On the night of Tuesday, November 4, 1952, Americans across the nation gathered around their television sets to follow the results of the presidential race between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson. That year, a television could be found in roughly one-third of U.S. households—compared with less than 1 percent in 1948—and politicians were just beginning to experiment with TV as a communication tool.
Many Americans were experiencing election night as they never had before. News networks would be announcing the next president live on TV. Adding to the anticipation: NBC and CBS planned to use new computer forecasting technologies to predict the results based on early returns.
“It was the first real national television campaign with TV ads and then election night coverage,” says Richard Craig, professor of journalism and mass communication at San José State University and author of Polls, Expectations and Elections: TV News Making in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. “It turned it into much more of a televised event.”
TV’s Entry Into Presidential Politics
By the 1950s, in an era of rapid technological innovation following World War II, TVs were rapidly making their way into American households. Ninety percent of households would own one by 1960.
When TV news networks broadcasted election returns in 1948, they reached a much smaller audience than in the years to follow. A lot went wrong for the media that election night, says Ira Chinoy, author of Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting and associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
First, TV news organizations’ were criticized for their lackluster presentation of the election returns. Reporters essentially recited the latest vote counts and hand-wrote them on chalkboards. Plus, Chinoy says, many journalists went into 1948 election night expecting that Republican Thomas Dewey would defeat Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman as the pollsters predicted, in what became an embarrassing moment for the news stations. (This was also an issue in print journalism, leading to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.)
“On election night 1952, this was a bit of a crisis for TV news that needed to better show it could live up to its promise as a visual medium instead of a medium where people are just reading things out,” Chinoy says. “And it also needed a way to come back from this sort of error of interpretation on election night 1948.”
When running in 1952, Eisenhower, more than Stevenson, recognized the potential of TV as a campaign tool. Eisenhower experimented with short TV commercial spots and even a catchy “I Like Ike” jingle. The final Gallup pre-election poll predicted a close race for the White House, with Eisenhower holding a slight lead nationally.
Computers Put to the Test
The night of November 4, 1952 marked the “first coast-to-coast coverage of a Presidential election,” according to the Los Angeles Times. In addition to upping their use of visual elements, NBC and CBS also attracted viewers with their plan to use another new technology—computers—to predict the outcome.
“This was going to be done live, with a massive data set that was going to be built in real time and with, basically, programs that had not been tested under those extreme circumstances,” Chinoy says. “I give them a lot of credit for taking this gamble.”
CBS partnered with the makers of the UNIVAC, a huge computer weighing more than eight tons that could rapidly analyze voting data, while NBC partnered with the makers of the Monrobot, a small, more compact machine about the size of an office desk. Both stations publicized their plans in the lead-up to November 4.
“It just fit the whole narrative in the 1950s of progress and the Space Age and everything,” Craig says. “It was a selling point in terms of TV, too.”
By 1952, the TV news stations ramped up their visual representations of data as an early precursor of what would become the election night experience. Polished charts and images (in black and white) revealing the national and electoral vote counts kept viewers informed about the presidential and Senate races. Throughout the evening, reporters conducted an election analysis, not unlike what networks present today, Chinoy says.
An Unexpected Prediction
Sitting in front of a mock-up UNIVAC console in New York, nearly 100 miles from the actual machine in Philadelphia, Charles Collingwood of CBS told his TV audience, “This is the face of a UNIVAC. A UNIVAC is a fabulous electronic machine, which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis of early returns as they come in.”
Ultimately, things didn’t go all that smoothly for either news network.
At CBS, likely some time between around 9 and 10 p.m., Chinoy says, UNIVAC spit out a prediction that Eisenhower would win in a landslide victory of 438 to 93—a count that didn’t align with recent polling data but ended up being remarkably close to the final tally. Wary of the calculation, the UNIVAC team hesitated to communicate it to CBS reporters in New York.
Ultimately, NBC went on air shortly after 10 p.m. with the Monrobot’s forecast of an Eisenhower victory, before CBS did so with the UNIVAC’s prediction. By this time, Eisenhower was almost certainly going to win the presidency. Chinoy says we can’t say for sure why there was a delay at NBC, though we know they faced some technical challenges with the machine.
“Both computers did forecast a resounding victory for Eisenhower,” Chinoy wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “And they did it in a flashy way. But an opportunity was missed to do so before the outcome was clear.”
Evolution of TV and Computer Forecasting in Elections
Today, the UNIVAC (not the Monrobot) is often the computer remembered when the story of the 1952 election is told, Chinoy says. It’s also commonly stated that after 1952 election night, computers became a part of elections, though it wasn’t so simple in reality.
In fact, there was still some skepticism about computers’ role in elections. During the 1954 midterm elections, CBS continued using UNIVAC, but NBC relied on human experts, Chinoy says. By 1956, all three major networks, including ABC, were using computers, though in varying capacities. The budding computer industry also saw election forecasting as an opportunity to get on the scene.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that computer technology really started dominating the election scene with faster and more frequent polling data analyses throughout the presidential campaigns, Craig says. Since then, the number of tools to monitor and report results has multiplied to satisfy the public’s appetite for instantaneous updates on election night. But in 1952, the impact of TV and computers on presidential politics was just starting to be realized.
"You had two huge advances in technology at the same time," Craig says. "You have both of them coming along at a moment when people could afford televisions, when people wanted to know things right away."
