The Truman surprise: in the election of 1948, Harry Truman fooled pollsters (and almost everyone else) when he beat Thomas Dewey to win a full term in the White House.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: Times Past

On Nov. 4, 1948, The New York Times published a letter from James Reston that was unusual for two reasons: Reston was the newspaper's own political correspondent; and his letter represented a public admission that the press was as guilty as all the pollsters and politicians who had predicted that Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican Governor of New York, would handily defeat President Harry S. Truman, who was running for a full term after becoming President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office in April 1945.

Nearly two months before the election, Elmo Roper was so certain of the outcome that he announced that his national polling organization would stop surveying voters. "My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin, and devote my time and efforts to other things."

Roper's mistake, shared by most politicians and reporters that year, holds valuable lessons for political campaigns and elections today. "In a way, our failure was not unlike Mr. Dewey's," Reston wrote in his letter. "We overestimated the tangibles and underestimated the intangibles ... and we, too, were far too impressed by the tidy statistics of the polls."

To be sure, there were plenty of good reasons to assume that Truman couldn't win. Before FDR tapped him as his running mate in 1944, he was a little known Senator from Missouri (and before that, a failed men's clothing salesman) who made his name in Washington by crusading against war profiteers and military mismanagement. He was a voracious reader, but never attended college (the only 20th century President who didn't).

The Democrats had lost control of Congress in 1946, and after World War 11 ended in 1945, inflation took off when wartime price controls were lifted and organized labor began striking for higher wages. Making matters worse, opposition to Truman's agenda prompted two Democrats to run for President as independents: Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, whose Dixiecrats stormed out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest Truman's commitment to civil rights; and Henry Wallace, whom Roosevelt had dumped as Vice President in favor of Truman in 1944. Wallace's fellow Progressives objected to, among other things, Truman's hard line policies against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War.

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