There are some political observers who are saying the presidential election of 2016 has strong parallels to the presidential race of 1948, and they are not incorrect.

For those of us who are too young to remember the race of 1948, it was an incumbent Democratic president (who had only served two and a half years in office), Harry Truman, who was up against a Republican Governor from the State of New York, Thomas Dewey.

Although today, Truman is thought of somewhat heroically for leading the nation as the Second World War wound down in the Pacific and Europe, at the time, Truman was seen as a bit of a bumbler — a less-than-worthwhile successor to the office occupied through three and a half terms by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a legendary figure beloved by much of the country.

Detractors of the new incumbent president had a saying — “To err is Truman” — that reflected some of the country’s thinking at the time.

In fact, after 16 years of having a Democrat in office, much of the nation was ready for a change in 1948. The Republican election slogan was the simple “Had Enough?”

Dewey was consistently polling five or six points ahead of Truman in the months leading up to the election, and, like the Democrats of today, the Republicans thought they had the race in the bag. Like the campaign insiders of Hillary Clinton, the men working for Dewey thought they merely had to “run out the clock” to win, but there were some things that they weren’t counting on.

Also like Clinton, Dewey was seen as an ally of the “Eastern Establishment” — rich internationalist elites who we would refer to as globalists today.

One of the strategies Truman used was to remind people of how bad things were under the last Republican leader, Herbert Hoover. Hoover, forever identified with the beginning of the Great Depression, was seen at the time as uncaring and inept, a hapless fool who allowed the country to nearly be torn in two economically by the darkest day in Wall Street history, costing millions of Americans their life savings overnight.

Even if Truman was not Roosevelt, in the end, there were greater fears that Dewey could turn out to be another Hoover, or at least there was a clear identification that he was of the same party.

In this election, Donald Trump only needs to remind voters that Hillary Clinton is from the same party as Barack Obama, whose failed policies of Obamacare, military blunders in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq and support for the TPP free-trade agreement will lead to his vilification as one of the worst presidents in recent American times.

In fact, Clinton was an Obama appointee as Secretary of State, and she largely bears responsibility for many of his foreign-policy mistakes, a point that Trump continues to hammer on.

The Clinton campaign protests that Trump’s speeches paint a vision of America as a dark and failing place where people are suffering economically and fears of terrorism are overblown. However, the Democrats need to wake up and take a look around — this is not the same America we had in 1999 when the Internet boom was still going strong and 9/11 had not yet occurred.

Yes, Wall Street may be experiencing its highest numbers in history — was that a good thing in 1929? Employment figures are up — doesn’t that mean people are happy with the jobs they’re doing these days? Aren’t wages on the rise for work in manufacturing? Aren’t young people being hired in record numbers?

The answers to these questions are an unrelenting and resounding no, and the people of the country are beginning to see through the effects of the Obama administration’s feel-good Kool-Aid.

Who’s getting richer in the country — is it the poor people of Louisiana, many of whom lost everything in the recent flooding there, or is it the rich Hillary donors in Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard (where the former Secretary stayed while Trump visited afflicted citizens in New Orleans and other places)?

Hillary’s run-out-the-clock strategy is a poor one because for the last eight years (some would even say 16) we’ve been running out the clock — on real wage increases, more honest trade agreements and less-costly foreign policy. Americans don’t want the clock to keep ticking; they want to smash it and reset it. Many Americans remember times of greater prosperity and worry that those times could be permanently behind us.

Fears of terrorism and domestic violence are all too real and justified — killers identified with ISIS have attacked savagely more than a dozen times globally in the last twelve months — shooting more people in one day in Orlando than anyone has on any other day in American history. Racial riots, immigrant violence and fears of more domestic terrorism have led to record purchases of guns and demands that borders be closed and refugees be barred from entering the country.

Hillary’s strategy of co-opting her Democratic Party rival Bernie Sanders and painting the Republican candidate as a bumbling loose cannon stands a greater and greater chance of backfiring the way Thomas Dewey’s campaign did in 1948.

Unlike the Democrats’ Truman then, Hillary can’t point to the country’s “successes” under her party’s leadership; she can’t point to war victories, greater security, more middle-class prosperity or even better prospects for the future.

Instead, all Hillary has is “at least I’m not Trump!” — which rings hollower and hollower every day as the GOP candidate looks more presidential and Hillary appears to be more and more of a crook who will lead the nation to ruin.

Like Truman, Trump can point to times when America was great and vows that he can restore and sustain those times. Like Truman, Trump may have been prone to boastful speeches and public gaffes in the past, but doesn’t that show that he’s human, unlike robotic Hillary? Like Truman, Trump isn’t afraid to tell people how things really are, whether it’s politically correct or not.

The same overconfidence that led Dewey to smile and the media to stop polling in the weeks prior to the election of 1948 appears to have infected the Democrats. But having the media in your pocket doesn’t make any difference if the people aren’t, as Dewey notoriously discovered election night when the Chicago Tribune printed its famous (and erroneous) headline “Dewey Defeats Truman!”

As with the Brexit vote earlier this year, the media may be loath to discover that in the final analysis, fear-mongering and editorializing for weeks on end can’t necessarily “Trump” the will of the people.

Like 1948, 2016 will be seen as a popular upset if Trump wins against the predictions and polls of much of the country’s mainstream press. This time, however, due to technological advances, the chances of an incorrect Hillary-friendly headline on a newspaper or a website will be virtually nil.