When I think of the election results from Tuesday, I am immediately reminded of what happened on November 5, 1946.
It was barely one year after the end of World War II. Harry S. Truman had assumed the presidency when FDR died in April 1945.
Only nineteen months after taking office, there was a mid-term national election. Here is a brief story of what happened.
The nation was restless, exhausted, and bitter. Americans were grappling with post-war inflation, meat shortages, crippling nationwide labor strikes, and what many in the Washington press corps sneeringly viewed as nothing more than a failed Missouri haberdasher stumbling in FDR’s enormous shoes.
The Republicans rallied around a devastatingly simple two-word slogan: “Had Enough?”
The voters roared back that they had.
On election night, the GOP swept into power with a vengeance, picking up 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate to capture both chambers for the first time in sixteen years. It wasn’t merely a midterm setback; it was an absolute repudiation.
Truman had gone back home to Independence, Missouri, to vote and await the returns. When the catastrophic scale of the massacre became clear, he didn’t hold a late-night press conference. He simply went to bed.
The next morning, waking up to the grim reality of the results, he faced a horde of reporters and refused to offer any public comment. His mood was somber, quiet, and deeply wounded.
He knew the electorate had just handed down a personal vote of “no confidence” against the former haberdasher turned accidental president.
Almost immediately, the Washington establishment and prominent voices within his own party treated him as an irrelevant ghost walking through his own presidency.
Senator J. William Fulbright, a fellow Democrat from Arkansas, publicly suggested that Truman should appoint a Republican Secretary of State and then resign from the presidency altogether to spare the country two years of bitter paralysis.
Truman was privately furious, dismissed him as “Senator Half-bright,” and dug his heels in.
He didn’t surrender to the panic. Instead, once the initial sting subsided, Truman realized that disastrous night had given him the exact adversary he needed.
Stopped from trying to placate everyone, he went on the attack. He vetoed their tax cuts, challenged their labor restrictions, and aggressively drew contrasts with the conservative majority.
By 1948, the defeat of 1946 had handed him his most formidable weapon: the foil of the “Do-Nothing, Good-for-Nothing 80th Congress.”
He took to the rails on his whistle-stop tour, bypassed the media, and turned a political graveyard into the famous front-page headline: Dewey Defeats Truman—with Truman holding the paper, grinning ear to ear.
Trump doesn’t need a blueprint, but already the political waters are similar with people in his own party calling for his resignation. Trump would do well to follow the Truman playbook.
Nikos Vlachos
