On the weekend of June 17-18, two well-known pundits opined about “spoilers” and said they believed that Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate in 1948, injured President Harry Truman in his race for re-election against Republican Thomas Dewey.
Joan Walsh, who often writes for The Nation, said in an interview that left parties “always” injure Democratic nominees. She did not specifically mention the 1948 election.
Jonathan B. Chait specifically wrote that in the 1948 election, Truman failed two “spoiler” candidates, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Chait said that in an article for the Intelligencer. He also writes for New York magazine.
Neither Walsh nor Chait seem aware of the research conducted by Samuel Lubell about the 1948 presidential election, research that is set out in his 1950 book “The Future of American Politics.” Lubell had been a pollster and then a political scientist. His research showed that Harry Truman would have lost the 1948 election if Henry Wallace had not run. During the 1944 presidential election, Lubell found, approximately two million Democrats had voted for Republican nominee Thomas Dewey, because they were strongly anti-Communist and they observed that the Communist Party (which had temporarily become the Communist Political Association during 1944) was strongly in favor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. A large share of these Democrats were Polish and they were very much opposed to Communism because of Stalin’s treatment of Poland. But in 1948, these voters observed that the Communist Party was strongly backing Henry Wallace and attacking Truman. So they felt comfortable returning to the Democratic Party and voting for Truman. Henry Wallace polled 1,157,326 votes. Even assuming all of them would have voted for Truman if Wallace had not run, their loss for the Democrats was far outweighed by the 2,000,000 voters who switched from Dewey to Truman.
