns, Eisenhower won the most popular votes in 2,104 (67.89%) while Stevenson carried 995 (32.11%). Eisenhower won in 21 of the 39 cities with a population above 250,000. He won in six of the eight largest Southern cities.

The election was the first in which a computer, the UNIVAC I (and Monrobot III ), was used to predict the results; it came within 3.5% of Eisenhower's popular vote tally and four votes of his electoral vote total.

Source (Popular Vote): Source (Electoral Vote):

Results by state
Source:

States that flipped from Democratic to Republican

 * Arizona
 * California
 * Colorado
 * Florida
 * Idaho
 * Illinois
 * Iowa
 * Massachusetts
 * Minnesota
 * Missouri
 * Montana
 * Nevada
 * New Mexico
 * Ohio
 * Oklahoma
 * Rhode Island
 * Tennessee
 * Texas
 * Utah
 * Virginia
 * Washington
 * Wisconsin
 * Wyoming

States that flipped from Dixiecrat to Democratic

 * Alabama
 * Louisiana
 * Mississippi
 * South Carolina

Close states
Election results in these states were within one percentage point (21 electoral votes):
 * 1) Kentucky, 0.07% (700 votes)
 * 2) Tennessee, 0.27% (2,437 votes)

Election results in these states were within five percentage points (36 electoral votes):
 * 1) South Carolina, 1.44% (4,922 votes)
 * 2) Missouri, 1.56% (29,599 votes)
 * 3) Rhode Island, 1.84% (7,642 votes)
 * 4) West Virginia, 3.85% (33,608 votes)
 * 5) Delaware, 3.88% (6,744 votes)

Election results in these states were between five and ten percentage points (140 electoral votes):
 * 1) Louisiana, 5.84% (38,102 votes)
 * 2) Pennsylvania, 5.88% (269,520 votes)
 * 3) Texas, 6.44% (133,650 votes)
 * 4) North Carolina, 7.82% (94,696 votes)
 * 5) Massachusetts, 8.76% (208,800 votes)
 * 6) Oklahoma, 9.18% (87,106 votes)
 * 7) Washington, 9.64% (106,262 votes)
 * 8) Illinois, 9.90% (443,407 votes)

Tipping point state:
 * 1) Michigan, 11.47% (320,872 votes)

Statistics
Counties with Highest Percent of Vote (Republican)
 * 1)  Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana 92.97%
 * 2)  Gillespie County, Texas 92.29%
 * 3)  McIntosh County, North Dakota 90.89%
 * 4)  Campbell County, South Dakota 90.14%
 * 5)  Kenedy County, Texas 88.52%

Counties with Highest Percent of Vote (Democratic)
 * 1)  Greene County, North Carolina 94.12%
 * 2)  Hart County, Georgia 94.08%
 * 3)  Treutlen County, Georgia 93.34%
 * 4)  Martin County, North Carolina 92.98%
 * 5)  Walton County, Georgia 91.89%

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