New River Media Interview with: Alec Gallup The Gallup Organization, Princeton, New Jersey

QUESTION: How did your late father, George Gallup, Sr., get involved in public opinion polling?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, he actually had a sort of heavy background in a way. It is sort of a natural, because when he had been teaching - actually his Ph.D. is in psychology - but he was teaching journalism at Northwestern. He was interested in what people read in the newspapers. And so he in effect was doing survey sampling very early on, as early as the early 1920s, where he did two surveys that I can remember at that time. One was for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the readership of the newspaper, and the other one he did for a department store in Des Moines, Iowa. Also, his Ph.D. thesis was on the reading of the newspaper and reading of magazines. So in a funny way it was sort of a natural extension. It was what he knew and what he was interested in.

He had been teaching at Northwestern, at the Medill School of Journalism. He was the acting dean there. And Ray Rubicam of Young and Rubicam, the advertising agency in New York, invited him to come to New York to be the first research director of an advertising agency. And when he went to Young and Rubicam, the sampling methods are very similar. The only difference is you are talking about marketing and advertising as opposed to political and social issues. He worked at Young and Rubicam for about three or four years, and in the course of that decided that this would be a terrific method to poll the public on issues rather than just marketing subjects. So he actually started work on the Gallup poll experimentally in, I think as early as 1932.

One other influence was his mother-in-law. She was the secretary of state for the state of Iowa, and it was very unusual to have a female at that point who was the secretary of state of any state. And he did some surveys to see how she would do in the election. He did an early poll in which he found that she had an excellent chance and probably would win, and he was right on the button, right on the mark. But of course that was an unofficial poll. It was done for her and never published or anything like that. So he was experimenting in the very early 1930's to use his sampling procedures.

QUESTION: What are some of the anomalies of his early survey findings in the mid-thirties, for example that people found the government spending too much on relief?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, given the fact there was a Depression, they always felt as too much spending and, given today's climate, today, they keep talking about spending. Nothing has changed, and here it is sixty-five years later and they're still talking about government spending. You could ask it at any time - the middle of the Depression or in good times - they are always saying the government is spending too much. So that wasn't in a way looking back, given the benefit of hindsight, that's not strange.

There's another rather unusual situation too, that even during the Depression, when you asked people if they were conservatives or liberals or moderates or whatever, no matter how you asked it or what scales you used, people are conservative. And that, now, that does throw me. That surprises me. But if you look back, they always do. It never changes. I think the word "liberal," a lot of people associate it with permissiveness almost.

QUESTION: Was your father politically unaligned?

ALEC GALLUP: Yeah, I think he was. He's very hard to read. He worked very hard to be detached. And it was even difficult for myself and my brother and my mother to try to figure out where he was. He was very much in the middle - always has been kind of in the middle. He was upset about, as a lot of people were, even on the left, or in the middle, about the court packing in 1936. That got him a little uptight. But for the most part he's hard to read.

QUESTION: What led him to "bet" on FDR in the 1936 presidential election against Landon?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, I think that he felt that - well, the mood was one of - I think there was no question there was huge support for FDR for what he was doing. And as I say even though they might say they were spending too much, that if you took it act by act, they were supportive almost entirely. FDR had a very strong base of support throughout the 1930s.

I guess - maybe he figured he had nothing to lose, because he wasn't going anywhere - (laughs) - I mean at the time. He was positive he was right, and he felt that this was the right thing to do. It would have been more of a challenge for The Literary Digest in a way. What is not known is that they had a pretty good record going back into the early part of the century actually. They had done very well. One of the reasons they had done well [was that] there wasn't this split on the basis of economics back then. But liberals, I mean Democrats and Republicans were on both sides of the upper-income, lower-income and what have you. But with the Depression you had that split, and that changed everything.

He knew because, remember, the Literary Digest was using car registration lists and telephone books. Well, back then in the 1930s, if you had a car or a telephone you were definitely up market and usually a Republican. So that's what happened. And he knew that was going to happen, and he was absolutely sure he was right. So he was able to do that. And our numbers were very good too, so although we were still six or seven points too low on the Democratic side. However, the main thing is he called the election, and he called the right side, whereas the Literary Digest called the Republican side.

QUESTION: What improvements in methodology his he use that the Literary Digest's poll did not use?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, his method was random selection. He realized that there was a systematic bias to use automobile registration lists and telephone books, and he discovered that very early. In sampling them he got an overwhelming Republican kind of responses. And also, I guess more important the political party ID was very heavily Republican. So he knew. He said, this is crazy, this isn't right. And he worked really from that. He was able to get as random a sampling he could possibly get given the situation.

How it was done was, you went into the field. You had interviewers around the country, and the sampling points were selected totally at random. He would go in, and - it became much more systematic later on, but in those early days the one thing they did do was try to get the interviews all done in the household, so you would actually go to somebody's house and knock. It was a systematic procedure.

