Word: polled
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Some of them had reason to worry. This year Rogers Dunn, praised by Columnist Hugh Johnson, widely quoted by pro-Willkie newspapers when the Gallup Poll began to go against their man, surveyed 40 States by various formulas (not sampling of the populace), offered no estimate of the popular vote. To Wendell Willkie he gave 29 States with a total of 364 electoral votes, to Franklin Roosevelt only eleven States with 124 electoral votes...
...same election in which the Digest poll went down to disaster a new kind of poll had its first public trial. Instead of inviting one & all to send in a postcard vote, it questioned a far smaller number of people about their opinions, carefully selecting those questioned in an effort to obtain a representative cross section of the population...
Best known of these polls was Dr. George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion. In 1936 the Gallup Poll successfully predicted Roosevelt's election. To be sure, it underestimated Roosevelt's strength by over 6%, but it was 13 percentage points closer than the Digest. Dr. Gallup's data last week showed a 52% majority for Roosevelt and 21 States in the President's bag. But he allowed himself a 4% margin of probable error, and day before election he wrote in the newspapers subscribing to his poll that he did not believe...
...American Opinion Forecasts poll, conducted by Edward J. Wall* on a scientific sampling basis, reported a 52% Roosevelt sentiment. This was the same as Gallup's prediction, but Mr. Wall allowed himself a statistical error of 2%, definitely predicted that Roosevelt would win the popular vote although Willkie might have a majority on the electoral college. But in 1940, as in 1936, the closest estimate of the popular vote was made by quiet, curly-haired Elmo Burns Roper, who has never made any great hullabaloo because he was one of the first to undertake political polls by the scientific...
...immense confidence in the accuracy of his surveys. What he fears more than a wrong report is "an election dominated by apathy, where the people don't take the trouble to vote, and where our poll might conceivably reflect true public opinion more accurately than the election itself." But he also insists on the limitations of his polls. He steadfastly refuses to make any forecast of electoral votes. The important and proper use of his political surveys is, he insists, not to predict elections but to obtain an over-all view of popular sentiment on public issues...