Page 2 - Boca ViewPointe - November '19
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Page 2, Viewpointe November 2019
JICYMI
Just In Case You Missed It University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member explained back then, a certain winding air to it—but it was
Gallup’s personal road to political polling had, as TIME
of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity,
By Bob Kronish and editor of The Daily Iowan, an independent newspaper driven, all along, by his faith in numbers and the desire to
which serves the university campus. He earned his B.A. in measure the world. As a friend of his told the magazine, he
The Popular Poll 1923, his M.A. in 1925 and his Ph.D. in 1928. wished he had invented the ruler. Raised in an eccentric Iowa
Performance He then moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he served as family and having to pay his own way through the State
Authors Note: Eight head of the Department of Journalism at Drake University until University of Iowa, he ended up editing the Daily Iowan.
months ago, in the March 1931. That year, he moved to Evanston, Illinois, as a professor He developed an interest in figuring out who was
issue of Viewpointe, the article of journalism and advertising at Northwestern University. The actually reading the paper, and which parts they liked best.
in this column was headlined: next year, he moved to New York City to join the advertising “At that time, a common way of measuring reader interest
“The Race To Quantum”. agency of Young and Rubicam as director of research (later as was to yank out the crossword puzzle for a week and count
It mentioned IBM recently vice president from 1937 to 1947). He was also professor of the complaints,” the magazine noted. “Gallup adopted the
announced what It claimed journalism at Columbia University, but he had to give up this startling device of confronting a reader with the whole
was the world’s first quantum computer”. Today, October 28th, position shortly after he formed his own polling company, the newspaper and asking him exactly what he liked and didn’t
Google’s research lab announced “it had reached a milestone American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll), in 1935. [3] like about it.”
that scientists had been working towards since the 1980s. In a May 1948 cover story, TIME dubbed Gallup the Gallup is often credited as the developer of public polling.
“It’s quantum computer had achieved a task that isn’t “Babe Ruth of the polling profession”—not the only or the In 1932, Gallup did some polling for his mother-in-law,
possible with traditional computers. Google’s quantum first pollster, but the most famous and the one who defined the
computer did in 3 minutes 20 seconds mathematical game, and in doing so changed the history of American politics. JICYMI on page 3
calculations that supercomputers could not complete in under
10,000 years. Scientists likened Google’s announcement to
the Wright brothers’ first plane flight in 1903”. There will
undoubtedly be more to come about Quantum computers.
Polling has become so popular and so ubiquitous that
hardly any major decision, be it political or commercial, seems
to be conducted without the results of a poll. Wikipedia lists
22 major polling organizations alone. Many of them, such
as Gallup, Quinnipiac, Harris, Pew, Nielsen and Rasmussen
have become well known within the industry as well with the
American population in general. Polling results have become
a much more desirable commodity, recently, functioning as a
guide to presidential popularity.
The first known example of an opinion poll was the local
straw poll. The idiom may allude to a straw (thin plant stalk)
held up to see in what direction the wind blows, in this case, the
wind of group opinion. The very first straw poll was conducted
by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824, showing Andrew
Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in
the contest for the United States Presidency. Since Jackson
won the popular vote in that state and the whole country, such
straw votes gradually became more popular, but they remained
local, usually citywide phenomena.
In 1916, The Literary Digest embarked on a national survey
(partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correctly predicted
Woodrow Wilson’s election as president. Mailing out millions
of postcards and simply counting the returns, The Literary
Digest correctly predicted the victories of Warren Harding in
1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928, and
Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
Then, in 1936, its 2.3 million “voters” constituted a huge
sample, but they were generally more affluent Americans who
tended to have Republican sympathies. The Literary Digest
was ignorant of this new bias; the week before election day,
it reported, incorrectly, that Alf Landon was far more popular
than Roosevelt.
At the same time, George Gallup conducted a far smaller
(but more scientifically based) survey, in which he polled
a demographically representative sample. The Gallup
organization correctly predicted Roosevelt’s landslide victory.
The Literary Digest soon went out of business, while polling
started to take off.
Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella
(Davenport) and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a
teen, George Jr., known then as “Ted”, would deliver milk and
used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where
he also played football. His higher education took place at the
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