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Dewey came fairly close to carrying VA in 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Virginia,_1948 The Crossley poll had predicted he would win it--that might be one reason he didn't talk more about civil rights during his campaign. (Both Dewey and his campaign manager Herbert Brownell later denied this, however, and it may be that Dewey's reluctance to talk about civil rights was simply part of his more general reluctance to discuss substantive issues--because, after all, he was leading in the polls, so why not play it safe?...)
Perhaps VA is one of the few states that Dewey lost in 1948 that Taft could have carried--especially if Harry Byrd's machine would have tacitly backed him the way it backed Republican presidential candidates from 1952 on. (But even if Taft had carried VA and his own OH, that wouldn't have been enough to win, especially since he would almost certainly have lost NY, which had 47 electoral votes in those days, and which Dewey only very narrowly won. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_New_York,_1948)