POLITICAL NOTES: Roosevelt, Farley & Co.

• Share

(5 of 6)

Polls. No magic is involved in Emil Hurja's election predictions. His method is simply to avoid opinion, stick to statistical facts. Letters received by the Democratic National Committee and at the White House are all carefully cataloged by subject and place of origin, thereby giving Mr. Hurja some clues to public opinion. His main reliance is on polls, public & private, local & national. Little polling is done specially for him, but he ferrets out many polls of which the public never hears and adds them to his store of information. In former years the straw votes conducted by the Literary Digest and the Hearst Press were a great help to him, although he had to make statistical corrections allowing for the fact that certain groups of the voting population were not adequately represented. He has much faith in the house-to-house polls privately taken by bookmakers who place election bets, provided he can be sure of getting the actual returns before they are doctored up to delude the betting public.

Early last autumn Mr. Hurja made a trip to Manhattan to lunch with Dr. George Gallup. For several years Dr. Gallup had been taking polls for businessmen, particularly advertisers & publishers, who wanted to find out the preferences, buying and reading habits of the public. His method, adapted from scientific research, was to sample a section of the public big enough to be statistically accurate, representative enough to include day-laborers, skilled workers, farmers, white-collar employes, millionaires, etc. in the same proportions in which they are found in the population at large. Mr. Hurja was interested because Dr. Gallup was applying the same method of scientific sampling to the voting population in a series of political polls. Nowadays Mr. Hurja apparently places much reliance on the Gallup polls which are being syndicated in 70 newspapers as the American Institute of Public Opinion. Dr. Gallup's first poll, taken in February 1934, rated Roosevelt strength at 69% of the electorate. Subsequent ratings fluctuated, tended generally downward. Lowest rating was 50.5% last September; last rating was 53.9% two weeks ago.

Not yet is even Mr. Hurja prepared to predict the exact election results of 1936. He does claim that Roosevelt will carry every state in the South and every state west of the Mississippi. There are 531 votes in the Electoral College. A winning majority is 266. The South (excluding Maryland and West Virginia) and the area west of the Mississippi (including Minnesota) have 272 electoral votes. Therefore, argues Mr. Hurja, Roosevelt is certain of re-election and any states he carries in the Northeast will be surplusage.

Interesting point about Democrat Hurja's prediction about the South and West is that the Gallup poll, which at present is probably as accurate a sample of public sentiment as is available, appears to confirm it in general.

Since cotton and tobacco farmers are on the whole devoted to AAA, the Democratic South should certainly be solid this year. The Gallup poll shows that section of the country to be stronger than any other area for Roosevelt. Thus Mr. Hurja properly counts 146 electoral votes from 13 Southern states.