by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
When some shooters lose a close match, they frequently push for a change in the rules. They are a lot like the Hillary Clinton supporters, politicians and media that are once again suggesting we amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and elect presidents by a popular vote majority.
They did it when Al Gore got a majority of the popular vote in 2000 but lost in the Electoral College vote. It has happened several times before with the Republican candidate usually being the beneficiary. It happened in the famous 1948 Harry Truman victory over Thomas Dewey. That time, the Republican candidate lost and the Republicans and some media and political science professors were the advocates for abolishing the Electoral College.
The 1948 Truman wins over Dewey is comparable to the 2016 Trump win over Clinton for several reasons. In both cases the establishment media—there was no television 68 years ago, let alone an Internet—pretty much supported Dewey. The major news media was largely controlled by conservative Republicans in those days—a reverse of what we have today. And the pollsters also got it wrong in both cases.
Bear in mind that in 1948 Truman, who was the vice presidential candidate hand-picked by three-term President Franklin Roosevelt at the Democrats’ national convention, had a lot of problems, besides the fact that he was a little-known senator from the Midwest. After Truman became president upon Roosevelt’s death, he faced all sorts of problems, not to mention big-labor unrest, the Russian blockade of Berlin, anti-communist hysteria among many Americans, and a three-way split in the Democratic Party. Roosevelt’s previous vice president, Henry Wallace, headed one national presidential ticket of Progressives, and South Carolina’s young Strom Thurman headed another national ticket of segregationist “states’ rights” Democrats.
Truman spent a lot of time campaigning in heartland America, much like Donald Trump in 2016. Dewey campaigned among the elite in states where he was already popular.
Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, was the darling candidate of the establishment media, just as Clinton was the favorite of the media to succeed Barack Obama from the day Obama won his second term.
The pollsters used different methods in those days but they made some of the same mistakes as this year’s pollsters. What was worse, they were so convinced of their Dewey-victory findings, they stopped surveying voters two weeks before the actual election.
Thoroughly convinced of a Dewey victory, some newspapers didn’t wait for the ballots to be counted. For instance, the Chicago Daily Tribune, then a leading Republican voice in the US, went so far as to a print an issue reporting a Dewey victory.
That resulted in the famous photo of Truman holding up a copy of that Tribune issue the morning after the election that inspired this year’s Michael Ramirez cartoon (shown here) mocking the media and the pollsters who had predicted and supported a Hillary Clinton victory.
Truman went on to be a super president. He solved the labor problems that afflicted the county. He overcame the anti-communist attacks of Sen. Joe McCarthy. He stymied Soviet Russia’s advances in Europe and Asia. He launched the Berlin Airlift to bypass Stalin’s blockade. He got the United Nations to take action in Korea. He reorganized and modernized the military and ended racial segregation in all the US armed services. He led the campaign to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
He was thought by many, especially the media and Republicans on Capitol Hill, to be a lightweight unfit to be president. Instead, Truman did what he thought was right and notched himself a prominent place in American presidential history.
My point in revisiting the 1948 election is that, in many ways, history has started repeating itself.
Just as the media and the pollsters got it wrong in 1948, their 2016 counterparts didn’t really spend much time talking to the average voter in many states, particularly in the heartland of America. They didn’t pay attention to the millions of voters who were disaffected by the status quo in Washington, DC, and were voting for outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders by the millions, and bringing in historic numbers of new voters.
They didn’t pay attention to the men and women who had worked all their lives and felt they had little to show for it. They ignored the millions who live in small rural or suburban areas of the country who feared an anticipated Obama third term in a Hillary Clinton win.
They also ignored the millions of gunowners who had been terrified by the prospect of a Clinton victory, not just with respect to the Supreme Court, but of her executive order capabilities.
Most of all, many people, including the media and the pollsters, missed the heartland’s fears for a changing American society.
The liberal elements, particularly in Hollywood, may be packing for immigration to Canada. Our neighbors to the north have already had their immigration system overrun.
The demonstrators may still gather in our big-city squares as you read this.
But the people of more states than ever have voted and they expect change. Now Trump and Pence should have a four-year chance to work for change starting Jan. 20, 2017.
