The nation is still stunned by Donald Trump’s successful run for the presidency.
Only a few weeks ago, the predictors were giving Hillary Clinton a healthy margin of victory. The New York Times put her chances of winning at 85 percent. There was talk of a Democratic landslide. Pundits wrote that the Republican Party was finished, split between irreconcilable factions: conservative and extra-conservative.
Only in the last few days before the election was there any talk that Trump’s defeat wasn’t assured. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, a respected website that statistically analyzes politics, economics, and sports, suddenly reversed his predictions to give Trump a 35% chance of winning. He was criticized for changing his data points to where he thought they should be.
It turns out he was right, but he was quite alone. The media generally dismissed Trump’s chances, believing that only Americans on the political fringes would take him seriously. Now comes the second-guessing. Reporters are now revisiting what the media got wrong. Esme Murphy, of CBS affiliate WCCO in Minneapolis, believes that journalists and politicians underestimated Trump’s support from rural, white voters, both male and female. Another factor was resentment against the Affordable Care Act and its rising premiums. The persistent media coverage of Clinton’s emails counted heavily against her. And finally, Trump was able to stir his audiences.
The situation is reminiscent of the presidential election of 1948, when Democrat Harry Truman defeated Republican Thomas Dewey, contrary to the expectations of the media.
Well before voting began, major columnists were convinced Dewey had already won the contest. Newspapers and magazines had printed their “Dewey Defeats Truman” stories before the election was decided.
Then, on November 3, 1948, America was shocked by the news that Truman had, in fact, won. Political analyst Samuel Lubell promptly set out across the country to talk to voters and GOP officials, hoping to understand what happened.
In his Post article, “Who Really Elected Truman?” from January of 1949, he spelled out the reason for the unexpected Democratic victory in 15 cities. There are several parallels to this week’s election upset, including tightly aligned voting blocs that showed up in force (urban voters for Truman; rural for Trump), apathetic or undecided stay-at-home voters, a stronger-than-expected showing in the Midwest, and, for both Truman and Trump, a “fighting, folksy tone.”
Who Really Elected Truman?
By Samuel Lubell
Excerpted from an article 0riginally published Jan. 22, 1949
When President Truman is sworn into office this week, the American people will be witnessing the inauguration of a political revolution.
Who elected him? What caused this “greatest upset in American history”? Since that November morning when Tom Dewey conceded that Harry Truman had defeated him, experts have been unusually busy proving how tiny a switch of voters — a mere 100,000 in selected states — would have sent Dewey to the White House. Such calculations, I believe, conceal the decisive nature of Truman’s triumph, which crumbled what remained of the post–Civil War political lineup and relegated the Republicans to the minority status long held by the Democrats. Henceforth political dopesters must think of the United States as “normally Democratic” or have their predictions boomerang.
Probably no previous election was influenced by so many crosscurrents. Yet the pattern of Truman’s victory emerges clear and unmistakable. First, Truman won because the urban masses, who elected Roosevelt for four terms, held together as a political force. The evidence that Dewey failed to crack any major groups of F.D.R.’s ardent following is ample. GOP victories in the industrial East were won less through new Republican adherents than by the apathy which kept much of the Roosevelt vote from the polls. Far from costing Dewey the election, the stay-at-homes may have saved him from almost as crushing a defeat as Landon suffered in 1936.
The winner with General Clark and Chief Justice Vinson. “The pattern of Truman’s victory,” the author states, “emerges clear and unmistakable.” (Harris and Ewing)
The second element in Truman’s victory was a belated catching on of the Roosevelt revolution on farms and in small towns. Much has been written of the farmer’s ire over the reduction of storage capacity to support corn prices. Of greater significance is the fact that the swing in the Midwest was most pronounced among voters of German descent who, apparently, had been held in the Republican Party through dislike of Roosevelt’s foreign policy. In my opinion, it will rank as one of the great ironies of American history that Roosevelt, in his very act of dying, removed the roadblock to a successful assault upon the staunchest Republican citadels.
Whether victory might have gone to Dewey had he slugged it out, issue for issue, will be debated endlessly. This much is clear: Dewey’s “high-level” talks on “unity” bear no relation to the way the vote broke. In contrast, Truman’s efforts seem tailored to the returns and constitute quite a tribute to Democratic Chairman J. Howard McGrath, to whom Truman owes more than Roosevelt did to Farley. In Roosevelt, the “common people” saw their benefactor. Truman hit just the right pitch in the matter of issues. He had fighting, folksy tones to appeal to the Roosevelt elements — labor, unorganized as well as organized; the foreign-born and their first- and second-generation offspring; also Negroes and Catholics. Helping him was something Dewey sorely lacked — enemies to dramatize his political convictions. Although Henry Wallace cost the Democrats New York and Maryland, he appears to have helped elect Truman. So do the Dixiecrats.
