Word: polled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Under this storm of castigation and second-guessing, the Digest's editors sat down to decide what to say for themselves. Their poll had accurately foretold the major electoral results of, 1920, 1924, 1928, 1932. This time something had gone horribly wrong. Pleased and proud were its readers when out of its travail came the Digest with a cheerful, sporting handling of its own and other poll scores. Good-humored Editor Wilfred J. Funk, who himself had wagered no money on the election, featured on his magazine's first page a small facsimile Digest cover encircling the legend...
Publisher Hearst had staked his personal reputation as a prophet on Governor Landon. Far greater was the stake risked and lost by the publishers of the respected old Literary Digest, whose famed straw vote had polled by mail 1,293,669 votes for Alfred Landon, 972,897 for Franklin Roosevelt. In the face of actual returns, the publishing trade buzzed with rumors about what the Digest had done or would do: that it had been bought with Republican or Hearstian gold, that its editors had bet and lost a fortune on the vote, that it would never again attempt...
...bits ." Even the august New York Times hurled a smug thunderbolt: "Among the rewards or consolations of this Presidential election, most citizens will have already made up a 'little list' of political nuisances of which they have now got rid. One of these is the Literary Digest poll. It will scarcely venture to show its face again in the Congressional elections of 1938 or the Presidential campaign four years from now. That it was so thoroughly discredited this year is not because it was dishonest or unfair in its motives or methods. It certainly will never be again...
...this conjecture about our 'not reaching certain strata' simply will not hold water. . . . The basis of the 1936 mailing-list was the 1932 mailing-list, and since the overwhelming majority of those who responded to our Poll in 1932 voted for Mr. Roosevelt, it seems altogether reasonable to assume that the majority of our ballots this year went to people who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932. . . . So what? So we were wrong, although we did everything we knew to assure ourselves of being right...
Lest Franklin Roosevelt feel that the magazine had attempted to slug him with a "weighted" poll, the Digest heartily added that it hailed "a magnificent President against whom it never uttered one word of partisan criticism. . . . The Digest does not editorialize...