USAT's Super Tuesday 'Dewey Beats Truman' Moment

February 6th, 2008 11:39 AM

It's hard to tell whether this was bias or sloppiness in the race to be first with a story, but USA Today has some egg on its fact this morning.

I received this USAT e-mail last night, concerning Democratice Primary results in Harry Truman's home state of Missouri:

USATclintonWinsMOwrong0208

Uh, not exactly:

MOfinalSTuesDems0208

In USAT's "defense" -- I have never, ever seen a race turn around like this. Hillary Clinton had a 22-point lead after well over half the vote was counted, and was up by over 50,000 votes at one point. In the final 10% or so of Missouri's counting, Obama took a ginormous percentage of the vote.

The answer, as NixGuy pointed out last night, was that St. Louis County votes came in last. On the GOP side, it wasn't nearly as radical, but John McCain also overcame a pretty big deficit, in this case to Mike Huckabee, to pull out Missouri. St. Louis County was the difference for him as well.

Cross-posted, with some revisions, at BizzyBlog.com.