1948 United States presidential election in Idaho


The 1948 United States presidential election in Idaho took place on November 2, 1948, as part of the 1948 United States presidential election. State voters chose four representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
In his four election campaigns, Franklin D. Roosevelt had carried Idaho each time, though by steadily decreasing margins. After beating Alf Landon by 29.77 percentage points in 1936, Wendell Willkie lost by only 9.05 percentage points in 1940 and Dewey by only 3.49 percentage points in 1944. However, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse said that Dewey would fail to maintain these gains in the West if Bureau of Reclamation programs were cut as demanded by the House Appropriations Committee. Truman campaigned heavily in the West, including Idaho, arguing that the region was an economic colony of Wall Street under the GOP and that only the Democratic Party could give the West direct access to its natural resources. Whilst in Pocatello, Truman also defended himself against charges of corruption by machine politics from his days in Kansas City.

Vote

Idaho was won by incumbent President Harry S. Truman, running with Senator Alben W. Barkley, with 49.98% of the popular vote, against Governor Thomas Dewey, running with Governor Earl Warren, with 47.26% of the popular vote.
This election marks the last before Idaho would turn from a swing state into a Republican Party bastion, which was to be inaugurated with a large-scale landslide in the 1950 state elections. The solitary subsequent Democrat to carry Idaho has been Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and he did so by only 1.83 percentage points in a huge national landslide, whilst only John F. Kennedy has otherwise passed forty percent of the statewide vote in the subsequent seventeen elections. This is the last election in which the southeastern Mormon counties of Bonneville, Bingham, Jefferson, Madison, Minidoka and Oneida voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, and like several analogous counties in the Texas Panhandle, these counties have frequently battled for the title of "most Republican in the nation" since the 1970s.

Results

Results by county