Washington columnist Mark Sullivan wrote about the possibility of a postwar political party realignment. This was a key talking point for the liberal wing of Democratic Party and its allies on the left. Sullivan cited a recent speech by the ever controversial Henry Wallace at a Jackson Day dinner in which he maintained that those who did not adhere to the party line should be expelled from the Democratic Party. This did not go over well in Congress, even with Wallace's usual supporters. Sullivan pointed out that Wallace himself had supported the American Labor Party candidate over the Democrat in the recent special congressional election on the Lower East Side.
Wallace had predicted that liberal Republicans and members of La Follette's Progressive Party in Wisconsin would align themselves with the Democrats and the left while Southern Democrats and some of the big city machine politicians would desert to the Democrats. However, La Follette, the son of the founder of the Progressive Party, instead joined the Republicans when his party disbanded. Sullivan wrote that this was in line with the party's Midwestern, agrarian roots as a descendant of the Populist Party of the 1890s and the Granger Movement of the 1870s.
Sullivan identified three other dissident political groups outside the formal party structures —the American Labor Party, the CIO Political Action Committee and the Communist Party. All three existed primarily in big cities and in New York City in particular. In 1944 all three worked for the election of Roosevelt and other Democratic candidates.
Sullivan did see a postwar trend with the Republicans increasingly becoming the party of the Midwest, farmers, small cities, towns and villages joined by the more conservative wing of labor. The Democrats were becoming the party of the big cities, the left wing of labor and, as an historical anachronism, the South.
Robert La Follette Jr, supported liberal domestic policies but was an isolationist on foreign affairs. His move back into the Republican Party backfired on him and the nation when he lost the party primary that year to Joseph McCarthy by 5,000 votes. La Follette would blame the Communists for his defeat because had adopted an anti-Stalin and anti-UN stance in his campaign. This did not save him from the revenge of his successful rival who during his infamous investigations in the 1950s went after the members of the Senate Civil Liberties Commission, which La Follette had headed, as nest of Commies. La Follette committed suicide in 1953.
Wallace and the dissident left formed a new Progressive Party in 1948 and went on to a massive defeat. Only in New York City did the new party have a respectable showing.