George H. Gallup (1901-1984)

Viola Ola Babcock Miller ran for Iowa's Secretary of State in 1932. Her son-in-law, George H. Gallup, had recently developed a method to survey newspaper readership, and Miller wanted to use his ideas to forecast this election. He was happy to test his methods and used them to correctly predict the outcome of the election in the first ever scientific use of political polling. The presidential election of 1936 was between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Alfred M. Landon, and Gallup was eager to test his methods again. The Literary Digest ran a large-scale poll, sending out $10$ million surveys and receiving $2$ million responses, indicating a predicted victory for Landon. Gallup's smaller sample was chosen with his new sampling methods and predicted Roosevelt's victory with a percentage of 55.7%. The actual result was 62.5% for Roosevelt, so Gallup's prediction was off, but much closer than the more popular polling organization. This experience led Roosevelt to be the first U.S. president to track American attitudes through polling, marking a change to the shape and strategy of politics.

Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion to continue collecting information through surveys with representative samples. The name of the organization has since been changed to Gallup, and the company conducts research in other areas, both in the United States and other countries. George Gallup said regarding his first published work from the 1936 elections, Persons in all walks of life have been polled in order to obtain an accurate cross section. The results of these polls are being published for the first time today in leading newspapers – representing every shade of political preference. Studies conducted by the organization can be found at gallup.com.