I should have looked it up. I was going from memory, when I was young, and there was a lot of talk about both Tafts.
Anyway, the Establishment thought that Taft was too conservative to win, but figured that Eisenhower, as a five-star war hero, would be a shoe-in.
And as it turned out, Eisenhower was a disaster for the GOP after 1952, ending with the calamitous 1958 elections and the Kennedy “victory” in 1960. It would’ve been better had the ticket of Taft-MacArthur had won in 1952 (Taft would’ve died regardless in the Summer of ‘53, and a President MacArthur would’ve been more proactive in dealing with the Communist menace both abroad and domestically).