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President FDR died a month before the fucking Nazis surrendered and his VP, Truman, suddenly became president and was told for the first time about the nukes they were working on and Truman said fuck yeah let’s use those, and in 1948 everyone expected Truman to lose the presidential election so much that the next day a major newspaper published a headline saying he had lost. But he hadn’t.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 3, 1948--
Most Americans were fine with Truman nuking Japan. It was the civil rights stuff that pissed them off. The Democratic party had tried unsuccessfully to punt Truman from the ticket, but he hung in there and got the nomination to run as president in 1948. Then a bunch of southern delegates at the Democratic National Convention said fuck your stand on saying we shouldn’t be so racist, and they split and ran as “Dixiecrats.” That split made people sure Truman was gonna get obliterated by Thomas Dewey and the Republican party. The Chicago Tribune was so certain they didn’t even wait for the election results to run the headline.
It was actually called the Chicago Daily Tribune at the time and later dropped the “Daily” and I was a columnist for them for several years, so I rewrote history just a little. Thomas Dewey was the governor of New York leading the Republicans, and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond—douche—headed the Dixiecrats. The election was held on November 2, and Strom only got 2.4% of the vote but carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina to take 39 Electoral College votes. Dewey got 45.1% and took 189 EC votes, and Truman received 49.6%, getting 303 EC votes, creating one of the greatest election upsets in U.S. history.
The next day, November 3, 1948, the Tribune ran with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Oops. The paper was notorious for being Republican leaning, having once referred to Truman as a “nincompoop,” which in 1948 was probably like calling him a dumbass motherfucker. Continues below …
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The paper was using a printing method requiring early press deadlines, so … they guessed. And it was a logical guess because Dewey was heavily favored to win, and early on election night it was looking like Dewey had it in the bag. So the Tribune said yeah fuck it just go with it. And in so doing created the most embarrassing headline in the paper’s history, with 150,000 copies printed before it was corrected.
It was a lot closer than the EC reveals, as a swing of less than 1% in the popular vote in California, Ohio, and Illinois would have handed victory to Dewey. The White House wasn’t the only prediction the Tribune fucked up. The paper also said the Republicans retained control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, but both of those swung Democratic too. Truman later held up the erroneous paper and posed for photos with a smile, saying, “That ain’t the way I heard it.”
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