You will see a lot of pictures we have around with people interviewing farmers in the field and all that. That was mostly PR, that they did not like them doing that. They weren't supposed to interview people on the street, because there's a tendency when you interview people on the street is to get the most accessible people. So you are introducing a systematic bias when you do that. You may have a sample of people who like to talk to people, and they can be atypical say. And so what they would do is go house to house. The idea was to make it as systematic as possible. If you make it systematic you avoid bias.

QUESTION: What was your father's reaction when the election went for FDR, the way he had predicted?

ALEC GALLUP: He was so convinced he was right that there wasn't this great, Hooray, we got it right! - or like winning the lottery - it wasn't one of those situations. It was, Hey, I knew it - it had to be that way, because that was the way it was going to happen. And one of the interesting - this is sort of a sideline on this - he thought [the opinion poll] was a great contribution to democracy and all, but he didn't think it would have a lot of staying power. He thought that it would probably run its course in three or four or five years, which is very not generally known; that he felt that the media would get bored with it after a while, see, and the newspapers would drop him. Never happened. A little sideline.

As a matter of fact, if you look back, Gallup was virtually alone. Elmo Roper of the Roper Survey for Fortune magazine was around, but for the most part Gallup was alone - you know, naked and alone most of the time - until I would say about 1975 when the media - when the New York Times and the big networks got into it, got into polling its competitors. Gallup was alone. As a result he got a lot of credit, and it was great for Gallup, but at the same time if you were wrong, as in 1948, it was pretty brutal, but he really took it.

QUESTION: What was the legacy of the 1936 election success for Gallup and scientific polling?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, what it did was it made it not only acceptable but made it credible. I mean, when he got that one right, the poll just took off and the papers, it was a syndicated newspaper service, as you know, and he signed the papers up, and they paid pretty good money back then. One of the reasons that we actually weren't as active in market research in the early years as we might have been, was there wasn't enough money in it. The papers were paying big money.

I once asked my father why was it so successful - why did it take off like it did? He said - it's something I wasn't even aware of - he said the decade of the 1930s for a very short period of time, from let's say 1932 until the war - was sort of the era of the Sunday newspaper, and they needed filler back then for that Sunday paper. And so he cranked out these full pages - you know, surveys and things - and it was great filler. And this was, for a very short period, was the era of the Sunday newspaper.

QUESTION: What were some of the reasons why Gallup was wrong in the 1948 presidential election when he picked Dewey over Truman?

ALEC GALLUP: One, we stopped interviewing too early, about two and a half weeks, I think, before. And you can't do that. But there's also another factor that's not mentioned very often, and that was that the Wallace vote collapsed. As is often the case in an election, the third-party candidate will collapse. And Wallace had been getting a fairly high - I think as much as eight or 10 percentage points - and that collapsed completely and went back into the Democratic column. And that probably, in many respects, was the most important reason. I don't think it was a failure of sampling so much as it was those two factors.

But certainly the probability-based kinds of sampling, which came into being sort of in the early 1950s was definitely a superior method. And the difference is that before, the interviewer had some leeway into which households he approached. He had a given territory, but he could hit different households. Well, I don't think there's any question there's a tendency to go to the households that don't have dogs or don't have mean-looking people sitting on the porch, or they're going to go to places that are more accessible. And that does introduce bias. And so this new approach, probability sampling, was a definite improvement on the sampling procedures that we used.

[The election result for Truman] didn't have much impact in our newspaper business. I think we only lost one newspaper, believe it or not. I think we may have had as many as 150 to 200 newspapers that subscribed to the Gallup poll. And as I understand it, we only lost one. Now, maybe there were a few down the line after that, but it had almost no impact there. But it had a definite impact on our own commercial market research [and] on public opinion polling. It set us back; there wasn't any question about it. And as a result, when 1952 came, and even again in 1956, we were very, very cautious and worried, and we came up in 1952 with about three sets of figures to cover ourselves, and everybody was very sort of paranoid as a result of it for a while. And really, it damaged the industry as a whole. But we recovered and we came back. I think it took a good four to six years, I really do, before it completely came back. And by then it was okay. And then we did very well in 1960. We were right smack on target in one of the closest races, if not the closest race, in history. We were right on, and that helped. And from that point on, we've been very good, for the most part.

QUESTION: What was your father's view of the importance of the opinion poll and how would he feel about its use today?

ALEC GALLUP: Well, he felt that it was critical. It was the one dimension that was missing. Before it was, you know, smoke-filled rooms. And no matter how you felt about it, you needed to know you didn't have to slavishly follow what the public wanted or what your polls showed the public wanted, but you at least needed to know where they stood. How could you make an informed decision without it?

You'd have to say he was a zealot. He was convinced this was the way of the future; this was the right thing to do, even though he took heat lots of times. And right now you hear an awful lot about the fact that Clinton won't make a move or the Republican candidates won't make a move without checking their polls out. And it's kind of cynical, and they use them for marketing and positioning and all the rest. And I think he'd still say, if he were around, he'd say although it's being overdone now, you still have to know where the public is. And this is what a democracy is about. Without it, what do you have?

