The 1948 Dewey Truman Polling

[eleny]

On NPR this morning there was a piece about the big flaw in the Dewey Truman polling of 1948. It was pointed out that the polling was done by telephone and most people who would vote for Truman didn't have phones back then. People who did have phones tended to be more affluent and also Republicans.

I know that no one in my working class family had one. And they were all FDR Dems who voted for Truman.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd pass this along since I couldn't find the topic in a search here in the forum. I'm suspicious of Zogby since I stopped getting their online polls about 6 months ago. And I live in Colorado. So something doesn't smell right.

[Lancer]

1. The 1948 Gallup polls had several major flaws.

Yes, that's the thinking on who owned home phones and who didn't. The Gallup Organization also stopped polling in October 1948 with about three weeks to go, making no allowance for undecideds to make up their minds or any late breaking news. The fiasco nearly drove Gallup out of business. (BTW, Zogby has continued to bombard me over the last few months, but their polls are almost never about political topics. WTF? I live in NC.)

This is a good article about "Gallup's Big Gaffe."

http://modern-us-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/george_gallups_gaffe

[eleny]

2. Thanks for the link!

You should also be getting political polls from Zogby, then. Makes no sense.

[No Passaran]

3. It was 1948. Enough said

On Edit: That was my 1000th post. Been here since the beginning. Whoooo

[dana_b]

4. congrats!! n/t

[eleny]

8. Hey! That's great!

You old timer, you!

[musicblind]

9. Wow! Congratulations!

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

:party: :party: :party:

:toast: :toast: :toast:

:hi: :hi: :hi:

:hug: :hug: :hug:

[unpossibles]

5. much like how a lot of younger Obama supporters don't have land lines

I think it would be amazingly sweet if the landslide were even larger than predicted.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. Many Pollsters Now Call Cell Phone Users

Among them are Gallup, Pew,CBS-NYT, and ABC-WAPO that I am aware of...

[unpossibles]

12. that's good

I've never been cell phone polled, so wasn't sure how they weigh that.

[ShadowLiberal]

7. No polling the few weeks before election day was also a problem

Historians today claim a large number of people switched their votes to Truman at the last minute, but personally I'm more inclined to believe the phone survey problem was the cause of it more then no polling. If you aren't polling the right group of people then it doesn't matter how many times you poll them and when.

Today younger voters tend to be more heavily cell phone only people, thus likely to be left out of polling.

[Overseas]

10. Now Pro Republican radio is helping the GOP effort.

The GOP needs to discredit polls if it intends to bump their numbers up on election day in the same ways they've done before (shown in the documentary Stealing America: Vote by Vote, available FREE NOW at www.stealingamericathemovie.com )

I am hoping that we have a solid enough wave of positive polls before the election and have caught enough GOP election manipulation so far (stopped some purging of voter rolls and filmed some vote flipping software in use at the polls, etc.) that they will hold back on their original plans to steal the whole thing.

That was my hope. That they'd hold back on the full GOP election manipulation tool kit. So when I see the raising of the Dewey Truman specter, that scares me because that could be designed to prepare the audience for a MAJOR SURPRISING UPSET-- wowee, this kind of upset has never been seen since DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN headlines, golly gee.

What I'm hoping instead is that this story will be used to show why we still get a landslide in spite of Republicans using many of their usual tricks -- the cell phone factor, and millions of youngsters flooding the polling places on voting day, ready to help each other endure the long lines with various phone-based fun and texting.

[Drunken Irishman]

11. A similar thing happened in the election of 1936.

The Literary Digest published the largest known poll in American history with 10 million surveyors. In their final edition prior to the election, they proudly proclaimed that Alf Landon would beat Roosevelt with 370 electoral votes -- an electoral landslide for the Republican.

However, the problem was that more Republicans generally subscribed to the Literary Digest than Democrats, so they were polled more often than not. Gallup did predict a Roosevelt victory, but the Literary Digest poll was used by many in the media to show Roosevelt was going down, since the sample size was so large.

On election night, the first state that was called was Maine and it went heavily to Landon. The media speculated it would be a landslide for Landon, especially after Vermont -- the next state to be called -- went to Landon by a 56-43 margin.

Roosevelt won every other state, dominating his way to a 523-8 victory in the electoral college.

James Farley, the then Democratic party chairman, quipped, "As goes Maine...so goes Vermont" amending the then-conventional political wisdom of "As Maine goes, so goes the country."

[eleny]

14. I recalling stories my mom told me about her life in 1936

I can't even imagine her family subscribing to any magazine!

[juno jones]

13. Yup

My father's dem family had no phone until the fifties.

Heck they'd only just gotten electricity on the farm in the 40's.

And are new technologies like cell phones skewing our present polls?

[eleny]

15. I grew up in Queens, New York

We didn't have a phone until I was in about the 3rd grade - around 1954.