Dewey Defeats Truman

Dewey Defeats Truman
	CORRECTED
	"Republican Thomas E. Dewey defeated President Harry S. Truman in the 1948 US presidential election."
Domain	Politics & Elections
Tactic	Statistical & Evidentiary Distortion;
Era	Historical
First seen	1948
Origin	The front-page headline of an early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune printed on election night, November 2–3, 1948
Last reviewed	2026-10-27
	Further reading: books on Politics & Elections

"Dewey Defeats Truman" was the banner headline of an early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune on the morning after the 1948 US presidential election. The newspaper, relying on opinion polls, conventional wisdom and its own political correspondent, announced a victory for the Republican candidate, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, before the votes were counted. In fact President Harry S. Truman won a decisive victory. A photograph of a grinning Truman holding up the newspaper became one of the most famous images in American political history and a lasting symbol of the dangers of premature conclusions and overconfident polling.

The claim

Throughout the 1948 campaign, almost all observers expected Dewey to win. Major polls showed him comfortably ahead, and several pollsters stopped surveying voters weeks before the election, believing the outcome was settled. Many newspapers and magazines prepared for a Dewey administration.

Origin

On election night the Tribune faced an early printing deadline because of a strike by its printers, which forced it to go to press before many results were available. Its managing editor relied on the forecast of the paper's veteran Washington correspondent, Arthur Sears Henning, who predicted a Dewey win. The first edition carried the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." As returns showed Truman leading, the paper changed the headline in later editions, but many thousands of copies of the first edition had already been distributed.

What the evidence shows

Truman won 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189, with States' Rights candidate Strom Thurmond winning 39. Truman won the popular vote by about 4.5 percentage points. On November 4, at St. Louis Union Station during his return trip to Washington, Truman was handed a copy of the early Tribune and held it up for photographers, saying it was not what he had heard.

Why the polls were wrong

Post-election analysis, including a study by the Social Science Research Council, identified several problems:

Stopping too early. Some pollsters stopped interviewing weeks before the election and missed late shifts toward Truman, particularly among undecided voters.
Quota sampling. Pollsters chose respondents to fit demographic quotas, giving interviewers discretion that introduced bias. Polling later moved toward probability sampling.
Undecided voters. Pollsters assumed undecided voters would split in the same proportions as decided voters; many broke for Truman.
Groupthink. Journalists, pundits and pollsters reinforced one another's assumptions.

Why it persists

"Dewey Defeats Truman" remains a staple warning in journalism, polling and politics. It is invoked whenever polls or pundits appear overconfident, and it has had successors, such as television networks' premature calls in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. It is also a reminder that not all false claims are deliberate: this one resulted from haste, overconfidence and flawed methods, and was corrected within hours.

Lessons for readers

Polls are estimates, not results, and can be wrong.
Be skeptical of declarations of victory before votes are counted.
Consensus among experts can reflect shared assumptions rather than evidence.
Ask when polls were conducted and how respondents were chosen.
Deadlines and competitive pressures can push media to publish before facts are known.

Sources

Frederick Mosteller et al., The Pre-Election Polls of 1948 (Social Science Research Council, 1949).
Chicago Tribune, retrospective coverage of the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline.
David McCullough, Truman (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (Knopf, 2000).