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.

One of the oddities of history is that Oklahoma has only had one presidential nominee of a party of the left on its ballot since 1936, the last year the Socialist Party was on the ballot in that state. In 1948, when former vice-president Henry Wallace was the Progressive Party presidential nominee, he got on the ballot in all states except Illinois, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In 1988, Lenora Fulani, nominee of the New Alliance Party, qualified in Oklahoma.

Even Ralph Nader never got on the Oklahoma ballot in any of his four presidential runs (1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008). No Marxist party ever was able to get on the Oklahoma ballot for president, not even the Communist Party, which did place a presidential nominee on the ballot in almost all other states at one time or another. In the Communist Party’s history, the only other states in which it never got on for president (in the 48 states that existed before 1958) were Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

But in 2017, the Oklahoma law was changed, so that instead of a very large number of signatures, a minor party or independent presidential candidate could also get on the ballot with a very large filing fee, $35,000. For 2024, the alternative to that fee is a petition to recognize a new or previously unqualified party of 35,592 signatures. The filing fee alternative permits a party label other than just “independent.”

Assuming Cornel West becomes the presidential nominee of the Green Party in 2024, and perhaps also of the People’s Party, or both parties, it will be interested to see if he gets on in Oklahoma.