Fun-loving Republican statisticians, pencil & paper in hand, conjectured how easily Tom Dewey might have won, with but a few hundred thousand more votes in the right places. They found that a shift of only 303.414 votes would have given Tom Dewey 15 more states,*and a bare electoral majority. The exercise had one validity: it showed how much closer was the popular vote than Franklin Roosevelt's electoral sweep indicated. But Democratic lightning calculators came right back: a shift of only 282,000 votes in the Dewey states, and Franklin Roosevelt would have carried all 48.
With final returns, Franklin Roosevelt's electoral...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
