United States presidential election in Texas, 1948
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The 1948 United States presidential election in Texas was held on November 2, 1948. Texas voters chose 23 electors to represent the state in the Electoral College, which chose the President and Vice President.
Texas overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic nominee Harry S. Truman, who received 66% of the vote. Texas was Truman's strongest state, and one of four in the country which gave Truman over 60% of the popular vote. Truman carried 246 out of the state's 254 counties. Strom Thurmond, the candidate for the States' Right's Democratic Party (also known as the Dixiecrats), won a little over 9% of the popular vote, though failed to carry any counties, including those in East Texas, which is more culturally tied to the Deep South than the rest of Texas. Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican Party candidate, only won 8 counties, with Gillespie County in the Texas Hill Country being his strongest performance by giving him over 80% of the vote. Dewey remains the last Republican candidate to lose Texas with under 30% of the popular vote.
This is one of the last presidential elections in Texas in which the following regions were considered strongholds for the Democratic Party: West Texas, the Texas Panhandle, and the Texas Hill Country. Although several Democratic candidates would win a majority of the counties in these regions in future presidential elections, notably Texas native Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, these regions were one of the first in the state to begin splitting their tickets by voting for Republicans on the national level while continuing to vote Democrat at the state level. With the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide win in the state in 1964, this was the last election in which Dallas and Harris counties would vote for the Democratic candidate, as both counties saw their populations increase as a result of northern expatriates moving into the state, and both counties would strongly vote Republican for the next several decades. Barack Obama would win back both these counties in 2008.
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