Ordinary Horse Race

Who will be the next President of the U.S.? Just after Candidate Harry Truman set bravely off in pursuit of Candidate Tom Dewey (see below), a man who should be able to answer that question, if anybody can, announced his answer: Dewey. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune this week, Pollster Elmo Roper decided on the basis of his latest FORTUNE Survey that the election was as good as won before the campaign had even started.

His soundings, said Roper, showed Dewey leading Truman by the unbeatable margin of 44% to 31%--"an almost morbid resemblance to the Roosevelt-Landon figures as of about this time in 1936." In the face of those figures, only a "political convulsion" could keep Tom Dewey out of the White House next year.

"Largely Ritualistic." Roper was so sure of his prediction* that he was not even planning to report his running campaign forecast. Said he: "This is not a hare and tortoise race, and neither is it a race between two closely matched thoroughbreds ; it is a very ordinary horse race --a race in which one horse already has a commanding lead . . . My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things."

Whatever minor fluctuations in popularity occurred in the next two months, Roper was convinced that no amount of electioneering would change a decisive number of votes. "Political campaigns," said he, "are largely ritualistic ... All the evidence we have accumulated since 1936 tends to indicate that the man in the lead at the beginning of the campaign is the man who is the winner at the end of it... The winner, it appears, clinches his victory early in the race and before he has uttered a word of campaign oratory."

If there was any point at all to politicians going through the ritual of campaigning, it was simply to whip up the enthusiasm of local professionals, charged with rounding up the vote. There was no point at all, he asserted, to political pulse-taking after the campaign had started. "It has become a stunt. Like tearing a telephone directory in two, it impresses without instructing."

"Clearly Ahead." Roper would continue to keep an eye on the campaign, nonetheless. For one thing, the Democrats still had congressional and gubernatorial candidates who might be able to buck the Republican groundswell. Because of many close Senate races, there was even an outside chance of a Democratic Senate next year.

But there was not much more which Pollster Roper could report about the presidential race. Said he: "My silence [in the future] on this point can be construed as an indication that Mr. Dewey is still so clearly ahead that we might just as well get ready to listen to his Inaugural on Jan. 20, 1949."

* In 1936, Pollster Roper missed the actual returns by 1.2%; in 1940 by .6%; in 1944 by .2% (though his survey did not estimate the soldier vote).

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