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Any student of history should be familiar with this photo of President Harry Truman, successor of the great FDR, smirking while holding a newspaper declaring that he'd lost to his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, in the 1948 election. Of course this turned out to be far from true, and Truman swept the Electoral College in a 303-189 victory, also winning the popular vote by a decent margin.

With that having been said, this is one election with which i'm not terribly familiar. I haven't studied it much in depth, so while i'm sure it's been covered before, I'd like to ask; what if Dewey had somehow defeated President Truman? What big changes come for American history with President Dewey in office from 1949 to 1953? Is he likely to win reelection in 1952? And what, if anything, changes about the Democratic Party following the loss? Does Dewey begin the work of peeling back FDR's many social/economic programs created in the wake of the Great Depression, or, as a moderate-to-liberal NY Republican, is he likely to leave them be, or even expand them?
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