WJC
(This essay originally was posted at the Conversation online site on 10 November 2020.) Polling is hardly a flamboyant field that attracts a lot of colorful characters. It is a rather reserved profession that now finds itself under siege in the aftermath of yet another polling surprise in a national election. The field is buffeted […]
Read More…(This essay was originally posted at the Conversation online site on 14 October 2020.) The question looms in nearly every U.S. presidential election, even in this year’s race: Could the polls be wrong? If they are, they likely will err in unique fashion. The history of election polling says as much. That history tells of […]
Read More…This is an abbreviated version of a commentary originally published at The Hill The “Dewey defeats Truman” upset election of 1948 is endlessly fascinating, an enthralling morality tale about the cockiness of pollsters, the credulity of journalists, and the hazards of glide-path campaigning. Pollsters were confident that Thomas E. Dewey would unseat President Harry Truman […]
Read More…The venerable Gallup Organization no longer conducts polls of U.S. presidential races. It dropped out after mistakenly estimating that Mitt Romney narrowly led President Barack Obama at the close of the 2012 campaign. Even though Gallup has quit election polling, a reservoir of its reporting remains available online; it’s a useful, even revealing resource about […]
Read More…The 1948 presidential campaign is endlessly fascinating, and it’s addressed at chapter length in Lost in a Gallup, my forthcoming book about polling failure in U.S. presidential elections. Lately, I’ve been rereading David McCullough’s account of President Harry S. Truman’s come-from-behind victory in ’48. That chapter is a highlight of McCullough’s hefty, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, […]
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