During the US presidential elections of 1936, the magazine The Literary Digest conducted an opinion poll using millions of people but still ended up being wrong. Who bested the magazine with his scientific technique using only a small percentage of what the magazine had used?
The Literary Digest and 1988 concluded that non-response bias was the primary source of this error, although their sampling frame was also quite different from the vast majority of voters. George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the 1936 election and by also correctly predicting the quite different results of the "Literary Digest" poll to within about 1%, using a smaller sample size of 50,000. Gallup's last poll before the election predicted Roosevelt would receive 56% of the popular vote. The official tally gave Roosevelt 61%. This debacle led to a considerable refinement of
The Literary Digest public opinion polling techniques and later came to be regarded as ushering in the era of modern scientific public opinion research. The Literary Digest The Literary Digest was an influential American general interest weekly magazine published by Funk & Wagnalls. Founded by Isaac Kaufmann Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines, "Public Opinion" and "Current Opinion". Beginning with early issues, the emphasis was on opinion articles and an analysis of news events. Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications. Type-only covers gave way to illustrated covers during