January 13, 2008

Pollsters got it wrong, just like they did in 1948

By Gene Krider

One more column about presidential elections and I will shut up for a while. In 1948, Truman had been president for almost 4 years. He was elected vice-president in the 1944 election when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president. No one knew how sick he was, and he died a few months into this fourth term.

The Republican Party held its convention in Philadelphia amid much dissension because they had lost both houses to the Democrats and wanted to win back their national domination. The eastern establishment’s choice was New York governor Thomas E. Dewey (434 delegates), a bland but reliable candidate. Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s outspoken daughter, said Dewey looked like the figure on top of a wedding cake.

The leader of the conservative wing, Sen. Robert Taft (224) known as “Mr. Republic-an,” opposed them. This was the convention I wrote about last week. At the start of the third ballot, Taft met with Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen (157) and Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (62) and tried to get them to give their delegates to Taft, which would give him the nomination. Stassen re-fused and, during the roll call, Taft had a letter read to the convention that he was withdrawing. Dewey was named the nominee by acclamation.

This was the first appearance of Stassen at a Republican convention, but certainly not his last. He became known as a “perpetual presidential candidate.”

In 1948, blunt-spoken “give ’em hell” Harry Truman was besieged on the left by Henry Wallace and on the right by Strom Thurman.

As commerce secretary, Wallace opposed Truman’s stand against the Soviet Union so Truman fired him. Wallace resurrected the Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt, and that convention was held in Philadelphia before the Democrats’ convention. Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, known as the “singing cowboy” who had ridden his horse up the front steps of the Capitol when he won his election, was named Wallace’s running mate.

The whole Progressive Party was embroiled in controversy and Henry L. Menken, the hot-tempered journalist, accused the party of being controlled by communists.

Both parties courted war hero Dwight Eisenhower, but he refused to tell his party affiliation until the 1952 election when he revealed he was a Republican. During the Dem-ocratic convention the southern states’ delegates opposed the party platform’s civil rights plank. When Truman won the party’s nomination, Thurmond marched the delegates out of the hall. Thur-mond formed the States Rights Democratic Party known as “Dixiecrats.”

For once, my family — the Kriders and the Sims — were united politically, sure the Democrats would go down in defeat. Everyone, including the pollsters, held this view. Truman’s faith in his re-election never wavered.

How did the polling companies unanimously make such a big mistake? Remember in 1948, American corporations producing for the war effort where struggling to get back into consumer production. This was especially true of AT&T struggling to get new wiring to all the areas that were demanding phones and, since most of the nonurban phones needed to be changed from hand-operated to auto-dialing, the phone company was way behind. Since all polling was done by telephone, you can see how this skewed the results.

I miss the compressed drama, polling delegations and all of the old days.