Overall he'd be very proud. He'd think it's doing what it's supposed to do. And on balance, it's the right thing and it's the wave of the future and it's going to go this way. It's a little unfortunate some of it is a little overdone sometimes.

QUESTION: What was your father's personality like?

ALEC GALLUP: Extraordinarily laid back. I've never known anybody who was as calm. You almost never even saw him angry. I mean, he was almost phlegmatic. He was an intense guy and, you know, it was constant. His mind was moving all the time. But he never lost his cool. He never got angry. He was a moderately religious guy, I would say. And as I said, I would place him very much in the middle. I think he worked very hard to be - for instance, he would never vote. He never voted. This was one of the things people couldn't understand. The reason he didn't vote is because he didn't have people asking him how he voted. He said, "I don't. It's easier not to." He said, "Everybody should vote but me." He said, "I don't want to do it, because then people ask me, and then they say, 'Oh, you're a Republican or you're a Democrat.'"

QUESTION: What about some of the criticisms of polling, such as the bandwagon effect, manipulation of opinion and so on?

ALEC GALLUP: Oh, in terms of bandwagon, he didn't believe that that was true. All you had to do was look at 1948, I mean, in places and situations where there was no bandwagon there. And he felt that that always had been sort of exaggerated, that that really wasn't the case.

Well, he always felt that that was a danger [of manipulation] and that did happen, but that knowledgeable people and people who are experts in the field could spot that. You can tell loaded questions, and it happens all the time. And there are certain organizations in America, who will go nameless, who do spin off loaded questions, and they're very obviously loaded. And if the question is objective, the sampling is done correctly, you're okay. And obviously, it can be used cynically by certain organizations who try to put a spin on, but there's less of it than you'd think.

QUESTION: Was there ever pressure put on Gallup by political partisans?

ALEC GALLUP: We would get calls from the . . . what would it be? What's the organization, the Republican organization? You would get calls wanting to know. And you're caught, because you don't want to give [it to] them. The data's in the public domain once it's released. And they would want you to release a poll three or four hours earlier, or earlier if you had it the next day. And we constantly were saying, "No, we can't do that. We can't do that." So the Nixon administration did bombard us in a way. They would suggest questions we should ask. We didn't pay attention. We wouldn't do them, because usually they were loaded and they were obvious what they were doing. And we'd just politely say, "That's an interesting question." Click.

QUESTION: Has Gallup become synonymous with polling?

ALEC GALLUP: It's a generic word in a way. And what's interesting, it's used in Scandinavia as a generic term. It's the word for survey. So you'd have a Harris gallup or a Roper gallup. The word for poll is a gallup, with a small 'g', I guess. And so it is. And, as a matter of fact, it's a little spooky, the generic part of it. It causes us a lot of problems, because in Scandinavia you really can't say, "Hey, you can't use our name," because they can use it, because it means survey.

NEW RIVER MEDIA INTERVIEW WITH: GEORGE GALLUP, JR. THE GALLUP ORGANIZATION, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

QUESTION: How did your father become interested in public opinion polling?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: Well, I think you could say, probably, that his early interest that led to his getting involved in polling stemmed from his natural curiosity. He was a good listener all his life. He liked to talk to people and search them out. And so, from that point of view, polling was a natural outcropping. But, more specifically, the poll grew out of my father's efforts for his Ph.D. thesis at Iowa to develop what is called the 'readership method,' which is still used today. Prior to the time, newspapers would simply ask people what they read in the paper. And, of course, that was not very trustworthy testimony because most people would say, of course, I read the headlines, you know, and all the important news, and that sort of thing. So, my dad took the simple measure of actually taking a sample newspaper around to people, and asking them specifically did they read that particular column or not. And that's the readership method, and that's used today in advertising. And that was a great breakthrough because up to that time, editors had been relying upon testimony that wasn't accurate.

My dad also developed what is call the 'coincidental method' of measuring how many people are listening to a particular radio show, which is simply asking people at the time either in personal interviews or over the telephone, but mostly personal in those days, what they were listening to on the radio. So he went directly to the people. And up to that time, the approach had been to ask people, what did listen to last week, and so forth. And the prestige factor often operated in those circumstances.

QUESTION: How did he get exposed to politics and electioneering?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: My dad did some polling in my grandmother's race for Secretary of State [of Iowa] in 1932. My grandfather had run for the governorship four years earlier, in the mid-1920s, and as a Democrat and lost, but he did very well, incidentally. And my grandmother was running as a Democrat, a woman, and it was unheard of for a woman or a Democrat to win high office in Iowa, and it was a family joke, her being on the ticket. But she won, and she won quite handily. And then she swept back into office with FDR in 1936. And so she was, as far as we know, the first woman secretary of state of any state in this country.

