Gallup

Gallup's core expertise is in measuring and understanding human attitudes and behavior. Gallup applies this expertise to help companies improve performance by leveraging their employee and customer assets. Gallup also conducts The Gallup Poll, the world's leading source of public opinion since 1935. Key Dates: Political polls were conducted in America long before Gallup. The first published presidential poll, based on a straw vote, appeared on July 24, 1824 in the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian . Newspapers at the time were little more than vehicles for the political parties, but as economic pressures forced publishers to become less partisan in order to expand readership, objectivity became a virtue. Straw polls were, by definition, objective; and by the beginning of the 20th century they became a staple of newspapers. The way straw polls were conducted, however, did not lend itself to accuracy. Some newspapers and magazines printed the ballot within its pages. Readers mailed in or hand delivered their votes, and they were encouraged to stuff the ballot box by purchasing more copies of the publication. Reliable results were willingly sacrificed for a spike in sales. A later technique, the mail ballot, selected names from such sources as telephone directories, registered voter lists, and automobile registrations. Then a 'sample' was created by pulling names at certain intervals, such as every tenth one. It was more difficult to stuff the ballot box, but the sample had an inherent bias against the lower economic strata. The 'personal canvass' proved to be the most reliable method for conducting straw votes. Under this method, 'solicitors' would hand out pencils and ballots to people on the street and collect the votes on the spot. Some newspapers made an attempt to sample a cross section of voters by creating quotas for their solicitors, for example requiring a certain number of white-collar voters from one community and blue-collar voters from another. Although arrived at intuitively, this technique anticipated the scientific polling that Gallup and others would refine. Most of the early newspaper polls were local or regional. The New York Herald Tribune and collaborating newspapers began to conduct wider pre-election polls in the 1890s. By 1912 they polled in over 35 states. The Hearst newspapers attempted nationwide polling in 1924. Forty-three states were covered, but the average error rate was a high six percent. In 1928, however, Hearst had an error rate of less than three points in 46 states. By the 1930s the publication with the greatest reputation for accurate polling was the Literary Digest-- the Time or Newsweek of its day. The Digest mailed out an incredible 20 million ballots and covered all 48 states. Although some critics questioned the sample, maintaining that the Digest overemphasized the higher income brackets, the results of the 1932 election silenced all doubters. The straw poll predicted a Franklin Roosevelt win with 59.85 percent of the popular vote. The election results gave Roosevelt the win with 59.14 percent of the vote. The straw poll also predicted that Roosevelt would win 41 states, totaling 474 electoral votes. The actual results were 42 states and 472 electoral votes. The Literary Digest did not hesitate to crow about its accomplishment and was now more than a little confident in its ability to predict election results. Then in the summer of 1936, more than six weeks before the Digest began its massive mailing to poll for the winner of the Roosevelt-Alf Landon presidential race, a little-known pollster from Princeton, New Jersey, predicted that the Digest would be wrong, and he had the further audacity to predict their final numbers. That pollster was George Gallup. It was also in 1932 that Gallup's mother-in-law was elected Iowa's Secretary of State, under unusual circumstances. She had been placed on the ballot in honor of her husband who had died during a run for governor in 1926. Despite runni