← 1944 November 2, 1948 11 0 79.75% 19.04% | November 2, 1948 1952 → 171,443 40,930 | |
 | ||
In the United States presidential election of 1948, Alabama was the only state in which the National Democratic Party candidate, incumbent president Harry S. Truman, did not appear on the ballot. The state Supreme Court ruled that any statute requiring party presidential electors to vote for that party’s national nominee was void. A “Loyalist” group did petition governor “Big Jim” Folsom to allow Truman electors, but Senator John Sparkman, fearing popular defeat at the hands of the Dixiecrats and a hostile state legislature, decided against placing Truman electors on the ballot. Instead, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond obtained the official Democratic Party line, along with being considered the official Democratic nominee in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
In other Southern states where he was on the ballot, Thurmond was forced to run under the label of the States’ Rights Democratic Party.
Thurmond overwhelmingly won Alabama by a margin of 60.71 percent, or 130,513 votes, against his closest opponent, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Two third party candidates, Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party and Claude Watson of the Prohibition Party, appeared on the ballot in Alabama, though neither had any impact on the election.
Analysis
Alabama in this time period was a one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was virtually nonexistent as a result of disenfranchisement among poor whites and African Americans, including voter intimidation against those who refused to vote Democrat. In the 1948 election, rifts in the national Democratic Party began to occur.
Southern Democrats walked out at the party’s national convention in Philadelphia because of Truman’s endorsement of civil rights for African Americans. This segregationist faction met on July 17, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama, nominating South Carolina governor as its nominee for president. Mississippi governor Fielding L. Wright was nominated for Vice President.
Thurmond won 66 of Alabama’s 67 counties, with the sole holdout being in the northern part of the state where Winston County gave Dewey over sixty percent of the vote.