Word: roper
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...next President of the U.S.? Just after Candidate Harry Truman set bravely off in pursuit of Candidate Tom Dewey (see below), a man who should be able to answer that question, if anybody can, announced his answer: Dewey. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune this week, Pollster Elmo Roper decided on the basis of his latest FORTUNE Survey that the election was as good as won before the campaign had even started...
...soundings, said Roper, showed Dewey leading Truman by the unbeatable margin of 44% to 31%-"an almost morbid resemblance to the Roosevelt-Landon figures as of about this time in 1936." In the face of those figures, only a "political convulsion" could keep Tom Dewey out of the White House next year...
...Largely Ritualistic." Roper was so sure of his prediction* that he was not even planning to report his running campaign forecast. Said he: "This is not a hare and tortoise race, and neither is it a race between two closely matched thoroughbreds ; it is a very ordinary horse race -a race in which one horse already has a commanding lead . . . My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things...
Whatever minor fluctuations in popularity occurred in the next two months, Roper was convinced that no amount of electioneering would change a decisive number of votes. "Political campaigns," said he, "are largely ritualistic ... All the evidence we have accumulated since 1936 tends to indicate that the man in the lead at the beginning of the campaign is the man who is the winner at the end of it... The winner, it appears, clinches his victory early in the race and before he has uttered a word of campaign oratory...
Where the People Stand (Sun. 2:45 p.m., CBS). Elmo Roper weighs the popular satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the Truman-Barkley, Dewey-Warren tickets...