Polling and Election Studies Organizations

Polling History

Efforts to gauge voters' views on specific candidates and issues have been around since the early 19th century. In 1824, newspapers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh, North Carolina, used straw polls to determine the strength of that year's presidential candidates. The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian declared Andrew Jackson the winner with 335 votes, John Quincy Adams came in second with 169 votes, followed by Henry Clay with 19, and William H. Crawford with nine. The straw poll itself was unscientific and the process would be constantly refined in future years.

Beginning in 1916, a magazine, The Literary Digest, asked voters what they thought of specific candidates. By mailing out ballots to as many as 20 million people, identified from car registrations and phone directories, it was able to correctly determine the outcome of every presidential election for two decades. However, George Gallup began to doubt the validity of the magazine's polling. After examining U.S. voting patterns since 1836, he sent out a small number of forms to a scientifically selected group of people. Based on those results he correctly predicted the outcome of the 1934 congressional elections. He used those results to challenge The Literary Digest.

As a way to get newspapers to use his polling data, he guaranteed them he would correctly predict the winner of the 1936 presidential election, and would refund their money if he were wrong. Using their different polling methods The Literary Digest predicted that Republican Alf Landon would win with 57 percent of the vote. Gallup concluded that Democrat Franklin Roosevelt would be elected with 54 percent of the vote. Gallup proved to be correct as Roosevelt won with 61 percent of the vote.

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