There was nothing in 1948 like today’s plethora of national and state pollsters, all constantly refining methodologies and being held accountable for accuracy and transparency.
We probably won’t see Trump holding up this sort of headline triumphantly this November. Photo: Underwood Archives/Getty Images When your presidential candidate is not doing well, it’s not uncommon to look around for historical analogies in which a similarly downtrodden candidate has made a dramatic comeback to win. Until recently, Donald Trump fans needed to look no further than his own improbable victory in 2016.
But just for fun, let’s look at the analogy more closely and see if it holds out any particular hope for Trump fans looking for a big upset. Here are some factors that fed into the 1948 shocker that might distinguish them from today’s circumstances: Thanks to what happened in 2016, there is probably no Democrat in the entire country who is “overconfident” right now. Until a wooden stake is pounded into the 45th presidency, the possibility of another Trump threading-of-the-Electoral-College win, or even a post-election Trump refusal to accept defeat, will keep Democrats on their toes and alert to any negative trends.
The likelihood that Truman had deeper reservoirs of potential support than Trump does today is also born out in job-approval-rating trends. Trump has notoriously been stuck in a narrow band of approval ratings, mostly in the high 30s to the mid-40s . Gallup only occasionally did approval-rating polls in 1948, but while Truman was in the 30s in the spring of that year and at 40 percent in June, by January of 1949 he was up to 69 percent .
By almost any measure, U.S. global prestige is now at a low point, in part thanks to Trump’s deliberate policies of nationalist unilateralism and self-isolation. Even national pride, which Trump promotes relentlessly, is at a nadir, as a new Pew survey shows:
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