With less than two weeks until Election Day, Americans are drowning in public opinion polls. New surveys are released at a rate of about a dozen per day. We are alternately delighted and tormented by the esteemed Quinnipiac, anxious Times/Siena, right Rasmussen. People who are not paid to be involved in such cases can be heard using phrases such as “sample size”, “error” and even “cross-tabs”. We are a nation obsessed.
We can partly thank George Gallup for this obsession, who took opinion polling from the private market research sector and applied it to American politics in the mid-1930s. He saw the problem in the informal and unscientific way surveys were conducted at the time. In 1936 Literary digest conducted a public survey by scouring the phone book and car registration data and then mailing millions of people postcards asking them who they planned to vote for in the presidential election: Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt or Republican challenger Alf Landon. Most of those polled preferred Landon. The magazine predicted he would get 370 Electoral College votes. Landon has eight. The magazine closed soon after.
George Gallup, by contrast, knew that poor voters who supported FDR were less likely to own telephones or cars. A former journalism professor at Iowa State University, Gallup sought to create a sample of voters that would better reflect voters. In doing so, he predicted Roosevelt’s victory in the 1936 election. Based on this success, he founded a poll in Princeton, New Jersey, which began to publish surveys of the opinions of the American electorate on both candidates and policies.
In the beginning of 1940 Nation published an article about Gallup and the whole new world of opinion polling, written by 24-year-old James Wexler, later an influential editor New York Post. Wexler noted that, thanks in part to Gallup’s pro-Roosevelt predictions, much of the criticism of opinion polls came from conservative opponents of the New Deal, who argued that “polls are inherently a threat to the republic: they reveal only the sum total of popular ignorance; they foster the heresy that Mr. Milquetoast has something to say and is entitled to be heard even between election days; thereby they endanger the structure of “representative government.”
Although Wexler did not share such anti-democratic concerns, he did warn Nation readers are skeptical of a large number of opinion polls. After seeing how Gallup staff conducted interviews in the three cities, he concluded that the possibility of “poll manipulation by conservative interests who are ultimately paying for them” is a legitimate concern. (Gallup’s operation was funded by newspapers that subscribed to its data and reports.) “There are many opportunities for sabotage on this assembly line,” Wechsler wrote.
Wexler portrayed Gallup as a nonpartisan pundit who “seeks in good faith a vantage point over the battle where the issues can be framed in a spirit of peace and neutrality.”
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Almost five years later, Nation readers had the opportunity to hear from the man himself in a December 1944 article titled “I Take No Sides.” He was responding to a critical essay the magazine had published two weeks earlier by a New Deal economist named Benjamin Ginsburg, which accused Gallup of refusing to share how it conducted its polls ahead of that year’s presidential election. While conservatives criticized Gallup four years ago, now it was Democrats who accused the pollster of falsifying poll numbers.
He has Nation Gallup dismissed the criticism as “unreasonable” and accused Ginsburg of “careless reporting,” while insisting it welcomes any investigation into its polling. He also noted that since both sides accuse him of bias, he must be doing something right. “You can’t make much of a political bias from this record, unless perhaps you think of us as chameleons who change political colors every two years,” Gallup wrote. “In that case, at least we would have to admit that we distribute our political favors evenly.”
Gallup has promised that he and his institute have no political preferences and only want to correctly predict the results of the election. He also insisted that, although he admitted that election forecasting had “no social value,” his work had contributed to the development of statistical methods that could perhaps be applied more usefully to other areas of public life.
In his 1940 article, Wechsler described polls as a useful adjunct to the democratic process. They gave a voice to the common voter who was otherwise rarely represented in public discourse. “What did answering good questions to the right person prove about America?” Wexler asked. “First of all, they discovered an incredibly vibrant population eager to articulate their fears, grievances, and loyalties.”
For Wechsler, both the process and the result gave importance to polls. “There’s a touch of excitement in these interviews that statistics don’t capture; For many Americans, elections represent a unique adventure in democratic life,” he noted. “On issues that have a direct personal impact, like going to war, they jump at the chance to express what they think, with the hope that someone in Washington will see the answers.”
“After going through fifty interviews,” Wechsler continued, “I could cite a large number of cases where the answers were based on half-knowledge and intuition. But against them I could cite many others, in whom insight was revealed by people who, in a certain sense, were only learning to speak, because no one asked them anything before.”
“The polls,” he concluded, “have encouraged the suspicion that Americans have intelligence.
It is not clear that public opinion polls nowadays encourage such suspicions, and it can hardly be said that ordinary citizens are otherwise deprived of the opportunity to express their opinions in the public square. In a world awash with data, perhaps we’d all do better to ditch the cacophony of surveys and take a look better sources information to understand what really animates the pulse of American democracy.
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