My mother also was very influential in picking my dad's future career. Not that she was wildly ambitious, you know, but she knew that he had certain great talents and interest and she urged him in his pursuit of polling, and they were an extraordinary team, my mother and father. Mom was very important to his career and everything else. Their marriage was legendary really. They were married in 1925, in 1926 my grandfather ran for governor of Iowa, lost, and as an honor they put my grandmother on the ticket. And my dad did some polling on her race, and his figures were within 1 percent of what she actually got. So that was probably the first scientific survey on politics, on a political race ever conducted in this country, as far as we know.

His success in that election forecast, this informal effort on behalf of my grandmother, certainly inspired him and empowered him and inspired him to move forward with polling. And, subsequently, in the 1934 congressional election, he polled the race for Congress nationwide, and his figures, again, were within 1 percentage point of the outcome. Again, informally, he did not publish these findings, actually. So, emboldened, he started the Gallup Poll the following year, in 1935.

QUESTION: Did this reflect his personal philosophy?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: He basically had a very powerful desire to know the will of the people, and felt that in a democracy it's important to know the will of the people accurately all the time. So, he felt that polling had a great role in this country in a democracy, and also had a great role in the future of the country.

The very first report that we sent to the newspapers in October 1935 had to do with the New Deal. And our findings indicated that the public thought the New Deal was costing too much. And so New Dealers were absolutely furious, of course. So, a barrage of criticism that accompanies poll results started in earnest at that point. The reason he chose that question was because it was certainly a major issue at the time, and the problem in polling and all these other challenges, of course, is to search out the big issues about which people are talking. And the New Deal was very much on people's minds, of course, that was perhaps one of the two or three really huge issues at the time.

My dad is best described, I think, as a militant moderate, really. But he will take a position that might be Republican on one issue, and Democrat on the other. And it fits his definition of an intellectual really, as a person who really weighs both sides and doesn't relentlessly go down one side or the other of the ticket. He never voted in any presidential race. Actually the one and only in which he voted was in 1928. He voted for Al Smith. But subsequently has not voted, and he did not vote because he felt that he would either have to lie to reporters who were always asking him that, or he'd have to say he's a Republican or Democrat. And then reporters would say, ah-ha, this is biasing the questions.

By the same token, it should be noted that he never failed to vote in local elections, because he believed very much in the power of the ballot box, and the need for citizens to vote. But he didn't vote on a national level.

QUESTION: How do you explain that result of 1935, to the question about public relief?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: The first release on the New Deal, people feeling it costing too much, and then later people wanting to help people through welfare and so forth. Well, you always have this kind of dichotomy. I mean, the American people want to be very helpful to the poor. By the same token, they don't want to pay high taxes. So, it's been a balance that the public has had to deal with over the years, and in the polling field we just have to be as careful as we can with questions to bring out this dichotomy.

Another example of this dichotomy would be that the high percentage of the public, I guess 90 percent or so, wanting pensions for older people, and so forth, but yet the public doesn't want to spend a lot of money for it either. So, this is the kind of dichotomy that we're finding even today in the year 2000.

QUESTION: Talk about the advent of scientific polling [using sampling]?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: It had been around in academic settings and so forth, and Roper had started the Fortune Poll a few months earlier. And so, there were sporadic efforts to do it, but my dad brought it to the national scene through a syndicated newspaper service, actually. Well, the reaction to that first report was dismay among New Dealers, of course, and the attacks started immediately. How can you interview merely - I think in those days it was two or three thousand people - and project this to the entire country.

That began to change, actually, the next year, when Gallup, Roper and Crossley, Archibald Crossley was a pollster, and Elmo Roper was another pollster, these were the three scientific pollsters, if you will, operating in 1936, and their success in the election, and the failure of the Literary Digest really changed some minds. And people started to think, well, maybe polls are accurate after all.

QUESTION: Relate the story of the presidential election of 1936 [between Roosevelt and Landon] and your father's role in predicting the outcome.

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: In 1936, in the election year, my dad had the temerity to challenge the Literary Digest, which had developed an incredible record since the turn of the century in predicting elections. My dad had the temerity to predict how far off the mark they would be. You will have to check these figures, but he said that they'd be 19 points off, and they were 18 points [off]. So that was more accurate, that prediction, than our own at that time, but he and Crossley and Roper went on to predict that FDR would win.

Now, the reason that the Literary Digest was way off the mark is that they had developed their sample from lists of car owners and telephone owners. And these tended to be more upscale than the average person. And up to that time, political lines didn't follow economic lines particularly. But in that race in 1936, political lines followed economic lines very sharply. So the Literary Digest in going to upscale people got a much more Republican figure. My dad attempted to get people of all political backgrounds, upscale and down scale, and so they were on the mark. The Literary Digest was way off the mark. The Gallup operation and, as I mentioned, Crossley and Roper were calling FDR the victor.

The Literary Digest also assumed that the more people you interviewed, the closer you're going to get to the truth, the actual, and of course that's not so. As a matter of fact, they went to about a third of all households in the United States. And the assumption was, the more people you interview, of course, you're going closer to the truth. But, of course, the key is, whom are you interviewing, the characteristics of those people.

