{"id":455,"date":"2010-10-12T01:50:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T01:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/?p=455"},"modified":"2010-10-13T00:54:11","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T00:54:11","slug":"election-of-1948-pollsters-and-the-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/2010\/10\/12\/election-of-1948-pollsters-and-the-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Election of 1948 – Pollsters and the Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the night of the election of 1948 presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, and the majority of the American public felt sure that Dewey was the new president of the United States.\u00a0The candidacy of his competitor, Harry S. Truman, who was running for his second term, was\u00a0cast aside as a long-shot.\u00a0Newspapers and radios alike endorsed Dewey\u2019s presidency and discussed his inevitable victory in the days and\u00a0hours\u00a0before the final election results were announced.\u00a0According to many contemporaries<\/a>, \u201cHarry Truman was the only man who truly believed he could win. And he was right.\u201d News of Truman\u2019s victory shocked a nation of non-believers.<\/p>\n

Polls leading up to the election showed that Dewey was far ahead of the competition. With the creation of the Gallup Poll<\/a> in the 1930\u2019s, an effective way of predicting election outcomes and determining public opinion\u00a0was created. Politicians and the public\u00a0 relied on Gallup Polls to get an understanding of where the nation stood on important issues. Prior to the election of 1948 Dewey was quoted as saying, “never argue with the Gallup Poll. It has never been wrong and I very much doubt it ever will be”( Thomas E. Dewey 1937-1947: A Study in Political Leadership<\/em>, Beyer, pg 73).\u00a0 The American media was just as quick to put all of\u00a0its faith in pre-election polls. Washington Post<\/em> journalist Drew Pearson<\/a> wrote that “Governor Dewey had conducted one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years” and that Truman “cannot possibly win this election.” Another Washington Post<\/em> <\/a>article put enormous faith in polling\u00a0representative voters and said that the\u00a0likelihood\u00a0of these representatives being wrong would be a\u00a0great surprise\u00a0to the nation. The most famous example of the unquestioning faith the media put in pollsters\u00a0was the infamous <\/em>Chicago Tribune<\/em> <\/a>headline that read “Dewey Defeats Truman.” 15o,ooo copies of this inaccurate headline were printed.<\/p>\n

Americans were shocked at the inaccuracies of the polls that had predicted Dewey overwhelmingly as the favorite candidate. Actual election results<\/a>\u00a0showed quite a different story. Dewey was unable to obtain the majority he needed to defeat Truman in key states like Illinois. There are a majority of factors that can account for the inaccuracy of these poll results. First of all, Dewey under-estimated the importance of the African American vote and failed to campaign strongly towards this demographic. In addition,\u00a0many historians believe that Dewey got lazy in campaigning because of\u00a0his unwavering faith in the polls, and others believe that\u00a0the the prediction of an overwhelming victory for Dewey kept some from seeing the need to go out and vote (Simon Topping<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Since then, polling has undergone changes<\/a>\u00a0to increase its accuracy. Despite these efforts, the polls often fail to be an accurate\u00a0indicator of future results. However, no polling innacuracy has ever been quite as dramatic in the eyes of the American public as that of 1948. On November 4, 1948 Truman drove into St. Louis, Missouri<\/a>\u00a0after winning the election holding a copy of the mistaken Chicago Tribune <\/em>headline claiming his defeat. The picture of this event in one of the most iconic photos in the history of American politics and its legacy lives on today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the night of the election of 1948 presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, and the majority of the American public felt sure that Dewey was the new president of the United States.\u00a0The candidacy of his competitor, Harry S. Truman, who was running for his second term, was\u00a0cast aside as a long-shot.\u00a0Newspapers and radios alike endorsed Dewey\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":552,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/552"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}