The Press: Back at the Old Stand

The day after the 1948 election, Editor Henry P. Slane of the daily Peoria Journal (circ. 68,000) sent Pollster George Gallup a bristling telegram: CANCEL OUR SUBSCRIPTION. Like Gallup, Elmo Roper, Archibald Crossley and all the pollsters who had confidently predicted a Republican victory, Editor Slane had a morning-after headache. With the editors of some 30 other U.S. dailies who canceled their subscriptions to the polls, Editor Slane cried: "Never again!" But like many another swearing-off, it didn't take.

"I hate to admit it," said Editor Slane last week, "but we are using Gallup again." So were many of the other papers which had dropped him in 1948 and later, although Gallup does not have as many papers now as he did then (206 v. 226). Elmo Roper is not doing quite so well in the press either (only 54 papers v. 66 then), but his Sunday broadcasts over NBC are now carried on 90 radio stations v. 75 on CBS in 1948. Crossley says most of his 1948 clients are back.

Said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat's President James C. Burkham last week: "We took Gallup again only after Dr. Gallup himself came out to sell us. He proved to us singlehanded that he had changed his technique ... so he would never stick his neck and ours out again."

How have the necks been protected?

For one thing, right after the 1948 fiasco, the pollsters turned over their figures for an autopsy by the Social Science Research Council. It checked actual votes against the predictions. The council discovered three major errors:

¶The pollsters stopped polling too soon, thus missed the last-minute swing to Truman. One out of seven voters checked after the election said he had not made up his mind until the last moment.

¶The polls did not interpret the "undecided" vote correctly. Gallup had assumed the undecided would divide about equally between the two candidates; actually, 74% voted for Truman.

¶Polltakers erred in their sampling (e.g., they interviewed a higher percentage of college graduates than the actual population contains, a lower percentage of people with grade-school educations).

To correct such errors, Gallup intends this year to poll right up to the eve of election. He is also giving more attention to working out a method of determining how the undecided vote is likely to go. The undecided are being divided into groups on the basis of their attitude on key issues, how they have voted in the past, etc. On the eve of election, Gallup will allocate them to the two parties in accordance with the percentages indicated by these breakdowns.

Gallup is also increasing the polling among the lower income groups by assigning districts to polltakers. In 1948, when polltakers could pick their own areas, they often passed up slum districts. To this Gallup has added greater use of a check which market researchers have found accurate: "pinpoint sampling," in which every third house is visited in 150 U.S. electoral precincts picked at random. This is the method Gallup will use for his last pre-election poll, taken the Saturday before Election Day.