Post Mortem

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 victory increased to 432 votes--leaving 99 electoral votes from twelve states for Tom Dewey. But the popular vote (24.3 million to 21.2 million) was the closest since 1916. Franklin Roosevelt's 4,938,711 plurality in 1940 had been cut to 3,099,284.

Many "sullen Southerners" had stayed home. In eleven Southern states, the Republican vote had fallen off less than 50,000 votes since 1940, while Franklin Roosevelt had slipped 747,000. The popular vote for all the U.S. last week, including some soldier votes, stood at 53.4% for Roosevelt. His total civilian vote was about 52.5%--exactly the estimate of FORTUNE'S secret civilian ballot. FORTUNE'S other estimate of 53.6%, based on a series of questions, was about 1% high; Gallup, and Crossley about 1% low.

Other election odd-ends: P: Dewey got the biggest number of electoral votes of any losing candidate since 1924. But Wendell Willkie ran better than Dewey in five states: Michigan (which Willkie carried and Dewey did not), Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and New York.

P: Wisconsin's once-great Progressive Party almost died out, electing only one Congressman.

P: The Washington Post's Jerry Kluttz took a shot at "that old phony" that federal workers all vote for Roosevelt. He totted up results in the five commuter counties bordering voteless Washington, D.C., found they had given Dewey a 5,000-vote lead.

*The states: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

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