Why is the gallup poll so accurate

But a democracy also needs leadership by men who must frequently tell the people why a popular notion—no matter how widely held—can be wrong. Decades later, the argument still holds. Write to Lily Rothman at lily. Circa American statistician and public opinion analyst George Gallup, creator of the Gallup public opinion polls.

By Lily Rothman. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Go here to connect your wallet. The motivations for this move are non-partisan. But the result, Alsop notes, invariably reduces the Democratic percentage, and that of undecided voters. In fact, in , Gallup had tried to resolve this difficulty in a different way: by simply giving Republicans a two-percentage-point advantage in its polls.

The organization failed to disclose this step publicly, and there was outcry when it was later revealed at a Congressional hearing. Discarding suspected non-voters was a more fine-grained way of tackling the same problem. Instead, individual newspapers and franchises conducted polls of small groups to take the national pulse on various issues. Between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the New Deal, there was very little interest in political polls.

In , the Literary Digest undertook one of the first national election surveys, by mailing out millions of postcards and then simply counting the returns. The idea of doing a more sophisticated poll is something we owe to George Horace Gallup. In a Profile , Russell Maloney under the pseudonym J. Gallup was lecturing in journalism at the State University of Iowa and studying for his Ph. This basic idea—selecting the groups of people polled—was the genesis of what would later become the Gallup polls.

Gallup was determined to make his polls as fair as possible. He made his sample a cross section of the country at large, with the proper proportions of voters from each state, and correct representations of rural voters, urban voters, voters of all incomes and age brackets, and voters of all ideological persuasions and political parties.

The findings from Gallup's U. A computer randomly generates the phone numbers Gallup calls from all working phone exchanges the first three numbers of your local phone number and not-listed phone numbers; thus, Gallup is as likely to call unlisted phone numbers as listed phone numbers. Within each contacted household reached via landline, an interview is sought with an adult 18 years of age or older living in the household who has had the most recent birthday.

This is a method pollsters commonly use to make a random selection within households without having to ask the respondent to provide a complete roster of adults living in the household. Gallup does not use the same respondent selection procedure when making calls to cell phones because they are typically associated with one individual rather than shared among several members of a household.

When respondents to be interviewed are selected at random, every adult has an equal probability of falling into the sample.