On September 9, nearly two months before election day, pollster Elmo Roper announced "Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected. [...] I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race." Roper stopped polling voters until the final week before the election, when he took another poll. It showed "a slight shift to Truman; it still gave Dewey a heavy lead, however, so he decided not to hedge his bet." One poll showing strong Truman support in the rural Midwest was sponsored by the Staley Milling Company, who "polled farmers by giving them a choice of a donkey or an elephant on chicken feed sacks. When the results among 20,000 farmers showed up as fifty-four percent to forty-six percent for the donkey, the poll was abandoned."