And if the Democratic party is powerful enough to capture the West, it will almost certainly pick up enough of the doubtful Middlewestern and Eastern states to get 50 more votes . . . We could lose New York, Pennsylvania, lilmois New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts-all the 'big' states and still win. Clifford went on to provide a shrewd analysis of the various special interest groups which the Democrats had to attract. The labor vote was a great imponderable. It is dangerous to assume that labor now has nowhere else to go in 1948.
Labor can stay home.
The effort to get out the labor vote will thus have to be even more strenuous than in 1944. Much would also have to be done to attract independent liberals, who were not important numerically but exerted a considerable leavening effect on public opinion. He warned that the Republicans would make a strong appeal for the Negro vote, which had been Democratic since 1932, and foresaw that the Negroes might hold the balance of power in states like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Clearly, the Democrats would have to outbid the Republicans in order to hold the Negroes. Truman's civil rights message in February 1948 followed logically from this premise.