Gallup Poll

The Gallup Poll is the longest continuous measure of public opinion in the United States, having been conducted for more than 70 years, and is the most widely recognized brand name in the field of survey research.

On Sunday, October 20, 1935, George Gallup officially launched his “scientific” polling operation nationwide with “America Speaks: The National Weekly Poll of Public Opinion.” About three dozen newspapers carried his first release, including The Washington Post, whose editor heralded the event by hiring a blimp to pull a streamer over the city to announce the new column. Gallup called his operation the American Institute of Public Opinion, which he located in Princeton, New Jersey, where he also lived. To attract subscribers, he made a money-back guarantee that his poll-based prediction of the 1936 presidential election would be more accurate than that of The Literary Digest, which had correctly predicted Herbert Hoover's win in the 1928 election within less than one percentage point of the election outcome. Gallup made good on his promise, predicting Franklin Delano Roosevelt would beat Alf Landon, while the Digest's final poll predicted a Landon landslide.

Gallup kept the name American Institute of Public Opinion for more than 20 years, but within a very short time, his poll was known simply as the Gallup Poll. He, too, used that name, giving souvenir cards to cooperative respondents with the announcement, “You have been interviewed for THE GALLUP POLL—The American Institute of Public Opinion.”

The Gallup Poll increased its newspaper subscribers substantially over the years, though it suffered [Page 299]a minor setback after the 1948 election, when Gallup and almost all of the other scientific pollsters of the day predicted Thomas Dewey to beat Harry Truman. By the 1950s, Gallup had more than 200 newspaper subscribers. In 1963, he encountered his first serious competitor, Louis Harris, who began syndication of his own column. For almost a decade and a half, the Harris Poll and the Gallup Poll were the two competing sources for news about American public opinion.

In the 1970s, the major news media organizations began forming their own public opinion polls, and by the 1980s subscriptions to the Gallup Poll had fallen considerably. Gallup died in 1984, and 4 years later, his organization was bought by a small research company in Lincoln, Nebraska, called Selection Research, Inc. (SRI). By this time, Gallup polls were rarely covered in the national news media. The president and chief executive officer of this new SRI-owned Gallup Organization negotiated with CNN to form a media partnership to cover the 1992 election campaign season. They included CNN's occasional polling partner, USA Today, and for the first time in Gallup's history, the poll was no longer completely independent. But the new CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll gained what Gallup had mostly lost after the emergence of the media polls: immediate nationwide dissemination of Gallup Poll results.

The partnership worked to all the partners' satisfaction in 1992 and was renewed several times. In 2006, the Gallup Organization refused to renew the partnership with CNN, resulting in a messy public break-up. Gallup continues to partner with USA Today.

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