[Ads-l] dark poll

Ben Zimmer bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM
Thu Oct 27 02:15:27 UTC 2016


And Gallup did indeed have Romney slightly ahead in its final poll before
Election Day.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/158519/romney-obama-gallup-final-election-survey.aspx

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 8:44 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> I know there were some Republican-friendly polls that were apparently
>> widely believed at the time that predicted Romney, but I don't recall
>> whether Gallup was among them. There was the famous example (I assume
>> actual and not apocryphal) of polls that predicted a landslide defeat of
>> the Democratic candidate (Truman vs. Dewey? FDR vs. somebody?) that was
>> flawed by having been conducted by telephone at a time when many voters
>> were too poor to have one. But that wasn't a dark poll, just a stupid one.
>>
>
> The poll you're referring to was by Liberty Magazine in 1936 - FDR vs
> Landon. Truman vs Dewey was 1948, and Dewey led by such a margin in early
> polling that the pollsters stopped polling in, I think, September, and
> missed Truman's big comeback.
>
>
>

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