How long has gallup been polling

Write to Lily Rothman at lily. Circa American statistician and public opinion analyst George Gallup, creator of the Gallup public opinion polls. By Lily Rothman. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. George Gallup's first official poll question.

What may come as a surprise is the fact that the majority of Americans were negative about the government's "relief and recovery" efforts in the fall of Franklin Roosevelt of course was a Democrat. The Gallup release showed, as would be expected, that Democrats were more supportive of relief and recovery than Republicans. Fifty-three percent of Democrats said that the expenditure by the government on relief and recovery was about right.

Roosevelt in was coming up on his bid for re-election. His opponent ended up being Kansas Gov. Alf Landon. Landon's campaign was based in large part on opposition to the relief and recovery efforts of the Roosevelt administration.

In his Republican nomination acceptance speech delivered in Topeka, Kan. The present administration asked for, and received, extraordinary powers upon the assurance that these were to be temporary We knew they were being undertaken hastily and with little deliberation.

Yes, 89 percent; no, 11 percent. Americans wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. And why not? It's a pattern that continues to the present day. Now, George Gallup did not invent the modern public opinion poll, but he is the man who legitimized it, thanks in part to a dramatic bet.

In , in order to get newspapers to subscribe to his weekly polls, Gallup promised he would predict the winner of the presidential election. Now, that was a lot of polling that he had been doing that whole year, so for him to agree to refund the money if he was wrong was a real big gamble. Gallup also guaranteed that he would predict the percentages more accurately than the leading poll of the day, conducted by the Literary Digest magazine. It seemed a foolhardy promise. The Literary Digest poll had picked the winner in every presidential election since The Digest poll was conducted on a vast scale.

A staff of several thousand workers stuffed ballots into envelopes, in some years as many as 20 million of them. The ballots were mailed to names polled from automobile registration lists and telephone directories.

The Gallup Organization : As a matter of fact, they went to about a third of all households in the United States. And the assumption was that the more people you interview, of course you're going to get closer to the truth.

The method he relied on was called quota sampling, a technique also used at the time by polling pioneers Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper. The idea was to canvass groups of people who were representative of the electorate. After teaching journalism at Iowa, Drake, and Northwestern universities, George joined Young and Rubicam, the largest advertising agency in the country, at As the Director of Research, George developed several methods to measure nationwide radio audience as well as advertising effectiveness.

In , George correctly predicted, in the first scientific political survey ever conducted, that his mother-in-law would win Secretary of State in Iowa. This triumph led him to establish the American Institute of Public Opinion in , a polling organization that conducted the Gallup Poll, a weekly survey.

His organization correctly predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would win the Depression Era election while The Literary Digest, an influential national magazine, incorrectly predicted Alf Landon would win.