Lost in a Gallup

Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections

W. Joseph Campbell

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520972131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

A sweeping look at the messy and contentious past of US presidential pre-election polls and why they aren't as reliable as we think. Polls in U.S. presidential elections can and do get it wrong—as surprising outcomes in 2020, in 2016, in 2012, in 2004, in 2000 all remind us. Lost in a Gallup captures in lively and unprecedented fashion the stories of polling flops, epic upsets, unforeseen landslides, and exit poll fiascoes in presidential elections since 1936. Polling's checkered record in elections has rarely been considered in detail and, until now, has never been addressed collectively. Polling embarrassments are not all alike. Pollsters have anticipated tight elections when landslides occurred; they have indicated the wrong winner in closer elections; state polls have confounded expected national outcomes. Exit polling has thrown Election Day into confusion. The work of venerable pollsters has been singularly and memorably in error. It is a rare presidential election not to be marred by polling controversies. Lost in a Gallup casts a critical eye on major figures in election polling such as George Gallup, a prickly founding father of public opinion research. The book also considers the polling innovations of Warren Mitofsky, whose admonition rings true across generations: "There's a lot of room for humility in polling. Every time you get cocky, you lose." Lost in a Gallup examines how polling failure often equates to journalistic failure. Historically, poll-bashing was quite pronounced among prominent journalists, including well-known newspaper columnists such as Mike Royko in Chicago and Jimmy Breslin in New York. They and other journalists challenged the presumption that polls could accurately measure or interpret what the public was thinking. Even so, polls drive news media narratives about presidential elections, shaping conventional wisdom about how competitive those races are. As Lost in a Gallup makes clear, polls are not always in error. But when they fail, they can fail in surprising ways.

CHAPTER 1

Of Poll-Bashing Journalists and the “Babe Ruth” of Survey Research

Newspapers were vital to the rise and prominence of modern opinion polls. Beginning in the mid-1930s, George H. Gallup syndicated polling reports to daily newspapers, an early step in establishing his assessments of public opinion as a staple of U.S. news coverage.¹ Aligning his polls with journalism helped make Gallup a familiar name. Along with the lucrative market research conducted for commercial clients,² polling helped make him rich. At the time of his death in 1984, Gallup had a farm near Princeton, a summer retreat in central Switzerland, and a winter home in the Bahamas.³

Frank Newport, a former editor-in-chief of the Gallup Organization and admirer of the company’s founder, once said it was a “combination of journalism and polling that made Dr. Gallup so successful.”⁴ At least in his early years, Gallup emphasized polling’s parallels to journalism. He said on the Meet the Press interview program shortly after the polling debacle of 1948 that poll-taking was “a new branch of journalism, and I think you gentlemen of the press would agree that it’s just as important to report what people think as it is what they do. This, I think, is a new, legitimate, and important field of journalism.”⁵

And yet, despite shared interests and commonalities, the relationship between election pollsters and prominent journalists has been often stormy, tainted by hostility and mutual suspicion. Poll-bashing among journalists arose from the resentment and distrust of the methods, presumptions, and intrusiveness of election pollsters. Poll-bashing may have eased in American newsrooms in recent years, but its pedigree is extensive. It afflicted such prominent journalists as broadcast legend Edward R. Murrow, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather,⁶ New York City writer Jimmy Breslin, Chicago columnist Mike Royko, and social commentator Christopher Hitchens.⁷

Skeptics in journalism doubted whether opinion polling could accurately divine the opinions or inclinations of millions of people—and doubted whether trying to do so was even a good idea. Such reservations date to 1936 and the dawn of polling’s modern era. The New York Herald Tribune said after the election that year it doubted whether “there is any scientifically reliable method of telling what 120,000,000 people are thinking.”⁸ Edward Murrow expressed similar misgivings. On the day after Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, Murrow said on CBS Radio:

Yesterday, the people surprised the pollsters, the prophets, and many politicians. They demonstrated, as they did in 1948, that they are mysterious and their motives are not to be measured by mechanical means. The result contributed something to the demechanization of our society. It restored to the individual, I suspect, some sense of his own sovereignty. Those who believe that we are predictable . . . who believe that sampling depth, interviewing, allocating the undecided vote, and then reducing the whole thing to a simple graph or chart, have been undone again. (They were as wrong as they were four years ago.) And we are in a measure released from the petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think, what we believe, what we will do, what we hope and what we fear, without consulting us—all of us.⁹

Such thinking resonated in American journalism for years, driven by uneasiness about polling’s presumptions rather than by evaluations of its techniques. “I hope profoundly,” Murrow said after the 1948 election, “that they never succeed in making the measuring of public opinion into an exact science.”¹⁰ Other critics like Eric Sevareid, a commentator for CBS News, were uncomfortable with polling’s audacity in challenging the mystique of the American voter. Sevareid wrote in 1964 of “a secret glee and relief when the polls go wrong” and said the reasons for feeling that way “were obvious: We hate to have the mystery and suspense of human behavior eliminated by clinical dissection.”¹¹ James Reston of the New York Times argued that “the more the pollsters fail, the more the democratic process is likely to succeed.” If pre-election polls “were a sure bet,” he reasoned, “who would vote?”¹²

