The 1948 United States presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. In one of the greatest election upsets in American history, incumbent President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey and States' Rights Democrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace also ran as a member of the Progressive Party.
Results[]
As the votes came in, Truman took an early lead that he never lost. The key states in the 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 split of the Democratic party, while failing to hold back Truman, did hold Truman back in several narrow states. Had the Wallace and Thurmond vote been in the Democratic column, Truman would have won all the Thurmond states, 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 Franklin D. Roosevelt's last victory.
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote | Electoral vote | Vice presidential candidate | Home state | Electoral vote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percentage | |||||||
| Harry S. Truman* | Democratic | Missouri | 24,178,347 | 49.55% | 303 | Alben W. Barkley | Kentucky | 303 |
| Thomas E. Dewey | Republican | New York | 21,991,292 | 45.07% | 189 | Earl Warren | California | 189 |
| Strom Thurmond | States' Rights Democratic | South Carolina | 1,175,930 | 2.41% | 39 | Fielding L. Wright | Mississippi | 39 |
| Henry A. Wallace | Progressive | New York | 1,157,328 | 2.37% | 0 | Glen H. Taylor | Idaho | 0 |
| Others | 289,638 | 0.59% | 0 | Others | 0 | |||
| Total | 48,793,535 | 100.00% | 531 | Total | 531 | |||
| Needed to win | 266 | Needed to win | 266 | |||||
| *Incumbent | ||||||||
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