For the past sixty years, whenever a presidential candidate is down in the polls days before Election Day, Harry Truman’s victory in 1948 inevitable comes up. Of all the comebacks, Truman’s still ranks as the most startling, down to the premature headline published by the staunch Republican media mogul Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune the day after the election: “Dewey Defeats Truman!”
MORRIS: How McCain Can Pull Off An Upset
SILVER: McCain’s Long Road To Victory
A month before the election, Thomas Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, had a double digit lead over Truman. Most pollsters simply stopped polling, believing that voters made their minds up well before Election Day. Of the 50 most prominent journalists and editors surveyed, not one thought that Truman had a chance. Yet, Truman beat Dewey by more than 2 million votes, leaving the pollsters and the press to eat crow, which George Gallup, who had been embarrassingly wrong, promised he would actually do.
Candidates since have dissected Truman’s victory for clues about how to stage a comeback. McCain would do well to follow Truman’s playbook. Truman won because he was seen as the more genuine candidate, where Dewey was perceived as too cool, too perfect, and too aloof. Truman waged his “whistle stop” campaign throughout the heartland and effectively painted Dewey as the candidate of the urban elites who can’t care about the needs of the average farmer and worker. With short, to-the-point speeches and down-home charm, Truman garnered the support of rural America and the working class, who gravitated towards the anti-Wall Street rhetoric and the sense that Truman was more in tune with needs of the heartland than the too-perfect Thomas Dewey.
There are certainly cultural similarities between 1948 and today. If McCain is to have any chance, he needs to emulate Truman and throw out the playbook. But that doesn’t mean letting McCain the maverick wing it. Truman came across as a man of the people only because he had a crack staff of researchers who tailored each message to every place he visited. Truman’s spontaneity was the product of discipline and an expertly-run campaign
Truman also went on the offensive and attacked Dewey relentlessly. Just as McCain has bludgeoned Obama, Truman lambasted Dewey as a front man for Wall Street tycoons and worse. During one speech, he warned that Dewey was the same sort of person that had preceded Hitler in Germany, and that his victory would lead to a dictatorship of corporations and lobbyists.
The fear-mongering worked, but it came with a cost. Truman earned the enmity of the Republican Party, which worked tirelessly to undermine him and make his presidency a miserable grind. They stood silent when Joseph McCarthy went on his witch hunt. By the time Truman left office, he faced the lowest approval ratings of anyone until the current president and had spent four years with little to show for it. Negative campaigning had propelled him to a Pyrrhic victory; he’d won the battle and lost the war.
The lesson for McCain is to be genuine but disciplined, attack but with integrity. Truman’s victory, as well as Reagan’s in 1980, show that it really isn’t over until it’s over. But it also shows that the price of victory can be too steep. With the country facing a set of challenges this grave, a victory at all costs could be worse than an honorable defeat.
Zachary Karabell is the president of River Twice Research and the author of several books, including “The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election.”