1948 United States presidential election in Virginia

The 1948 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 2, 1948, throughout the 48 contiguous states. Voters chose 11 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

For the previous four decades Virginia had almost completely disenfranchised its black and poor white populations through the use of a cumulative poll tax and literacy tests. So restricted was suffrage in this period that it has been calculated that a third of Virginia’s electorate during the first half of the twentieth century comprised state employees and officeholders.

This limited electorate allowed Virginian politics to be controlled for four decades by the Byrd Organization, as progressive “antiorganization” factions were rendered impotent by the inability of almost all their potential electorate to vote. Historical fusion with the “Readjuster” Democrats, defection of substantial proportions of the Northeast-aligned white electorate of the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia over free silver, and an early move towards a “lily white” Jim Crow party meant Republicans retained a small but permanent number of legislative seats and local offices in the western part of the state. In 1928 a combination of growing middle-class Republicanism in the cities and anti-Catholicism against Al Smith in the Tidewater allowed the GOP to carry Virginia and elect three Congressmen, including one representing the local district of emerging machine leader Byrd. However, from 1932 with the state severely affected by the Depression, Republican strength declined below its low pre-1928 level, although Byrd himself became highly critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies as early as 1940.

Virginia’s delegates at the 1948 Democratic National Convention were all opposed to incumbent President Harry S. Truman after his proposal for black civil rights titled To Secure These Rights. Nevertheless, the presence of viable Republican opposition in the southwest and Shenandoah Valley meant that Byrd refused to endorse either South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who received the nomination of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, or Republican nominee New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, largely because of fear of losing several seats in the House to resurgent Republicans.