Pollster

A pollster is a person who measures public attitudes by conducting opinion polls. Pollsters design, conduct, and analyze surveys to ascertain public views on various subjects. Pollsters typically conduct this work on behalf of clients, including corporations, news organizations, and candidates for public office.

Time magazine first used the term in May 1939, referring to “Dr. George Horace Gallup, punditical pollster of public opinion.” But the term appeared only rarely in print until after the infamous presidential Election Night ordeal of 1948 sent the polling profession temporarily reeling. The three major pollsters of the day—Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Alfred M. Crossley—each forecast an Election Day sweep for New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, so when President Harry S. Truman won, the Detroit Free Press ran the box-score “Truman 304, Pollsters 0.”

In the year before the 1948 debacle, there were 15 references to pollsters in The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Dewey mishap helped put the term into more popular usage; those papers used the term 139 times during the next year. (There were nearly 500 such mentions in 2006.)

After 1948, Gallup and others updated their methodologies, employing probability samples in their estimates. But many had already begun to use the word pollsters pejoratively. Lindsay Rogers, a professor of public law at Columbia University, wrote The Pollsters, a scathing book, hoping to equate the new profession with a bunch of “hucksters.”

For some, the negative label stuck. In 1976, Gallup called the term “sort of denigrating.” Roper never used the title, also insisting that his work be called “surveys,” not polls. Richard Wirthlin, a Republican consultant, once said the term made him “shudder.”

However, pollster regained its more neutral meaning on the heels of pollsters' successful implementation of new opinion-gathering techniques following the famous early failure. “Pollsters Bask in the Limelight,” the AP wire rang in 1960. “The Pollsters Come Through,” read a New York Times editorial in 1968.

By then, pollsters had become integral to political campaigns. President John F. Kennedy was the first to hire a pollster when he commissioned Louis Harris to conduct private campaign polls. (Columnist Stewart Alsop called Harris a “pulse-feeler.”) President Bill Clinton titled his advisor Stanley Greenberg “Pollster to the President,” and a popular movie during the Clinton era, The American President, included prominent roles for the actress and actors playing the White House's public opinion advisors and pollster. And in 2004, the presidential candidates spent about $5.5 million on polling, and those running for their party's [Page 590]nomination in 2008 were well on pace to shatter that amount before the first primary votes had been cast.

Most political pollsters also gather opinion data for commercial clients and/or interest groups. Many major media companies and some think tanks also employ pollsters. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also eschews the term pollster, there were approximately 24,000 people employed as “survey researchers” in 2006.

Despite their prominence in politics and market research, pollsters have been little noted in popular culture. Only one major motion picture features a “poll-taker” as a protagonist. In Magic Town (1947), Jimmy Stewart turns around a failing polling operation by finding a town whose demographics perfectly mirror that of the nation's.

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