The surprise election that could be a model for Democrats in 2024

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With Democrats divided over the Israel-Hamas war, uninspired by their presidential nominee in Joe Biden and planning a convention in Chicago, there have been multiple comparisons to 1968, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey lost the White House to Republican Richard Nixon.

The Vietnam War divided Democrats that year. Humphrey was uninspiring to younger voters opposed to the war. There was violence outside their convention in Chicago.

Democrats today should hope that a better comparison is to 1948, when then-President Harry Truman, an unpopular incumbent, pulled off a surprise reelection versus Thomas Dewey, then the Republican governor of New York.

That year, 1948, was also amuch better year for Humphrey, then the young and inspiring Minneapolis mayor who helped push Democrats on the road to embracing civil rights legislation that would ultimately remake both political parties over the coming decades.

I talked to Samuel Freedman, a Columbia Journalism School professor, about his recent book about Humphrey and the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia. The book’s title, “Into the Bright Sunshine,” is taken from a line in Humphrey’s rousing speech on civil rights. The crackling audio does not hide the competing jeers and applause when Humphrey says:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the