Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Nothing Happens for the First Time
Was there “chicanery” November 3rd? I don’t know. But I do know this:
It is an unwritten law of nature that nothing happens for the first time. We’ve all been there. When a teenager gets busted for booze or pot, chances are it’s not the first time. When a cop pulls your kid over for speeding, same thing. Should you catch your spouse in flagrent dilecto no matter how much he denies it or how much you want to believe him, deep down you know the truth. If you find your wife day drinking during the pandemic, and she swears that she hasn’t done it before, it’s probably not the first time.
I fear this law of nature may apply to politics as well—though it never crossed my mind until this past election—where it appears the integrity of mail-in voting is highly questionable in several states.
In 1948 my grandfather, (then) California Governor Earl Warren, ran for the Vice Presidency on the ticket with the Governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. They were shoe-ins. According to the experts and the pollsters, Roosevelt’s former Vice President, Harry Truman, didn’t have a chance. He wasn’t very popular; was thought to be a dunderhead, and assumed to be way over his skis; how could a former haberdasher from Missouri ascend to the highest office in the land?
Truman lost all nine of the Gallup Poll‘s post-convention surveys. Walter Winchell reported that gambling odds were 15 to 1 against him.
In his biography of Truman, William Manchester wrote that on September 9th, pollster Elmo Roper announced, “Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected… I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race.”
The Dewey/Warren combo was a dream team. Two wildly popular Governors of the country’s two largest states, New York and California. It was an East/West ticket destined to automatically deliver two states with a combined 72 electoral votes and every state in between.
By all accounts, Dewey/Warren ran a horrible campaign. Their consultants adhered to the “Farley rule,” which held that voters made up their mind right after the conventions and that all the politicking and campaigning from the end of the conventions to the day of the election was simply meaningless noise.
Pollsters and advisors told Dewey that he was so far ahead that anything he said of consequence; any position he took would only cost him votes.
So he uttered platitudes and empty phrases like “The future lies ahead of us.”
It frustrated Papa Warren to no end. He was never a complainer but having been an active “doer” as California’s Governor (building roads, prisons, , state hospitals, expanding the University system, and running a surplus–all the things that he was born to do, feel and be)–went for naught, as Dewey’s advisors kept the lid on him. It rankled him to his dying day.
Papa Warren was so popular in California that (back in the days when one could “cross-file”) in 1946 he was nominated by both the Democratic and Republican parties for the governorship. He won in a landslide.
Yet, in 1948 he didn’t even carry his own state.
How could that be?
He never complained nor tried to explain it. He simply said when asked to explain, “Mr. Truman got more votes.”
On the surface, the final results didn’t appear close. Truman won with 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. Truman took 49.6% of the popular vote –Dewey’s 45.1%. (Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party and Henry Wallace’s Progressive party skewed the final results somewhat). Thurmond and Wallace each won less than 3%.
Truman carried 28 states Dewey/Warren 16 and Thurmond 4 southern states.
Heading into the election, New York (45) and Pennsylvania (37) had the most electoral votes.
Only three states, Illinois (28), California (25), and Ohio (25) had over 20 electoral votes. They were the battleground states of their day.
Truman won all three of these states by a margin of less than one percentage point, for a combined total of 78 electoral votes. The difference in the election.
Dewey/Warren carried Pennsylvania and New York. Truman carried California by 17,865 (out of over 4,000,000 votes cast–.44%); Ohio by 7,107 (out of almost 3,000,000–.24%); and Illinois by 33,612 out of almost 4,000,000–.84%.
Papa Warren never publicly questioned the integrity of the election. That was not his style. But to lose California by 17,000 votes out of 4,000,000 given his overwhelming popularity? It boggles the mind—unless chicanery was involved.
With the exception of Mayor Daly’s well-known boost to Kennedy in 1962 one rarely thought that elections were rigged. But after seeing the irregularities in the battleground states, I’m reminded that nothing ever happens for the first time.
Published in Politics
Or Daley in 1960, perhaps.
You are correct, of course. Thanks for pointing it out.
We all have brain farts. Some are more funny than others.
Getting back to your real point, though, I seem to remember a line in Ecclesiastes about “nothing new under the sun.”
Or as Ecclesiastes also said, “Don’t be too wise. Why wouldst thou destroy thyself?” Perhaps we were better off when we didn’t know these things.
Meanwhile, some believe this guy should be “Time Magazine’s” Man of the Year:
Great post. Voter fraud is a valued Democrat tradition.
The only reason to fight voter ID tooth and nail as Democrats always have, is that you know you generally need it to win elections. It has been true since Reconstruction and Jim Crow, through Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall, Mayor Daley, etc. JFK was “elected” though voter fraud … Joseph Kennedy was at least honest in this case: “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide“.
Certainly modern Democrats have lost any semblance of parsimony — with their money or ours. But if we are paying ANY attention, we knew that already. This time they over achieved by at least hundreds of thousands. They wanted no doubt of the outcome after 2016, and even then, even with the massive fraud, it may be too close to get away with. The down ticket losses are really proof enough on their own. We are expected to believe that many thousands of “voters” went to the trouble of filling out “votes” for ONLY the riveting Biden!
As Biden said. it was the greatest vote fraud organization in history! (so far) He rivals Joe Kennedy in telling truth to sheep.
