At the same time, Truman’s conduct of foreign affairs brought criticism from the left wing of his party. Former vice president Henry Wallace ran on the Progressive Party ticket, backed by disgruntled liberals living mainly in the North who opposed Truman’s hard-line Cold War policies. Besides these two independent candidates, Truman also faced the popular Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey. Under these circumstances, political pundits and public opinion polls predicted that Truman would lose the 1948 presidential election.

Truman confounded these voices of gloom by winning the election. His victory resulted from a number of factors, including his vigorous campaign style; the complacency of his Republican opponent, who placed too much faith in opinion polls; and his success in winning over many potential Thurmond and Wallace voters. Much of his victory, however, depended on the continuing power of the New Deal coalition. Truman succeeded in holding together the winning alliance that Franklin Roosevelt had first put together. He did this by stitching together a coalition of labor, minorities, farmers, and liberals and won enough votes in the South to come out ahead despite long odds. In the four-candidate race, Truman did very well in winning slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Democrats also regained control of Congress.

Having won election as president in his own right and armed with a Democratic majority in Congress, Truman still faced tough opposition in his second term. A coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans blocked passage of civil rights proposals and Truman’s so-called Fair Deal programs, including national health insurance, federal aid to education, and agricultural reform. The president did manage to obtain budget increases for New Deal measures such as Social Security, minimum wages, and public housing.

By this time, many liberals, as a result of their experience during World War II, had made peace with cooperative corporate executives and relied on the federal government to produce prosperity by tinkering with the economy through tax and monetary adjustments; these liberals no longer supported the more radical approaches of income redistribution or reducing corporate concentration. They practiced what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. labeled vital center liberalism, avoiding what they considered the ideological dogmatism of the extreme political left and right. Militantly anti-Stalinist, centrist liberals supported civil rights, the prosecution of Communists through due process of law, and the expansion of New Deal social welfare programs. In the end, however, preoccupation with fighting the Cold War in Europe and the hot war in Korea diverted Truman’s attention from aggressively pursuing a truly liberal political agenda in Congress.