Harry Truman won a famous upset over Thomas E. Dewey despite a Democratic split into Dixiecrat and Progressive breakaways.
The story
On November 2, 1948, President Harry S. Truman won a full term in one of the great upsets in American politics. Truman took 303 electoral votes and 49.6 percent of the popular vote. Republican Thomas E. Dewey won 189 electoral votes and 45.1 percent. Strom Thurmond of the States' Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party carried four Deep South states and 39 electoral votes, and former vice president Henry Wallace's Progressive Party won about 2.4 percent.
Polls and pundits expected Dewey to win easily. Truman's own party splintered twice: Southern segregationists walked out after the convention adopted a civil rights plank, and Truman then ordered the armed forces desegregated, while Wallace attacked Truman's hard line against the Soviet Union. Truman fought back with a cross-country whistle-stop train tour, attacking the Republican 'do-nothing' Congress. Pollsters such as Gallup stopped surveying well before election day and missed his late surge, and the Chicago Daily Tribune printed the headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman.'
Why it mattered
Truman's full term brought NATO, the Korean War and the deepening of Cold War containment.
The Dixiecrat revolt was an early sign of the white South's later shift to the Republican Party.
The polling failure pushed survey firms to keep polling until the final days of campaigns.
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