Kamela Harris’s run for the presidency is showing earmarks of the above-the-fray campaign that Thomas E. Dewey mounted for president in 1948, losing what pollsters, pundits and the press then regarded as a can’t-lose race.
The hazy elusiveness that has characterized the first weeks of Harris’s campaign has prompted impatience and criticism from across the political landscape.
While noting the distance Harris has kept from the news media — she has neither granted an interview nor convened a news conference since emerging as the Democrats’ nominee — the New York Times nonetheless reported recently: “Some political strategists say Ms. Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing.”
Perhaps it’s not “exactly what she should be doing,” though — not when recalling campaign history and the case of Dewey, who served three terms as Republican governor of New York but twice lost the presidency as his party’s nominee.
Dewey in 1948 embraced a distant, glide-path strategy against President Harry Truman (D), sidestepping controversy and offering tame platitudes such as the importance of national “unity.”
“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” Dewey told a supporter, according to his biographer.
He specifically rejected suggestions by Republican leaders to undertake a vigorous, hard-hitting effort against Truman, who had become president in 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow,” Dewey said of Truman.
To be sure, the similarities between 1948 and 2024 are not exact. Although they defined the campaign narratives then, as they do now, pre-election polls are far more prevalent nowadays. Candidates no longer travel extensively by train in pursuing their campaigns. Debates between major party presidential candidates were in 1948 a dozen years in the future.
The Democratic Party is largely unified around Harris; in 1948, it split three ways, among the segregationist “Dixiecrats,” the hard-left Progressives and the Truman mainstream. Mirth and laughter come more readily to Harris than they did to the stuffy Dewey.
Such differences notwithstanding, the tenor of the campaigns, then and now, project some striking similarities.
Like Dewey, Harris is running a light-on-details campaign, preferring to make the race a referendum about an unpopular opponent. Like Dewey, Harris stands accused of flip-flopping on issues. Like Dewey, Harris is the candidate preferred by the press corps. Like Dewey, Harris faces a political foe known for verbal excess and for being free with the insults.
Inspired by Truman’s unpopularity and by polling data indicating the presidency was his to lose, Dewey by mid-August 1948 settled on a play-it-safe, above-the-fray campaign, rejecting suggestions by Republican leaders for a rousing, hard-hitting effort.
“That’s not what we’re going to do,” Dewey told Hugh Scott, a Pennsylvania congressman who chaired the Republican National Committee. Instead, Dewey pursued a “high-level campaign” that seemed “in keeping with the gravity of world events,” according to biographer Richard Norton Smith. The Middle East was in turmoil in the summer of 1948. Berlin was under a Soviet-imposed blockade. China was in the midst of civil war, in which communist forces were soon to prevail.
“Whatever characterizations would later be made of Dewey’s campaign strategy,” Smith wrote in his biography, “it was immensely popular at the time among those hoping to persuade a disenchanted, uncertain public.”
Dewey’s strategy did not anticipate the effectiveness of Truman’s response — a grueling, cross-country whirlwind in fall 1948. The president logged thousands of miles by train in a whistlestop campaign that biographer David McCullough likened to “a fast-rolling political roadshow.”
Truman made hundreds of speeches from the back of his train. His favored foil was the Republican-led 80th Congress, which he often, if unfairly, characterized as “idiotic” and “do-nothing.”
The consequences of Truman’s energetic campaign were not immediately clear. Richard Rovere wrote in the New Yorker in October 1948 that traveling with the president left an impression that “the American people who have seen him and heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the presidency.”
Late in the campaign, Dewey sensed his too-confident strategy and calls for “unity” were not resonating with voters, buffeted as they had been by price inflation and uneasy economic times. He felt it was probably too late to modify tactics, and his top advisers, Smith wrote, were against his doing so.
The polls, in any case, were reassuring. They signaled Dewey would win easily. Elmo Roper, who stopped releasing poll results in September 1948, estimated Dewey led by 15 percentage points. Rival pollsters Archibald Crossley and George Gallup both pegged Dewey’s late-campaign advantage at 5 points. Gallup was unequivocal in his final pre-election report, predicting: “Gov. Dewey will win the presidential election by a substantial majority of electoral votes.”
Such forecasts prompted little dispute or quarrel on the eve of the election. But they were widely recalled in the aftermath of Truman’s stunning victory by 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote.
“One of the satisfying results of the election,” the now-defunct Washington Evening Star declared in an editorial, “is that the professional pollsters fell flat on their faces.”
For pollsters, the outcome was an epic failure. For Dewey, it meant repudiation of the glide-path strategy, which was immediately and harshly second-guessed. A Republican committeeman in Arizona, for example, scoffed that Dewey’s run for president had been “smug, supercilious, and arrogant,” and “not a campaign in any real sense of the word.”
As for Dewey, he insisted he had “waged a clean, constructive campaign” and had “no regrets whatsoever.” But in the years afterward, according to Smith, Dewey never mentioned 1948 or his miscalculation — a miscalculation perhaps relevant in 2024 — of attempting to mark time until Election Day.
W. Joseph Campbell is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of seven books, including most recently, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”