Literary Digest
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Literary Digest was an influential general-interest magazine in the early 20th century United States, published by Funk and Wagnalls. The first issue was in 1890 and in 1938 it merged into Time Magazine.
The Digest is almost certainly best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise. It conducted a poll regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election. The poll showed that governor of Kansas Alf Landon would likely be the overwhelming winner. This seemed possible to some, as Landon carried Maine, where the voting was then held in September (as opposed to the rest of the nation, where the election was held in November as it is now). This seemed especially likely in light of the conventional wisdom, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation", a truism coined because Maine was regarded as a "bellwether" state which usually supported the winning candidate.
In November, Landon carried only Vermont in addition to the Maine electoral votes that he had already garnered; U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried the then other forty-six states; Landon's electoral vote total of eight is a tie for the record low for a major-party nominee since the current U.S. two-party system began in the 1850s. The magazine was completely discredited because of the poll and was soon discontinued.
In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame. Although it had polled 10 million individuals (an astronomical sum for any survey), it had surveyed firstly its own readers, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time (shown in part by their ability still to afford a magazine subscription during the depths of the Great Depression). This base was supplemented by two other readily-available lists, that of registered automobile owners and that of telephone users. While such lists might come close to providing a statistically-accurate cross-section of Americans currently, this assumption was mainifestly untrue in the 1930s. Both groups had income well above the national average of the day, and resulted in lists of voters far more likely to support Republicans than a truly typical voter of the time.
George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the election, and for correctly predicting the results of the Literary Digest poll, using a smaller sample.
This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and was largely regarded as spurring the beginning of the era of modern scientific public opinion research.
