Trump will win, like Truman in 1948, by giving ’em hell’

President Donald Trump isn’t the first incumbent president to run for reelection facing a deficit in the late summer polls. At this stage of the election cycle in 1948, no one thought Democrat Harry Truman had a prayer of winning as he sank in the polls.

Newsweek magazine likened the Truman campaign in the month before the election to a “ship beating itself to pieces against a rocky shore.”

The “never Trumans” in the Democratic party were not much different from the Republicans’ never Trumpers, a group of neoconservatives who Trumpism has thrust into irrelevancy. In the election of 1948, Southern Democrats rallied around Dixiecrat and South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, and Henry Wallace ran as a Progressive Party candidate.

So, how did Truman pull off the “miracle of ’48”?

In the last three months of the campaign, he adopted an ingenious strategy of running against the “do-nothing Republican Congress.” He fled Washington by train on his “whistle blow” tour through the heartland. He pitted the social and financial concerns of blue-collar Americans, farmers and faith-based voters against the moneyed interests and deep-pocketed lobbyists on the East Coast. This, of course, led to the populist, “Give ’em hell, Harry” rallying cry of Middle America.