QUESTION: Talk some more about the actual polling method used in the presidential election of 1936 [between Roosevelt and Landon].

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: The process used in that election was in-person interviewing coupled with mail surveys as well in those days. Interviewing today is virtually entirely by telephone, although we still do - occasionally do in-person interviews. But in those days, it was strictly a combination of mail and in-person interviews.

To find people we were using what we call the quota sample in those days. My dad had, after a great deal of experimentation - in fact he looked at the effect of fifty-four different questions in terms of demographics - determined that there were five key determinants of opinion, and they were age and sex, income, region, and so forth. And then he would send his interviewers out to get a quota of people from each of those groups.

The 1936 election was, in my father's view, the most important turning point in his life. He's had many important turning points, but that was it, really, and he knew that the image and the future of polling rested in considerable measure on the outcome of that very obvious test of whether polls can find the truth, can get at the actual facts.

As the election day approached, of course, he was very, very nervous. And he wasn't a smoker, but he would borrow people's cigarettes constantly, and they were in his mouth unlit. But he was, without question, very, very nervous, very concerned, very worried. But, he's always told me, he can go back to other careers, and he thinks that everybody should have two careers in mind, and he said I can always return and be a journalist, or a teacher, or a professor of journalism.

When the results came in and he was proved right. I don't personally because I was six, but I know the stories are that he, you know - early on when the election returns came in, he knew that they would be - indicate the right, the winner of the outcome. And similarly with every other election, he probably knows more than - sooner than any other person in the country, you know, yes, things are going well, or, no, things are not going well, in the case of 1948. So early on that evening, I think, he probably popped a cork off a champagne bottle, and so forth. It was a very - it was an exhilarating moment, I know that. That election was a very, very key one, of course, a dramatic demonstration that scientific polls can be really, really close to the actual. And it, of course, helped him build up his newspaper subscribers, and so forth, with Harold Anderson, who ran Publisher's Syndicate in Chicago, Publisher's Hall Syndicate. And built up support among newspapers, actually, which has under-girded the Gallup Poll ever since.

QUESTION: How did the Gallup name become synonymous with opinion polling?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: I suppose that the name Gallup is better known than some of the other pollsters who started early on then. I think the factors involved in that are because we were widely syndicated in the newspapers all across the country, because we had an excellent election record over the years, and continue to have an excellent election record, so that helps our reputation certainly. The fact that we went overseas, actually, and started affiliates. As early as the late 1930s, we were tying up with other organizations overseas informally. And that, of course, has grown into a huge operation, the overseas operation. So, I think all of those factors contributed to it. And my dad was - you know, he spoke fairly frequently and wrote articles, and so forth, and he was a real student of this field. So, I think all of those factors conspired to give the name some recognition.

QUESTION: What was your father's view of the importance of the opinion poll?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: My dad thought that polls were absolutely vital to a democracy, and he'd like to quote James Bryce, who said that the challenge is to know the will of the people at all times. And he'd like to quote Samuel Stouffer from Harvard, who said that polls are the most useful instrument of democracy ever devised.

He felt that polls were extremely important because they removed the power from lobbying groups, and from smoke-filled rooms, and let the public into the act. It was the way to let the public speak, to hear the public. And so he felt that is so vital in a democracy that people - each person, in effect, through a survey is able to express his or her views on anything.

QUESTION: What was the immediate impact of the result of the 1936 election [where Roosevelt beat Landon]?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: I would say that the 1936 election really put the so-called "scientific pollsters" on the map. My father, George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper, because it was a very dramatic demonstration of the power - rather the accuracy - of scientific polling versus other kinds of surveys, that relied on sheer numbers, or samples that weren't representative.

QUESTION: What happened in the presidential election of 1948 between Dewey and Truman?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: Well, everybody remembers the 1948 election, at least if you're that age, and maybe eventually talk of that will die out, but it was the time that polls were really off the mark. And it's important to bear in mind that the 1948 election didn't mean that the polling mechanism was worthless, it wouldn't function at all. In fact, one can pinpoint the reasons all pollsters went off the mark, actually, and that was simply that we stopped polling too soon, missed the collapse of support for other parties . . . And that vote went back to traditional voting patterns, in this case towards the Democratic side and towards Truman. But, our having stopped polling too soon, we missed the collapse of support and the return of that to major parties. This typically happens in every election, it has during the turn of the century, that a vote for third parties will collapse in closing days, because it's typically in the nature of a protest vote. But, we didn't know that at that time, so we stopped polling early and missed the collapse of support. So that was the big reason.

Another factor, but of less importance, was in the allocation of the undecided vote. Prior to 1948 we decided, or assumed, that the undecided would vote the way the decided did. So we split them accordingly. But, the fact of the matter is that a person who is truly undecided is truly undecided. And the safest way is to split it right down the middle. So when we started doing that we got much closer. And, of course, one of the big challenges in election polling is to deal with the undecided, and ultimately we look at the undecided in terms of issues to see which party or which candidate it will go to, and we end up with no undecided. Some organizations, polling organizations, will leave a high undecided so they can fiddle with that later and say well, if they had gone this way we would have been right, and so forth. But, we feel that the public expects us to stand up to the fire really, and come up with an actual figure, a two-way figure in the race, and so forth. So the allocation of the undecided vote was part of the system, too.

