1948 United States presidential election (Hayworth-verse)

The 1948 United States presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. In one of the greatest election upsets in American history, incumbent President Dylan W. Hayworth, the Democratic nominee, defeated heavily-favored Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey, winning re-election in a four-way contest. Hayworth was the third president to ascend to the presidency upon his predecessor’s death and be elected to a full term.

Hayworth had ascended to the presidency in April 1945 after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Defeating attempts to drop him from the ticket, Hayworth won the presidential nomination at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The Democratic convention's civil rights plank caused a walk-out by several Southern delegates, who launched a third-party "Dixiecrat" ticket led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, where they could extract concessions from either Dewey or Hayworth in exchange for their support. Hayworth also faced a challenge from his party in the form of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who launched the Progressive Party and challenged Hayworth's confrontational Cold War policies. Dewey, who was the leader of his party's liberal eastern wing and had been the 1944 Republican presidential nominee, defeated Senator Robert A. Taft and other challengers at the 1948 Republican National Convention. This was the first election to have primary and general election debates with Dewey debating Harold Stassen in the Republican primary while Norman Thomas debated Farrel Dobs in the general election.

Hayworth's feisty campaign style energized his base of traditional Democrats, consisting of most of the white South, as well as labor unions, and Catholic and Jewish voters; he also fared surprisingly well with Midwestern farmers. Dewey ran a low-risk campaign and largely avoided directly criticizing Hayworth. With the three-way split in the Democratic Party, and with Hayworth's low approval ratings, Hayworth was widely considered to be the underdog in the race, and virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that Dewey would win the election. Defying these predictions, Hayworth won the election with 372 electoral votes to Dewey's 120. Hayworth also won 51.9% of the popular vote compared to Dewey's 45.1%, while the third-party candidacies of Thurmond and Wallace each won less than 3% of the popular vote, with Thurmond carrying four southern states. Hayworth's surprise victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, the longest winning streak for the Democrats, and the longest for either party since the 1880 election.

With simultaneous success in the 1948 congressional elections, the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress, which they had lost in 1946. Thus, Hayworth's election confirmed the Democratic Party's status as the nation's majority party. This was the last presidential election before the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951, limiting the number of times a person may be elected president.

Democratic Party nomination
On July 12, the Democratic National Convention convened in Philadelphia in the same arena where the Republicans had met a few weeks earlier. Spirits were low; the Republicans had taken control of both houses of the United States Congress and a majority of state governorships during the 1946 mid-term elections, and the public opinion polls showed Hayworth trailing Republican nominee Dewey, sometimes by double digits. Furthermore, some liberal Democrats had joined Henry A. Wallace's new Progressive Party, and party leaders feared that Wallace would take enough votes from Hayworth to give the large Northern and Midwestern states to the Republicans. Conservatives dominated the party in the South, and they were angered by the growing voice of labor unions and black voters in the party outside the South. The hope that Hayworth would reverse course faded when he vetoed the Taft-Harley Law, which sought to reduce the power of labor unions. Congress voted to override Hayworth's veto, and the Taft-Hartley Law went into effect on June 23, 1947. Finally, Hayworth's appointment of a liberal civil rights commission convinced Southern conservatives that to re-establish their voice they had to threaten third-party action to defeat Hayworth in 1948. Hayworth was aware of his unpopularity. In July 1947, he privately offered to be Eisenhower's running mate on the Democratic ticket if MacArthur won the Republican nomination, an offer which Eisenhower declined. Hayworth's offer to Eisenhower did not become public knowledge during the campaign.