The election has been dismissed as a vote for prevailing prosperity — that plus popular anger against high living costs, inadequate housing, and the Taft-Hartley Law. With the Democrats controlling Congress and the presidency, Republicans now take comfort in the belief that they will profit from the voters’ wrath in 1952. But the 1948 vote resulted from factors which have been remaking our political life for at least a generation — birth rates, economic status, racial groups, the rise of government as an employer, the development of a new middle class with underdog memories. In terms of these forces, the Republicans appear, to me, weaker today than during Roosevelt’s dazzling victories.
Each city offered a different explanation for voting for Truman.
BOSTON
“Dewey by 60,000” was the forecast for Massachusetts. But Truman’s astonishing plurality topped 240,000, for a larger popular vote than Roosevelt ever got. Why?
Clumsily, the Republican state legislature put on the ballot proposals to legalize birth control and to crack down on trade unions. No two issues could have more effectively aroused the Democratic vote, concentrated among working-class elements of Irish, Italian, French-Canadian, and Polish descent, all predominantly Catholic. One observer told me, “The church did a job on the women, while the unions got out the men.”
STETTIN, WISCONSIN
With anti-Roosevelt feeling no longer a factor in 1948, farmers found it easier to vote their economic interests. … The greatest Truman swing came in Western Wisconsin, rolling dairy country which raises no price-support crops. Eastern Wisconsin, which does, held for Dewey. What the western counties do share is having suffered greater privations during the depression — twice as many farms were foreclosed — than Eastern Wisconsin.
GUTHRIE CENTER, IOWA
Throughout the Farm Belt, it seemed, farmers were seeking down-to-earth promises which they didn’t find in Dewey’s speeches. The pre-election drop in farm prices had the psychological effect of making them fear they were going to lose all their gains. These fears were stimulated when Congress reduced the storage capacity available for supporting corn loans.
DETROIT
Steady employment undoubtedly has contributed to [workers’ satisfaction with the Democrats]. On nearby streets, every fourth or fifth house is freshly painted. The grocery which handled food stamps in 1940 gleams with fluorescent lighting. Many union members are property owners.
HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY
Negro voters are no longer swayed by the naming of a few colored persons to well-paying jobs. … the Republicans have no labor program to attract the 1,000,000 Negro workers, now unionized. They frown on public housing, which to Negroes promises relief from both squalor and segregation.
CLEVELAND
The younger people voted for Truman. The Dewey ballots were invariably among older folk. Typical of the reasons given by Truman supporters were, “We were high-school kids during the depression, but remember how tough it was,” or “It seemed the safest thing to do.”
CHICAGO
The depression first split the allegiance of the middle class — three banks in [one] neighborhood failed. Few “lost Republicans” have been won back. One woman, who drove 60-odd miles to vote for Hoover in 1928, felt that Truman was “one of the people,” while Dewey was “It’s all been said before.”
PITTSBURGH
The great Republican mistake, I believe, was to assume there was a “natural pendulum swing” which had won them control of Congress in 1946 and which would carry them the rest of the way into the White House.
From his national canvass, Lubell saw a new appreciation of the Democrats and a dismissal of the Republicans that the pollsters and politicians missed. And as this year’s election shows, it wasn’t the last time the experts overlooked critical signs of change.
Overall, I found that in city after city through the Roosevelt years, the former “minorities” became the new majority. This indicates what has become of the GOP pendulum. That pendulum reflected the normally Republican majority which evolved from the Civil War. With each successive election the proportion of the population to whom 1860 has any political meaning dwindles. The Republican problem becomes increasingly one of finding a new political vehicle of a design to attract new passengers.
From the Republican viewpoint, perhaps the harshest fact the 1948 returns reveal is how many ordinarily conservative persons feared a Republican victory. Is this because the processes of inflation, government infiltration, and global power politics have already gone so far that people feel our whole social structure rests upon government supports?
Whatever the reason, the doctrine of too little government seems to have become as frightening as that of too much government. Unless the Republicans can develop their own concept of the positive role that government is to play in American life, they will have to resign themselves, in the judgment of this reporter, to a minority status, with their best hope for victory lying in a Democratic equivalent of the Bull Moose split. Dewey, in fact, came close to becoming a minority president, as Wilson was in 1912.
Whether the Democrats can hold together is still the crucial question. Can they cement their new farmer allies with their older labor following?
You can speculate from now until 1952 on how the reshuffling of both major parties — now so clearly under way — will eventually come out. So far — and this is perhaps the crowning irony to this most paradoxical election — the Republicans seem to have suffered more from Roosevelt’s death than the Democrats. Roosevelt’s passing removed the common foe who united some Republican elements, while plenty of enemies for the Democrats to vote against survived.
Perhaps that is the moral of the 1948 election — that Americans like to elect their presidents on the basis of the enemies that they have made. Dewey’s fatal error may have been that he did not choose to run against anybody, especially.
If a Hollywood script writer wrote the plot of the 2016 World Series for a movie, it wouldn’t have been believable. Two teams that haven’t won a championship in decades playing against each other? The series goes seven games after one team is down three games to one? And the seventh game goes into extra innings?