And another underlying but very important factor was using the quota method versus a new method we were about to work into called modified probability sampling. Now, the quota method works for virtually all elections, except the problem is you're dealing with only five variables, or determinates of voting behavior, or thinking, and so forth. And there are, of course, other factors. Well, a modified probability sample allows any range of factors to be involved, because you're operating on a chance or random selection, taking every nth person. No judgment enters into it, no subjectivity.

With a quota sample you're saying, go out and get X percent of farmers, to our interviewers and so forth. There's a lot of judgment in there, a lot of subjectivism, really. So after the 1948 election we shifted to modified probability sampling. We were going to anyway, and I don't think the quota sample hurt us in that election much. But, what happens is you miss variables, and in 1960 when Kennedy was running against Nixon, and Kennedy being a Roman Catholic, we didn't have religion as a factor, so we didn't have maybe the right percentage of Catholics or Protestants, and that could have thrown us way off. That's a case in point.

QUESTION: How did the 1948 election results [in favor of Truman instead of Dewey] influence your father?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: The results of that election did not really shake my father. I mean, he was obviously puzzled, and said immediately after the election, I don't know what happened, but you can be darn sure we're going to find out what happened right away what happened, and they did. But, he is so resilient, my father, that he felt, one, he was confident he could find what went wrong, and beyond that he was not going to let it bring him down. He had other things he could do. And he had such a great curiosity that polling wasn't the only idea that he'd helped develop, actually. I mean, he was a man of ideas. So he knew that through his own creativity he could express himself in other areas, in other fields.

The 1948 election result was actually a body blow to the image of polling in this country. And for years afterward people would say, what happened in 1948, and my dad once joked that on his tombstone there will be the numbers 1948. So we patiently explained the factors involved in that, actually, and slowly polling came back and I think improved its image. Elections are really the acid test of a poll's methodology.

QUESTION: What about the enduring value of polling?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: My dad was really a fervent promoter of public opinion polling in the United States and around the world, because in many respects he was a populist, he believed in the average person, he believed in the tremendous potential of the average person. And that was sort of instinctive with him. And so he felt that polls, in effect, were representing everybody, whether or not they vote or not, and it's giving everybody a voice, and that resonated with his inner being, if you will.

Polls today continue, I believe, to reflect values in the populace, democratic values really and I think have helped guide leaders and the populace, too, to see what problems are upper most, and what solutions are available, and what's the strength of manpower and woman power to deal with these particular problems. So it continues to serve. But, sometimes polls are misused, sometimes a politician will, regardless of his own conscience, just go where the votes are. And that does happen, of course. My dad always maintained that leaders should lead and not follow public opinion, although at the same time they should know where the people are.

QUESTION: What are some of the criticisms of polling?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: One of the big criticisms, of course, was does this subvert leadership, do polls subvert leadership? And his answer was always, absolutely not, because here leaders have the benefit of surveys on every imaginable topic, reflecting the views of every group in the populace. So just as a general needs this kind of information for his intelligence to make his strategies, leaders have that kind of information. But, he always felt that it would be sad if a leader just went with every whim of public opinion. If a leader doesn't agree with the public, it's up to the leader to reeducate the public, that is his purpose.

Another of the frequent criticisms is that polls create a bandwagon effect, that people will jump on the winning side as polls show that candidate or party leading. Well, we like to refute that argument by pointing to 1948, when all the pollsters, including Gallup, were saying that Dewey would win. There may be some effect at a local level, but the fact of the matter is that by the time of the election, the national election, the candidates are well enough known that it's not a question of distorting the race by showing one candidate polling up to the other. There are many other factors that will be involved in the person's choosing their candidate, actually, and it's not necessarily to be on the winner's side. I mean, there are economic factors, which party will keep them out of war, and so forth. Those completely overpower the desire to be on the winning side.

There's also been the charge that polls keep people from going to the polls, actually voting, or that early projections from the East will lower the voting turnout in the far West. And the studies I've seen refute that, really, that people will go to the polls in just the numbers expected, regardless of what happens in the East. But, it is a public relations problem, I think, for the networks, for the projections, because people believe that, so at least that ought to be dealt with.

Sampling can reflect the views of the entire populace within a margin of error of a few percentage points. But, there are certain groups that are left out, out of the sample, and they would be very small in number, maybe 1, 2, 3, or 4 percent at the most. But, they would be transients, people that are just fleeing from the law, or just transients, the homeless and so forth. It's very difficult to get those persons, of course. You know, our sample does not actually include people in prisons, nor in hospitals, nor on military bases.