The ornery Mike Royko, who was perhaps Chicago’s most engaging and entertaining newspaper columnist, delighted in his contempt for polls. The pollster, he wrote, was “a hired brain-picker trying to figure out what your personal fears, hopes or prejudices are, so that he can advise a politician how to more skillfully lie to you.”¹³ In the mid-1980s, Royko waged a noisy campaign urging readers to lie to the interviewers conducting exit polls. He said he wanted to confound the projections that television stations relied on. Besides, Royko wrote, exit polling was draining the fun from Election Night. “Do they care,” he wrote, “that their exit polling is completely ruining what used to be the most entertaining and exciting part of an election—the suspense of watching the results trickle in?”¹⁴

“The election is a few days off,” Royko wrote in early November 1984, “but it’s never too early to begin planning to tell a lie to a TV exit pollster. As some readers might recall, urging people to lie to exit pollsters has long been one of my few constructive civic endeavors. The idea is to mess up their polling results and cause them to go on TV and project the wrong candidate as the winner. And that could cause them to swallow their tongues, which would be fun to see.”¹⁵

It was a perversely amusing and, of course, an ineffective campaign. Royko’s tongue-in-cheek advocacy troubled the likes of the Washington Post. Lying to pollsters, the Post declared, was neither wise nor prudent advice, warning that it could even lead to a debacle akin to the “Dewey defeats Truman” miscall of 1948.¹⁶ Royko’s campaign resonated for years after his death in 1997. It was recalled in 2018 at the conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, when the organization’s genial then-president, Tim Johnson, complained about efforts he said were intended to delegitimize opinion polling. He cited Royko’s lie-to-a-pollster advocacy and asked, “How can we expect the public to take our surveys seriously when some of our opinion leaders make a mockery of them?”¹⁷

Johnson also recalled the snarling, poll-bashing crusade waged by Arianna Huffington, a syndicated columnist who founded the popular online news and commentary site Huffington Post. Hers was an aggressive campaign called the “Partnership for a Poll-Free America.” Huffington encouraged people “to take the no-poll pledge and hang up on pollsters” should they call. “If they can’t hang up, if they don’t have the strength yet to do that,” she advised, “at least lie to them—anything to contaminate the sample and demonstrate how unreliable polls are.”¹⁸ She said her crusade was intended “to get the dominance of polling out of our political life.”¹⁹ She lamented that polling results had come to be regarded “with the kind of reverence that ancient Romans gave to chicken entrails”²⁰ and said they were treated by “media mavens . . . as if Moses just brought them down from the mountaintop.”²¹

A high moment in Huffington’s campaign came in 2003, when AAPOR invited her to address the organization’s annual conference. She opened her remarks by saying that friends had asked her who was crazier—she, for accepting the invitation, or AAPOR, for offering it. Huffington demonstrated on that occasion that she was more inclined to offer insouciant and humorous asides than a serious or sophisticated critique of polling, its methodologies, and its failures. The speech was less a confrontation than a theater for witty exchanges and sly repartee. Richard Morin, the polling director at the Washington Post, was one of the designated respondents to Huffington’s speech. Morin said drolly that the talk revealed there “are actually two Arianna Huffingtons. There’s the one who just spoke to us: What a charming woman—intelligent, witty. She’s critical but insightful about polls.” Morin turned to Huffington and added, “But then there’s the shrieking pundit from hell who writes about polls in a syndicated newspaper column under your name. Have you ever met this dreadful woman?” Laughter swept the room. The evening closed with Huffington’s being asked to place her hand on the convention program and vow never again to try to kill off survey research.

A hint of naïveté characterized Huffington’s campaign. And Royko’s. Not many people ever are called or interviewed by a pollster, and a few deceptive responses would not significantly distort a poll’s results. In time, Huffington’s poll-bashing campaign faded away. Its end effectively came in 2010 when the Huffington Post acquired Pollster.com, an aggregator and interpreter of polling data that was renamed HuffPost Pollster. “Polling, whether we like it or not, is a big part of how we communicate about politics,” Huffington said then. “And with this [acquisition], we’ll be able to do it in a deeper way. We’ll be able to both aggregate polls, point out the limitations of them and demand more transparency.”²² Huffington left Huffington Post in 2016, after Verizon acquired AOL, which owned the site.

Poll-bashing also arose from a tension between anecdote-based reporting and data-based methods of information-gathering, a tension between qualitative and quantitative methods of assessing public opinion. While election polls were valuable in addressing the inevitable questions about elections—who’s ahead, who’s likely to win—they posed a challenge to the celebrated news-gathering technique of “shoe-leather” reporting, which obliged journalists to leave the newsroom and rely on direct observation and in-person interviews. “Some newspaper folk are antagonistic to opinion polls, chiefly because they are skeptical of the methods employed,” the director of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin poll wrote in 1949. “They doubt that the cross-section is an accurate portrayal of the community at large, and feel that for their purposes they can obtain results as conclusive by a much more limited number of spot interviews.”²³

Generations of American journalists have assigned outsize value to “shoe-leather” reporting, a practice steeped in presumptive virtue and sometimes identified as an antidote to the failures of election polling. Jay Rosen, a journalism educator, has observed—with, perhaps, only faint exaggeration—that “in the U.S. press there is thought to be a single source of virtue. The mythical term for it is ‘shoe leather reporting.’ There ...