I didn’t know that about Ball (the he endorsed FDR) or that Gene McC endorsed Reagan.
Was the base being POed at Ball part of the reason he lost by such a big margin? Truman also whooped Dewey in the state. Was the farm recession the main reason?
Ironically Reagan stumped for HHH against Ball back in his democrat days. Meanwhile Dewey of course loyally campaigned on Ball’s behalf. Too funny, all of it.
According to OurCampaigns, Humphrey endorsed Ball in the 1942 race (!) This was only months before Hump first ran for Minneapolis Mayor, losing to the Republican incumbent (he’d go on to win in 1945, defeating the same man).
I’ll go into why Ball lost by such an embarrassingly wide margin below. Recall, though, he had won by a less-than-47% plurality in 1942 in a 4-man race, so one could say that in a 2-man race with the right candidate, he was vulnerable.
The Democrat Party in MN up until that time had been a very weak, almost desultory party (the Dem in the race came in dead last with 10%). So weak that they hadn’t won the Governorship since 1914 (and the incumbent died shortly after and replaced with the GOP Lt Governor — and they wouldn’t win it again until 1954 with Humphrey disciple Orville Freeman, who later was Sec of Agriculture when HHH was VP). From 1914 until 1944, only 3 Democrats had managed to win Congressional seats. Not that Minnesota was one-party Republican, there was an opposition, and that was the Farmer-Laborite Party, which became a serious force in the early to mid 1920s, and managed to win a respectable number of offices.
I believe it was Humphrey and a number of others that realized that if they could merge the weak Democrats and the FL’ers, they could pose a substantive threat to the GOP. Ironically, two of the FL’ers most prominent members both bolted for the Republicans before the merger (Sen. Henrik Shipstead, who ran outright for the GOP in 1940, preceding Ed Thye, and he was a very strident isolationist, and Congressman Harold Hagen, who jumped with the 1944 elections, when the DFL sent their first two members (of which one would die, and the other would lose in ‘46)).
I was looking about and came across this book, and it more succinctly explains Humphrey’s ambitions and gameplans and his race against the erratic Ball in 1948: (specifically pages 124 onward, “Victory Over Ball”).
http://books.google.com/books?id=wzGabQcvDvcC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=%22joseph+ball%22+%22hubert+humphrey%22&source=bl&ots=vVJ_Ecx1pp&sig=oklfPoqhq7tf8ZOzACHxk-tTgBg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0XFWUvL1K5La9ASA2IHQBg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22joseph%20ball%22%20%22hubert%20humphrey%22&f=false
It’s pretty clear that Humphrey was very masterful as a strategist, indeed. He was also quite terrified at the prospect of facing liberal Republican Gov. Luther Youngdahl in 1954, that he managed to get President Truman to appoint him to the federal judiciary in 1952 (Truman certainly owed HHH, as he helped pull his bacon out of the fire in ‘48). He drew State Treasurer Val Björnson as an opponent instead, and Björnson ended up performing better than Ball did in 1948, though still lost by 14%.