Polls can also be used to manipulate public opinion. In fact, we give probably most attention in the survey process to the wording of the questions. Just a change in a word or two can affect an outcome. We must be sure that the question we write doesn't insult people with the most education, but is understood by the people with the least education, gives both sides fairly and so forth, and we have to test every question on a small group, pilot study, if you will, to see if there are any problems with a given question. But, there are many examples, unfortunately, of perhaps a politician loading a question so he gets the answer that he or she wants, and then they build their case around that.

There's always a danger, because polls are so well read today that they could distort public opinion. So therefore we belong to certain groups, the National Council of Public Polls, and AAPOR, the American Association of Public Opinion Research, which has a watchdog group, if you will. These are sort of watchdog groups of, I guess, the leading practitioners of polling in this country. And so we check each other out to be sure the polls are used the way they should be, and the wording is carefully done and so forth. So that's a safety hatch, if you will.

QUESTION: What do you think your father would think about polling today, if he were here to see them?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: If my dad were here today I think he'd be very proud of the way public opinion polling has taken hold in the thinking of people in all different spheres, certainly business, and that's been so for many, many years, newspapers certainly buy into polls, if you will, a lot. He'd be pleased with the way it's spread around the world, and helped people understand each other better. I think one of the areas - he would have been disappointed in a couple of areas.

One is that in the area of the mechanics of polling, the sophistication of polling and so forth, there haven't been many changes, in his view, that it sort of stopped at that point. Maybe some would challenge that, but when he said this a few years ago prior to his death that's what he felt. It's interesting that there was a lot of advancement in the science of polling and then it sort of stopped, in the 1950s. But, in a sense that's understandable, because the question was you can't really go beyond a certain point of developing a sample, the accuracy of a sample. But, I think he meant in new ways of question design, new ways of the application of polls, I think he felt that, too.

I think another area that would have disappointed him is that younger people don't know much about polling really. They're trained in so many other ways, they can be computer whizzes, but they don't really know much about the science of polling. And I think that would have really disappointed him to realize that it hasn't become more pervasive, the understanding of polls, nationwide. And that takes the form of younger people not understanding polls and what's behind them, but also not having the knowledge of how they might apply polls in the future, because I think his feeling was that polling is a way of thinking, really, as well as a method of application. To find out how people think it helps people make decisions, of course, and that polling can be applied in many different ways. It can be used in schools, small numbers really, you only need deal with a hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred people, you don't need to have thousands and thousands.

So I think he would still say that polling is in its infancy, that its development will increase greatly around the world, on a local level, there will be new applications, there will be greater efforts to explore the inner life, which could be regarded as the new frontier of survey research. It could be used as a way to prevent wars, used in the area of health more, they can be used as a clearinghouse for societal ideas from around the world. So I think he would feel that we're still in the infancy, that there's a lot more that can be done with the application of the polling technique.

QUESTION: What is your own view of polling's value?

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: I believe that polling has made a huge contribution to this country, because it's removed power out of the hands of special interest groups, it's given people who wouldn't normally have a voice a voice, not only on issues, but also in terms of products and services, really. It's enabled people in the area of religion, for example, to see whether they're integrating their faith into their lives and their actions. You can look at every sphere of the public and see that they're better off because they know where people are, and they knew the challenge ahead, in terms of educating people, of giving them new knowledge, and so forth. So I see it as overwhelmingly positive, the impact of surveys. I think what would dramatize this is if you imagined not having a way of telling what people think, and just having to rely on fiery editorials, and the handful people around you, how distorted all this could be.

QUESTION: Talk about your father's sense of integrity in relation to political and opinion polling.

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: Well, he was a man of ideas, certainly, and a man of ideals, as well. He really actively tried to have new ideas constantly, and he felt that everybody could do this. He would never have called himself a genius, but I would call him a true intellectual, because he would not necessarily follow the party line, he read independently and widely, he spent time reflecting, thinking by himself. He was always au currant with the news, I mean, he not only knew the news, he had also thought about a lot behind the news. And this is part of his training, of course, through polling, where we tried to be on the cusp of new ideas, and try to get inside the issues, and so forth. But, he was a master at that. He had wide interests, and was very creative. I mean, there were very many different ideas that he developed, and he once said that he tried to have a new idea every day, actually.

He was a very generous, kind person, he was without pretension, he would be ready to give credit to other people, that's something you don't see a lot sometimes in the business world, and bone deep honesty was certainly part of his make up, really. It would never occur to him to cheat, or lie, or distort. He was a very resilient man, he had a strong sense of duty, even in the face of illness and fatigue. He loved his family. He was, I guess, a farmer at heart, he really loved to be on a farm, loved farming, loved animals, farm animals and so forth. He was an extraordinary guy in many different ways. My dad would take no hard political line. And he wasn't prone to get swept away by enthusiasm for a new leader, and so forth. He was very careful and calculating, actually, in his judgment and so forth. He really was an independent thinker. He really didn't go down a predictable line.

Well, my dad always saw the tremendous potential for democracy of polling around the world. And with the outbreak of freedom around the world polling has played a very important role in all of this. So it was his dream that everybody around the world should be heard. And, in fact, through surveys and sampling this is now a possibility.

