Why was Truman considered a heavy underdog in the 1948 election?
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I know someone will complain that I do not cite sources but I am running out of time to type this and the following are easily verifiable by internet search
Truman was the Democratic party candidate and the Democratic vote was potentially split by two significant breakaway candidates, as a more left-wing Democrat, Truman's predecessor as Vice President, Henry Wallace, stood as a Progressive Candidate, and a more right-wing (and pro-racial segregation) Democrat, Governor Strom Thurmond stood, mainly in the south, as a 'States Rights Democrat' (or 'Dixiecrat'). Between them these two candidates took nearly 5% of the vote.
Opinion polling by telephone made insufficient allowance for the fact that not everyone had a telephone then, and the mostly poorer people who did not were more likely to be Democrats.
The Republican campaign was better funded
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Truman wasn't necessarily an underdog in the popular vote (although he was no favorite either). In the end, he won the popular vote 49.6% versus 45.1% for Dewey, with only a last minute shift creating this margin. But the electoral college math was against Truman. He won in spite of this.
Almost 4% of the popular vote went to two Democratic splinter candidates, Strom Thurmond, and Henry Wallace. Thurmond won four "Dixiecrat" states, capturing 39 electoral votes that would ordinarily have gone to the Democratic candidate. Henry Wallace captured over 500,000 votes in New York state where Truman lost to Dewey by about 60,000 votes. New York and the Thurmond states represented some 86 electoral votes.
Truman won by narrow margins (less than 1%) in three other big states, California, Illinois and Ohio, with 78 electoral votes. If these states had fallen into the Dewey column, Dewey would have won a Trump-like electoral victory, notwithstanding a popular vote minority. In California and Ohio, Truman's margin of victory was a fraction of the Wallace vote; if Wallace had done slightly better in these two states, the election would have gone to the House of Representatives.
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