Labor Day leader usually wins the presidency, but not always

It’s a rule of presidential politics that the candidate ahead on Labor Day almost always wins in November.  The key word, of course, is “almost,” and the prime exception after all these years remains Thomas E. Dewey, of The Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline fame. 

Dewey was convincingly ahead on Labor Day in 1948, so far ahead that he elected to play is safe, say nothing that would offend a voter and avoid excessive contact with the reporters.  This may remind you of someone.

While Dewey preferred to coast to victory, the underdog President Harry Truman traveled the country, seeming to stop his train at every junction, ranting at the crowds, giving them hell about the folly of voting for Dewey.  (Actually, Truman later explained, “I never did give anyone hell.  I just told the truth and it sounded like hell.”)

The major pollsters of the day—there were far fewer then—had been in the presidential polling business since the 1930s, when the man ahead on Labor Day was always Franklin D. Roosevelt.  But 1948 was different with not only Dewey challenging 15 years of Democratic presidents but also two much stronger third-party candidates than we have today, the left-leaning, Progressive candidate Henry Wallace and the segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.  Both were expected to take most of their votes from Truman.

The polls—Gallup, Roper and Crossley—predicted a Dewey popular vote victory margin of 5 to 15 percentage points; Truman won by 4.4 percent.  What happened, said Burns Roper, son of the Roper Poll founder, was the consequence of an unwitting alliance of an energized labor force that feared Dewey’s victory and satisfied Republicans who “played golf” on election Day.   There was also the pollsters’  bad decision to stop polling two weeks before the election.

The post-Labor Day polls this time show this race tightening in the popular vote, with Clinton slightly ahead and Trump catching up in some key states.   But Clinton maintains a big advantage in the electoral college where the votes ultimately count.  (See Bush-Gore, Hayes-Tilden and others.)

The most interesting polling was announced the day after the holiday when The Washington Post joined with the Survey-Monkey organization to get responses from more than 74,000 registered voters in all 50 states.

The poll confirmed what others showed regarding the unprecedented disdain voters have for both Clinton and Trump.  The poll indicated 55 percent of the voters believe a Clinton presidency would threaten the nation’s well being. These are numbers that would doom a candidacy, were it not for the 61 percent who feel a Trump presidency would do the same.  Only four percent of the 74,000 polled say neither of them would threaten the well-being of the nation they seek to lead.

States with Democratic majorities, not surprisingly, contain most of the people who consider Trump a threat, but they are also states with lots of people — from California to Massachusetts.  You will be shocked to learn Connecticut is among them.  The bright red states whose well-being is most threatened by Clinton are in the wide open spaces, where the spaces outumber the people—Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, North Dakota.  

And, following other polling, this one finds most of the voters fearful of a Clinton presidency are men, residents of rural areas and whites, particularly those with less education.  Trump represents a frightening vision to women, younger voters, minorities, urban residents and those with bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Sadly, all of these groups share one area of broad agreement — what the newspaper called “a pervasive pessimism that no matter the outcome, the election will do little to unite the country.”  These voters, the ones who detest Trump and Clinton, fear they are being left behind by cultural changes that are transforming the country and that America reflects their values less today than it ever has in the past.

This is the state of the Union whose leadership will probably be assumed by Hillary Clinton next January 20.  Or maybe not.  The cliché about the candidate being ahead on Labor Day winning the presidency has been replaced for now with the one  about the October surprise. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.