The last time the the Chicago Cubs won The World Series, in 1908, Henry Ford produced his first Model T car, the Titanic hadn’t even been built yet, and a loaf of bread was five cents. Jimmy Stewart was born in 1908 and Mark Twain was still alive.
Here’s what was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on October 10, 1908.
November 4, 1908
I’m happy for Bill Murray and all of the other Cubs fans. As a Red Sox fan who went through a lot of pain for a lot of years until they won in 2004, I know how they’ve felt.
I Didn’t Win $250,000
Quaker Oats had a contest earlier this year where the public could go on their web site and create a new oatmeal flavor. If they picked your recipe you’d win $250,000! I didn’t win, so I guess I’ll cancel that order for a Lamborghini.
The three finalists have been announced. It’s down to Vanilla Chai, Lemon Ricotta Pancake, and Apple Cheddar Rosemary. My choice is Vanilla Chai. Voting ends November 19.
And no, I’m not telling you what my flavor entry was. There’s always next year.
Starbucks and the Coffee Cup Wars: The Sequel
Courtesy Starbucks
Remember last year when people got upset because the coffee cups at Starbucks weren’t Christmas-y enough? It’s happening again this year. This is becoming an annual Christmas tradition, like watching It’s A Wonderful Life, decorating your house with colorful lights, and punching people in the face as you fight over the last toaster on sale on Black Friday.
Here’s the new Starbucks cup. It’s a green and white cup with a drawing of several faces all close to each other in a big circle, and while Starbucks doesn’t specifically say it’s the cup for the holiday season, it’s November 4 and you’d think the holiday cups would have been unveiled by now. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says that “during a divisive time in our country, Starbucks wanted to create a symbol of unity as a reminder of our shared values.” Oh, if only a coffee cup could solve our nation’s problems. I was really looking forward to this election being over concentrating on the Christmas season – a non-politicized Christmas season.
Maybe next year Starbucks can go back to snowmen and trees and angels and Santa?
Hello Bye Bye Birdie
I think that the live events that NBC has been producing the past few years are one of the great things on television right now. So far we’ve seen Peter Pan, The Wiz, and Grease (with Hairspray coming next month and A Few Good Men in the spring) and while we can say that not all of them have worked 100%, it’s great that someone is doing something that harkens back to the live performances we saw in the 1950’s during The Golden Age of Television (the first Golden Age of Television).
Next up is a new version of Bye, Bye Birdie. It was first a Broadway musical in 1960, with Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, and then a 1963 film with Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, and Ann-Margret. This version will star Jennifer Lopez and will air some time during the holiday season of 2017.
If you’ve never seen the film, it’s about the craziness that occurs when rock star Conrad Birdie visits the president of his fan club in a small Ohio town. Mad Men did an episode about it. They were going do a tie-in with Patio Cola:
RIP Tammy Grimes, Michael Massee, Hazel Shermet, Don Marshall, and John Zacherle
Michael Massee was in a ton of movies, including Se7en, The Game, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, along with TV shows like The Blacklist, The X-Files, Alias, House, Rizzoli & Isles, and 24, but he will probably be remembered as the man who accidentally shot and killed actor Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow in 1993.
Hazel Shermet was one of those people you’d see on TV and say “I know her!” even if you didn’t know her name. She appeared on shows like I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Facts of Life, as well as over 100 commercials. If you were a kid in the ’70’s you heard her voice as Henrietta Hippo on a really bizarre show called New Zoo Revue that I watched every single weekend for some reason:
Shermet, an actress and singer who also appeared on Broadway, was 96.
Don Marshall played one of the crewmen trapped in the Land of the Giants on ABC in the ’60s. He also appeared in the series Julia and several other TV shows and movies. He passed away last weekend at the age of 80.
John Zacherle? He was one of the first horror movie hosts on television, appearing as Roland/Zacherley on local stations in New York and Philadelphia in the 1950’s. He even had a hit song in 1958 called “Dinner with Drac.” He passed away on October 27 at the age of 98.
You can thank Zacherle for opening the door to other horror movie hosts like Svengoolie, who hosts his own show every Saturday night on Me-TV.
This Week in History
“Dewey Defeats Truman” Headline (November 3, 1948)
Why didn’t Thomas Dewey actually win that election? Maybe it was his mustache.
Walter Cronkite Born (November 4, 1916)
That’s right, the CBS newsman would be turning 100 this year. Here’s Jeff Nilsson with a look back at his influence.
Abraham Lincoln Elected President (November 6, 1860)
The Republican candidate defeated Democrats Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party.
It’s National Candy Day
Didn’t we just celebrate a candy day, on October 31? Seems like we should just combine National Candy Day with Halloween. It seems more efficient and we can spend our energies celebrating Love Your Lawyer Day (which is also today). But I guess we shouldn’t dismiss any day that helps give us two candy holidays in one week.
