Dewey lost because polls did not reflect that so many voters made up their mind in the final weeks of the campaign. Clinton was unbeatable the entire time.
Which was a greater upset
I found Trump’s victory way more upsetting.
Though I know I’m using “upset” differently to how you intended.
The greatest American Presidential upset was John Quincy Adams. He only won 30% of both the popular vote and the electoral vote!
In modern times I’d say Trump. The 1948 Presidential results were quite a surprise when scrappy Missourian Truman beat urbane New Yorker Tom Dewey, however the country was way more homogenous back then, regions somewhat more predictable as to how they voted. Both men were experienced politicians and highly capable of governing, as Truman had already shown. 1948 was a big surprise. It was not a shocker.
In 2016 we have Trump, who’s never held or run for public office, nor served in the military, a man with an unprecedented lack of government experience, for our time, which is to say the last century and a half, give or take a few years, and this is a shocker, especially as he’d best known as a show offy TV celebrity, a star of reality shows, and a billionaire real estate mogul not known, I think it’s fair to say, for his empathy or his caring for others aside from his family members and business associates.
Truman ran a whistle stop campaign throughout the Midwest and far west, which was more or less his neck of the woods. He proved a dynamic and popular campaigner, could talk to farmers and working people,–he was one of them, of them–and he understand their concerns. What’s more, as a New Deal Democrat he was going to act on them, as promised, thus his victories,–Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin–ripped the Heartland from the GOP. He even carried Oregon. Plus, the still monolithically Democratic South held firm for the Dems, with Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond winning only a handful of states, giving Truman Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas.
Even before polling became scientific, when the dust settled and the experts looked at the political map of the United States, it all made sense. Perfect sense. Tom Dewey was, like Hillary, widely viewed as a big city snob with no feeling for average, especially rural and small town Americans. When one looks at the political map of the U.S. in 1916 Trump’s victory makes no sense. It’s an aberration. There are reasons for it, for sure.
I sort of knew Trump had it in the bag after the Democratic convention last summer. But that was intuitive on my part, not logical. From a logical perspective, he should have lost, been losing points since Labor Day, Instead it was the other way around. From, again, a logical perspective, it makes no sense. It feels almost surreal. The voting results of the 2016 presidential election are shockingly out of line with what experts believed to be the way Americans voted and felt, and what they believed. I’ve never seen anything like it.
These aren’t upsets - they are examples of the media either missing the story completely and misreporting, or not wanting to see the story.
You see these events entirely through your own bubble and what is put in front of you by the media - they both lie.
Some called it accurately - like Michael Moore and a very few media outlets, the vast majority got it very, very wrong, often because they so wanted the liberal narrative to prevail.
Trump was the bigger upset, by far. In 1948, polling was in its infancy and Truman was an incumbent president.
While there are indeed garbage polls in 2016, the vast majority of them are done according to reasonable scientific models. But, polls have gotten elections wrong, just as weather forecasters do. Still, the Trump election is to me like getting a snowstorm when the weather forecast was for 80 degrees and sunny.
My understanding is polls started earlier in 1948 than today because earlier attempts seemed to indicate that voters made up their minds early. They changed them later in 1948. 1948 was also different than just about any election since 1860 because two other candidates, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond, got Over a million votes each.
Walter Cronkite once said on a tv remembrance in the 1990s in the 1952 election CBS used an early version of exit polls. The polls showed a large Eisenhower lead but CBS could not believe it was right, so they didn’t use the data until late at night.
Is Trump’s victory so hard to understand? Hillary has a long list of shady dealings and lying and by most standards (median income, percentage of adults in the workforce, food stamp usage, national debt) the economy is worse than it was in 2008. Any candidate of the incumbent party would have a hard time getting elected on that. Plus it seems to be quite common the last 60 years that after 8 years in office, the party in power loses (1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, 2008, 2016). Only 1988 is different and the White House changed hands in 1992.