October 29, 2014

by Jim Nowlan
Outside Columnist

Ever since the Literary Digest poll of 1936 infamously predicted that Alf Landon would smother Franklin D. Roosevelt in that year’s presidential election, pollsters have been working to refine their art.

This column looks at why polls have become more difficult to do well and of the consequences the polls can have for election outcomes.

When I commissioned polls in the 1970s and ’80s for U.S. Senate and other candidates I was working for, we had the gold standard of random digit dialing of the universe of nearly 100 percent of households that had telephones. The pollster was confident he could achieve a sample of voters that was representative of the whole population.

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