Word: deweyitis
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...before election, the Gallup poll gave Dewey 49.5% of the total vote, Truman 44.5%. On the day after election, red-faced Dr. George H. Gallup had two alibis: "Truman recaptured many votes from Wallace. Also, a lot of the 'undecided voters' in the poll voted for Truman." Poll-taking, he added, was still "an infant science...
Redder-faced still was FORTUNE'S Pollster Elmo Roper. He had predicted a Dewey landslide comparable only to Roosevelt's victory over Landon. He was so sure of it that, on Sept. 9, he said he would report no more figures unless there was a significant change. On election eve, he had found none, said: "I stand by my prediction. Mr. Dewey is in." But Roper, who had predicted the three previous presidential elections within .2 to 1.2% of accuracy, had no alibis. Said he: "How did we go wrong? I frankly do not know...
Many other faces were red. The Crossley poll's Archibald M. Crossley had given a final prediction of Dewey's election by 51% (to Truman's 42%). Fifty Washington correspondents, most of them bureau chiefs, had unanimously predicted a Dewey victory in a Newsweek poll. On election night the Chicago Tribune headlined: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In a pre-election photograph, LIFE had unreservedly captioned Dewey "The next President." TIME was just as wrong as everybody else...
...Dewey's home town, Buick-Dealer Harlow B. Ross summed up the election results in one disgusted sentence: "There are just more damned fools in this country than there are intelligent people." ¶Leesburg, Fla. reported a heavy Negro vote. It was apparently stimulated by a motorized parade of 250 members of the Ku Klux Klan on election...
Tallulah Bankhead, who regards Tom Dewey as "a phony ham actor," but thinks Harry Truman "a wonderful little man," did some hamming of her own at a Manhattan rally, in the famed, florid Bankhead manner...