Since the media has been mostly Democrat for a LONG time, and Americans (especially the hard working ones) have a strong aversion to the seedy, wasteful business of politics. Most Americans don’t want to look in that sewer. It is clear now that if they want to retain any illusion of “freedom” while they are masked and locked in their houses, they are going to have to jump in that sewer now. The toilets are backing up.
This article is WELL worth the read. A teaser …
1948 was more like 2016. Dewey was not that likable and had lost in 1944 to a zombie. Your grandfather was popular in his own state but that was less a force in national politics. Dewey also had the unfortunate experience with the train engineer which spread like something on Facebook today. They ran a limp campaign, like Hillary did, and were surprised by the guy who went 24/7/30/365 all out. Goodwin Knight was also very popular and did the same winning both primaries.
Knowland tried that switch with Knight and ended both their careers.
I had to look that up as I had never heard about it before. I was a month old at the time and probably should have been paying better attention.
I read recently that in 2016 with Gary Johnson and William Weld running on the Libertarian Party ticket, that that was the first time that two governors had run run together on the same ticket since Thomas Dewey of New York ran as a Republican with Earl Warren of California.
However, they weren’t the only pair of governors to run that year as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina ran as a States’ Rights Democrat with Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi.
You are so right. Thanks for taking the tine to respond and to add some light to this dark tunnel. It is amazing that we have allowed this open wound to fester so. Appreciate your intelligent comments.
How did we get to this point? Or has it been that fraud has always been a part of elections (as you mention the various Big City Machines) and no one discusses it, sort of like fathers and teenage daughters who tacitly agree not to discuss birth control pills that have been dealt with by their mother. Some open secrets are just to painful or awkward to discuss–like blatantly open voter fraud.
You are correct. Papa Warren’s home state popularity may not have transferred nationally. But (and I never once thought about this until this year) how could he have possibly have lost his home state, which just two years before nominated him on both the republican and democratic ticket for governor. It’s not like he had done anything bad or had been caught in some sort of scandal. It must have been fraud.
Yes, there was a time when the idea of governors as a pair would be a smart ticket–but it rarely seemed to work out that way.
Dewey was a bad candidate but you have a point. Alice Longworth (Teddy’s daughter) also condemned him as “The Little Man on the Wedding Cake.” He was ridiculed in that and similar ways. I wonder if the Japanese incarceration had affected your grand father’s reputation. Hard to know at this distance. I was 10 at the time but don’t recall the election.
Unlikely, that at the time the internment worked against him. There was not much positive sentiment, nationally, towards the Japanese. The War had just ended and (though I was a baby), from my parents I undershood that the antipathy was pretty deep.
Victor Davis Hanson has compared Donald Trump to Harry Truman
Dewey was overconfident and barely campaigned.
Dewey put a ‘lid’ on Warren.
Yet somehow the ‘lid’ on Biden seemed to work this year.
As Patrick Basham stated in Spectator and on Mark Levin’s show, Biden’s victory is statistically implausible
What has always perplexed me about Japanese internment is the number of Japanese in California in 1942.
I know the Chinese immigrated because of the Gold Rush.
Why did Japanese immigrate to California?
Some of that antipathy hung around for a while. An anecdote from the late 70s, told me by my coworkers. One colleague took his friend to Dewey’s Car Palace where he was having some repairs done. After watching and learning what the guy was doing it seemed this auto guy was pretty good, so asked him, “Say, do you work on Datsun [or whatever make and model]?” The auto repair guy stopped his work and after a few seconds of silence, said, “That’s a Japanese car, isn’t it? I haven’t had much time for the Japs, ever since the war.” And without a word more he returned to his work.
In the early-mid 80s I wrote a letter to the local editor criticizing my liberal leftwing Congressman, who had just written a newspaper article about his visit to a factory in Japan to get a first-hand look at the Japanese threat, for describing the Japanese workers in a factory as subhuman automatons. That letter got me a phone call from somebody in Detroit who claimed to be close to all the top Michigan Democrats. The conversation started with, “Why did you put that letter in the paper?” and ended with, “I’ll stay in touch.” Never heard from him again, though.
I asked my mom, during WWII why everyone was hating on the Japanese? She said because on pay days they would all rush to the post office and mail their paychecks to Japan. I was about 6 or so.
However, many, many years later she became involved in women’s groups, and went to a conference in Japan.
She fell in love with Japan and many Japanese women she became acquainted with, and they with her. For years, and just before she died she was still getting letters from her Japanese friends.
I have a beautiful portrait one of her friends made of my mother. Buried in a box of her papers at the moment. A half century can make a difference.
I think it is discussed in “Centennial” by Michener. That applies more to Colorado but also applied to CA. I have a number of Japanese-American friends whose families were farmers. They had lots of coastal real estate, too.
A Japanese American friend was a teacher with my first wife. Her father had a wholesale produce business at the downtown market in Los Angeles. (I used to know the street name) The whole family, including Nancy, were relocated to a camp until 1943. When her father returned to his produce “stall” in the market, a lot of his things had been kept by Caucasian stall owners who knew him. He had to start from the bottom with produce but his equipment and possessions had been saved for him.
Central Street?
Alameda Street?
Probably Central. I think that was the produce market street.