Democratic Party presidential primaries, 1952
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The 1952 Democratic presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the Democratic Party chose its nominee for President of the United States in the 1952 U.S. presidential election. Although the popular vote proved conclusive, the 1952 Democratic National Convention held from July 21 to July 26, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois, was forced to go multiballot.
The 1952 primary season was one of only two where a challenge to an incumbent president of either party was successful, the other being 1968. Prior to this, the last incumbent to try and fail to win his party's nomination was Chester Arthur in 1884 on the Republican side, and Andrew Johnson in 1868 on the Democratic.
The expected candidate for the Democratic nomination was incumbent President Harry S. Truman. But Truman entered 1952 with his popularity plummeting, according to polls. The bloody and indecisive Korean War was dragging into its third year, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade was stirring public fears of an encroaching “Red Menace”, and the disclosure of widespread corruption among federal employees (including some high-level members of Truman's administration) left Truman at a low political ebb.
Truman's main opponent was populist Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who had chaired a nationally televised investigation of organized crime in 1951 and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. The Gallup poll of February 15 showed Truman's weakness: nationally Truman was the choice of only 36% of Democrats, compared with 21% for Kefauver. Among independent voters, however, Truman had only 18% while Kefauver led with 36%. In the New Hampshire primary Kefauver upset Truman, winning 19,800 votes to Truman's 15,927 and capturing all eight delegates. Kefauver graciously said that he did not consider his victory "a repudiation of Administration policies, but a desire...for new ideas and personalities." Stung by this setback, Truman soon announced that he would not seek re-election (however, Truman insisted in his memoirs that he had decided not to run for re-election well before his defeat by Kefauver).
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