Spoiler alert: That is not what happened. Truman won a clear plurality of the popular vote — a 4.5 point margin — and a comfortable 303 electoral votes. No, he didn’t win New York, thanks to the Wallace vote and Dewey’s popularity in his home state. Yes, he lost 39 electoral votes in four Southern states to the Thurmond-Wright ticket. It didn’t matter. Truman scored narrow victories in California, Illinois and Ohio, and returned to the presidency.
Post-election analysts pointed to Truman’s combative “Give ‘em hell!” approach and a strong showing among Black people, labor and the farm vote, as well as Dewey’s risk-averse campaign and stiff-backed personality. (“The little groom on the wedding cake,” as Dorothy Parker famously called him.)
What was overlooked — then and now — is how perilously close the United States came to a deadlocked contest that would have rocked American democracy, shaking the public’s confidence in our electoral system while giving Southern segregationists a chance to extort the country.
How close did America come to a constitutional crisis?
Look at two key states. In California, where nearly 4 million votes were cast, Truman won by about 18,000 votes giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. In Ohio, where nearly 3 million people voted, Truman won by just 7,000 votes, giving him that state’s 25 electoral votes. If 12,000 voters in those two states had changed their minds, Truman would have wound up with 253 electoral votes, Dewey with 239 and Thurmond with 39 — with no candidate winning the necessary 266 electoral vote majority.
Imagine the nation’s voters waking up Wednesday morning to discover that they had not elected a president. The first likely response would be confusion: What happens now? They would have learned that under the Byzantine rules laid down by the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives would vote not by individual members, but by state delegations — one state, one vote. The single member from Alaska would have the same vote as the 45-member delegation of New York. It would take a majority of delegations — 25 out of 48 — to elect a president. If a state delegation was tied, that state would not be counted, but a victorious candidate would still need 25 states. And the members would have to choose from among the top three electoral votes finishers: Truman, Dewey and Thurmond.
But nothing that “simple” would cover the sheer head-scratching nature of an election without a majority. In the weeks after the November vote, the spotlight would first fall on the presidential electors — the real voters who choose a president. And in 1948, the general belief was that members of the Electoral College were more or less free agents. While some states had laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate under whose name they ran, most states did not; and if a rogue elector chose to defy those rules, it was unclear what could be done about it. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t get around to forbidding such “faithless electors” until 2020.
The likely consequence would have been attempts to persuade electors to switch enough of their votes to make an electoral majority; one plausible case would focus on making the popular vote winner the president. But how many GOP electors would be willing to face the wrath of their party back home?
For example, if Dewey, who had made clear his refusal to bargain with segregationists, were to urge his New York electors to vote for Truman, how many of them — from conservative upstate regions of the state — would accede to that request? And how many Truman electors from states like Georgia, Tennessee and Florida would switch their votes to Thurmond to deprive the president of an electoral majority? In fact, the key reason for the States’ Rights Democratic Party to exist was to force the election into the House, where the South would hope to win deep concessions on civil rights from whomever emerged as president — and there were any number of Democratic House members outside the four Thurmond-won states in sympathy with that effort.
If we assume that electors would not deliver the presidency to Truman, a deadlocked election would move the contest to the Congress — with enough uncertainty to boggle the mind.