Word: galluping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pollsters rose to fame and influence on the basis of two celebrated debacles. During the 1936 presidential campaign, the old Literary Digest ran a mail poll and was wrong, while three more scientific pollsters were right. Those three-George H. Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley-conducted interviews among a predetermined mix of ethnic, income and age groups that seemed representative of the U.S. population. The other turning point was in 1948, when the pollsters again used this "quota system" of sampling-but were wrong. The U.S. had become so complex that picking just the right population...
...Pascal, some expert gamblers and the U.S. Census Bureau. Probability theory says that if a jar contains 1,000,000 beans-half black and half white-and somebody scoops up 100 of them, he will almost always draw half black and half white, within a 3% margin of error. Gallup views the nation as a big bowl of beans. On a strictly random basis, he picks 300 sections of the U.S. and selects five voters in each section. Then he sends his interviewers-who are mostly middle-aged women working part time-to poll those five voters. For the entire...
...taken. Moreover, there is usually a lag of a week or two between the time that interviewers ask their questions and the time that the results are analyzed and published. In the interim, public attitudes may be radically changed by all kinds of events. Although the latest Gallup poll shows Robert Kennedy's popularity declining, for example, this reading may be outdated because it was taken before Kennedy's primary victories in Indiana and Nebraska, which in turn may be outdated by this week's Oregon primary...
What most baffles pollsters is the great block of "undecided" voters who swing most elections. In 1952, Gallup's last pre-election poll turned up 13% undecided. On the basis of past voting patterns, he "allocated" the undecideds more than 2 to 1 for the Democrats, which put the Eisenhower-Stevenson election into fifty-fifty country. Had Gallup instead discarded the undecideds and prorated the rest of the vote, his poll would have shown Ike over Adlai by 54% to 46%-Eisenhower won the actual election with 55% of the vote...
...deal with the double problem of indecision and hidden prejudice, Gallup has voters mark secret ballots and deposit them in sealed boxes in the last few polls just before election day. The ballot obliges them to make a choice. Equally helpful is the new "intensity question." Using a scale ranging from plus 5 to minus 5, pollsters ask voters to indicate how strongly they feel about candidates and issues. Plus 5 indicates a firm attachment to a candidate; plus 1 suggests that the voter might well swing to the other side. Even in very close contests, pollsters can usually spot...