Here is the map I made, with a 4% swing with New York swinging 4% against Stassen and going Democrat:
View attachment 249931
Stassen: 269 Electoral Votes, 49.1% popular vote
Truman: 224 Electoral Votes, 45.6% popular vote
Thurmond: 38 Electoral Votes, 2.4% popular vote
True, Stassen was governor of Minnesota, but that was almost 7 years before the election, and Humphrey's landslide is occurring regardless, and 17 points is a huge margin. But that's still a possibility, and I still think that if there's a 4% swing towards Stassen from Truman, New York could still go Republican.
So I would say that a Stassen vs. Truman match up has a good chance of being a Republican victory, or at least a hung electoral college.
And in the event of a hung electoral college, it would only take 6 very close Congressional Elections (in Idaho, Nevada, Minnesota, Ohio, Connecticut, and Colorado) to go Republican to give the GOP a 25-23 majority in House delegations and elect Stassen president.
I think you are *way* overestimating Stassen's gains over Dewey--I am in fact not even sure that he would do better than Dewey (even outside New York) *at all*--let alone carry states like Virginia (which Truman won by 6.9 percentage points). As I said at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/wZOEAVWf0NA/IWfYcIBgz3MJ
***
Was Nixon right that Stassen could have defeated Truman?* Despite the
force of Nixon's arguments about Stassen's youth (which, however, could have
worried some older voters) and his appeal to his fellow World War II
veterans, I would still say No. Remember that Dewey only narrowly carried
New York state by 2,841,163 to 2,780,204--in spite of Henry Wallace getting
509,559 votes (almost all of which, one can assume, had gone to FDR in 1944,
and most of which would have gone to Truman in a two-way race).
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1948.txt If Dewey, who was
a popular governor of New York, could nevertheless only carry the state
narrowly, I find it hard to see any other GOP candidate carrying it at all.
And in those days, New York had 47 electoral votes. Without those votes, it
would be very hard for the Republicans to defeat Truman.
Could Stassen make up in the Midwest for his likely loss of New York? I
doubt it very much. Farmers were angry about the 80th Congress and would
probably have taken it out against any GOP presidential candidate. (To quote
an old post of mine: "In particular, farmers, normally a Republican-leaning
group, were angry with Congress. As the historian Allen Matusow has pointed
out, an obscure provision in the Commodity Credit Act passed by the 80th
Congress at the end of its first session made it impossible for the federal
government to build grain storage bins near farms. The fall of 1948 brought
a record-breaking harvest and drastic declines in farm prices. With no bins
available, farmers could not deposit their grain and collect support
payments. Truman took advantage of this, and warned farmers that next
Republicans would cut other programs farmers had come to depend on such as
price supports and funding for rural electrification.") Organized labor was
angry about Taft-Hartley, which Stassen basically supported despite urging
some modifications.
What confirms me in my belief that Stassen would not have been a stronger
candidate than Dewey is that he seems to have done an inept job campaigning
for Dewey. To quote Pietrusza (p. 331):
"...Dewey deputized Stassen to carry the inflation fight to Truman. But
while Truman personalized the issue for consumers, Stassen entangled himself
in a heavy-handed and largely pointless broadside on government bureaucracy,
attacking Washington for purchasing twenty-five million pounds of lard during
July 1947. 'This purchase,' Stassen contended...'compared with fifty million
pounds of lard for all the preceding year, has caused lard and all other
fats, including oils, to skyrocket.
"A foray to the Midwest to discuss farm prices proved even less salutary. At
Detroit's Masonic Temple on Tuesday, September 7, Stassen rebutted Truman's
Labor Day address--and merely alienated labor. Some suspected Dewey of
sabotaging his onetime rival. 'Stassen is the first casualty of the
campaign...In two times at bat, Stassen appeared to have lost...his greatest
source of political strength before--agriculture and labor,' pronounced
columnist Tris Coffin--and no one argued with him."
See also Robert G. Donovan, *Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S.
Truman, 1945-1948*, p. 420
http://books.google.com/books?id=d0uu-j32elUC&pg=PA420 on how a Minnesota
Republican congressman, August H. Andresen, wrote to Dewey that Stassen had
done the GOP ticket much harm among farmers (by attacking the administration
for trying to keep food prices up by making unnecessary grain purchases).
Now maybe Stassen would have made a more effective spokesman for himself than
he did for Dewey. But *pace* Richard Nixon's point about Stassen's appeal to
the GI Generation, I still think Stassen would have lost to Truman.