Dewey Defeats Truman.

“Dewey Defeats Truman” is the famously erroneous headline printed by the Chicago Daily Tribune after the U.S. presidential election of 1948. Many newspapers went to press before final vote counts were available, and early returns (along with most polling and pundit expectations) suggested Republican Thomas E. Dewey would defeat incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman. The Tribune, facing a printers’ strike and an early deadline, relied on incomplete information and published the premature result. When Truman actually won, he gleefully posed holding up the paper, creating one of the most enduring images of modern American political history and a cautionary tale about media certainty and election-night forecasting.

The phrase has become shorthand for the hazards of overconfidence, the limits of prediction, and the reputational risk of publishing before facts are settled. Beyond its literal meaning, it symbolizes the gap between elite expectations and electoral reality: Truman’s victory confounded polls and conventional wisdom, while the headline crystallized that misread in a single, memorable line. In quotation form, it is often invoked to warn against treating provisional data as definitive, to critique herd thinking in journalism and politics, or to illustrate how a striking error can outlive more accurate but less dramatic reporting.

“DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” (all-caps banner headline as printed by the Chicago Daily Tribune).