Biden Can Still Win — If He Runs Like Harry Truman
“The subject everyone is talking about,” a liberal, big city mayor wrote not long ago, is: “How can we peacefully get rid of the present incumbent?” Unless Democrats could agree on a replacement at the top of the ticket, they seemed sure to lose the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.
OK, actually, the year was 1948. The mayor was Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, and the incumbent president in question was Harry Truman — not Joe Biden. The comparison is apt, nevertheless.
In the spring of 1948, Truman, an accidental president who assumed office upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death three years earlier, was at the nadir of his influence and popularity. His approval rating in the Gallup poll stood at an abysmal 36 percent. With the economy still reeling from runaway inflation, the Cold War posing military challenges abroad and security dangers at home, and a restive public fatigued from 16 years of Democratic party governance, most political insiders agreed that Truman would lose the fall election to his likely GOP challenger, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York.
Making matters worse, the president faced defections on his left and right flanks and would have to run in a multicandidate field where third-party contenders might siphon off a small but critical number of votes in key swing states. No wonder many Democratic leaders wanted to move him off the ticket. “Truman Should Quit,” read the cover of The New Republic, then a highly influential liberal outlet. “The president of the United States is today the leader of world democracy,” wrote the magazine’s editor, Michael Straight. “Truman has neither the vision nor the strength that leadership demands.”
If it all sounds familiar, it should. With Americans still rebounding from Covid and its inflationary shocks, global democracies struggling in a pitched battle with autocrats both abroad and at home, and the country on edge over entrenched culture wars, Biden faces challenges similar to those that Truman confronted in 1948. What’s more, he may be bleeding support to the right (in the form of conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr.) and left (to gadflies like Cornel West and Jill Stein). Multiple polls show him losing his next match-up against Donald Trump.Of course, Truman ultimately won reelection. He did so by following a blueprint designed by two advisers, James Rowe and Clark Clifford. And the good news for Biden is that their blueprint offers him a road home.
Truman’s dilemma in March 1948 bore uncanny similarity to Biden’s in 2024. The end of wartime rationing and price controls created a massive inflationary spiral, similar to the one-off supply chain disruptions that generated high inflation during the Covid pandemic. In both cases, the public remained cranky long after inflation subsided. Like Biden, Truman had to convince Americans to make heavy investments in Europe to stave off Russian territorial aggression, in the face of isolationist opposition on both the left and right. Just as Biden is currently wrestling with the left flank of his party over Israel’s war in Gaza, Truman similarly walked a tight rope when he decided to recognize the new Jewish state in 1948, against loud protests from establishment foreign policy figures.
Both men were underestimated.
Several months earlier, Clark Clifford, a West Wing aide, and Jim Rowe, who formerly worked in FDR’s White House, drafted a 47-page memo that provided the framework for Truman’s comeback campaign. They recognized that the Democratic coalition was a messy collection of ethnic and interest groups, including Jews and Catholics, Southern white supremacists and African Americans, white ethnic union members and farmers. They observed that with the decline of urban and statewide machines, it would be increasingly difficult to glue the constituent parts together — but it could be done.
Truman would have to offer something for everyone: Civil rights for Black Americans, recognition of Israel for Jews, strong union protections for urban workers and federal grain storage programs for farmers — an issue that seems niche to the modern eye but was of primary importance to the farm belt in 1948.
They also encouraged Truman to play mean — against the Republicans, to be sure, but also against former Vice President Henry Wallace, who was running to his left on the Progressive party ticket. Their memo offers a surpassingly relevant playbook for Biden today.