The Pittsburgh Press (September 1, 1944)
Gallup faces ‘iron test’ in election this year
Pollsters have much to gain or much to lose in making presidential predictions
This year’s presidential election, which gives promise of being the closest since the Wilson-Hughes race of 1916, will be an iron test of the accuracy of public opinion polls as conducted by Dr. George Gallup and other political pollsters.
So says Amy Porter, staff writer of Collier’s, in an article in the current issue. Miss Porter reported:
If they hit it right on who’ll be the next President, their stock will go up. If they guess wrong, they stand to lose much of the prestige they’ve built up in the last decade.
Miss Porter points to the fact that Dr. Gallup, “out of 114 predictions on local state and national elections, has had an average error of only four percent.” And none of the pollsters missed the popular vote by more than three percent in the last presidential election, all of them picking President Roosevelt.
Miss Porter declares:
Through the polls the people have spoken good sense on many issues. Often, they have been ahead of their political leaders. They were correct on the value of airpower before the experts; they urged military conscription long before it became law. Four years before Pearl Harbor, they were opposed to the shipment of American oil and scrap to Japan, and they favored controls on inflation before such controls were put into effect.
Miss Porter states:
The pollsters claim their technique is so precise that they can discover what any or all of us think about anything at any time. In response to your protest that they’ve never interviewed you and don’t know what you think, the pollsters contend that they did interview your proxy – a person of the same age, sex, race, religion, income, education, political affiliation, living in the same type of setting (farm, town, city) and the same section of the country as you.