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That Other Time a Poll was Dead Wrong
No, I’m not talking about the 2016 or 2020 polls! Lord knows enough people are doing that right now.
I’m talking about 1936, when incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt took on Governor of Kansas Alf Landon in a bid for the American presidency.
At that time, one of the most trusted American polls was run by the Literary Digest, which was a popular general interest magazine that had been running since 1890. They had correctly predicted all five of the presidential contests preceding that of 1936.
This very trustworthy poll boldly predicted that Landon was going to win 57 percent of the vote and defeat Roosevelt. What actually happened was that Landon got only 37 percent of the vote and suffered one of the worst defeats in American presidential-election history.
In hindsight, the Literary Digest’s error was simple.
They had blasted out 10 million ballots, which was an enormous sample size at the time, but they had made a major error in how they located those 10 million.
They had sent all their ballots out to subscribers to their magazine, people who owned cars (they found them through their registrations), and people who owned telephones. This may have been fine at any other time, but 1936 was in the midst of the Great Depression. The people who subscribed to…
