Roper – W. Joseph Campbell

The hazards of glide-path campaigning

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 […]

The winners of July

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 […]

Reminders from ’48 in McCullough’s take on Truman’s come-from-behind campaign

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, […]