New River Media Interview with: David Moore Author, The Super Pollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America

QUESTION: How important was George Gallup in the development of the modern opinion poll?

DAVID MOORE: George Gallup was probably the most important early pollster because of several things. Number one is he launched his "America Speaks" syndication in 1935. In 1936 he predicted the [presidential] race correctly. Now, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley also did, but George Gallup went out on the line more than they did. He actually guaranteed the newspapers that were subscribing to his poll that if he was wrong he would refund all their money. Now that was a lot of polling that he had been doing that whole year, so for him to agree to refund the money if he was wrong was a real big gamble.

And what he meant by being wrong is that he said he would be closer than the Literary Digest. In 1932 the Literary Digest had done an absolutely fantastic job of predicting the election within a couple percentage points, had predicted correctly 44 out of the 48 states. So he was really taking on what at that time appeared to be the giant of polling. That was another reason why Gallup was so correct because the stakes were so large, and he won.

And finally the other thing that he did at that time is he predicted what the Literary Digest poll would show using their technique, and he predicted that they would show Landon ahead of Roosevelt. And he was right, right within a couple of percentage points. That, of course, infuriated the people at the Literary Digest, but it made for good copy and it certainly pushed George Gallup's name out there to the forefront.

QUESTION: The Literary Digest's poll was also a pretty massive operation. Was this sort of a David and Goliath situation?

DAVID MOORE: One of the features of the Literary Digest poll is that the Literary Digest would send out around 10 to 15 million ballots. Actually they got back 10 to 15 million. They got back I think in 1936 they just got back about 2 million. But still George Gallup was doing polling on the basis of approximately 2,000 to 2,500 people across the country. So a lot of politicians at the time and said, "How can you believe George Gallup? I know the Literary Digest is polling because I know of people who have gotten the ballot, but I never see a George Gallup interviewer." So, you know, what's going on here?

And the Literary Digest not only sent out millions of ballots, but, of course, having been so accurate in the 1932 election when it came within a couple percentage points of predicting the election, was correct in 45 of the 48 states, was now going against this upstart former academic, who was saying, "Oh no, you're going to be wrong, because you're using a system of sampling from telephones and auto lists, people who are richer. You're using this sampling procedure that is going to lead you to an incorrect conclusion."

Well, at the time in 1936 not a whole lot of people believed George Gallup and a lot of people believed the Literary Digest, much to George Gallup's glee when the final results came forth.

QUESTION: Why was Gallup right and the Digest so wrong?

DAVID MOORE: Gallup was right in 1936 because the structure of the voting had changed from 1932. In 1932 rich people and poor people were all dissatisfied with the Republicans, because of the Great Depression, because of the fall of the stock market and things of that nature. But by 1936 it had become a class election so that disproportionately the poorer people were voting for the Democrats and the more wealthy people were voting for the Republicans.

So when the Literary Digest was sampling based upon people who had telephones and who add autos, they were disproportionately getting the richer people who were going to vote for the Republicans and so their results reflected the notion that Alf Landon was going to beat FDR, whereas Gallup intended to get people of all economic levels.

And when he sent his interviewers out across the country they had quotas they had to fill to make sure that they had people with high, low and of course medium income levels. So by ensuring that he had a proper distribution among the income levels he got a more accurate sample of the general public, and therefore was accurate in his final analysis.

QUESTION: How was he able to predict what the Digest's results would be?

DAVID MOORE: In order to predict what the Literary Digest might come up with, George Gallup almost casually said, "You know, I think I will use a tel-auto lists, the way in which the Literary Digest does", and he didn't use as many, and he didn't send out as many millions, but just sent out, you know, maybe a couple thousand, figuring that he would get some idea of how different the tel-auto lists would be from his own sample, which was more systematic.

And when he got the results back, he tabulated them and it showed that Alf Landon would beat FDR in this tel-auto list by about the same proportion that the millions of tallies that the Literary Digest did also showed later on that year. So in the spring of the election year George Gallup was saying, "This is what the Literary Digest is going to find." And the editor of the Literary Digest was almost apoplectic, because they hadn't even sent out their first ballot yet. And so he was very critical of this unknown person named George Gallup, but ultimately of course the Literary Digest folded and George Gallup did not.

QUESTION: What did Gallup's success in predicting this election mean for him and for public opinion polling in America?

DAVID MOORE: The success of the 1936 election meant that the new scientific pollsters, which included Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, along with George Gallup now had credibility. It also meant that polling expanded into a lot of commercial areas. It's also used sociologically. This election demonstrated that the so-called scientific polling was much more accurate. For George Gallup it meant that, of course, he had more subscribers. It meant that the Gallup Poll became famous and it meant that people had more belief now in these polls.

Still, as there is even today, there was skepticism that a poll of only about two or three thousand people nationwide could really reflect what everybody was thinking. But at least the 1936 election said, "Well, it's a lot better than getting ten million if you got the wrong ten million."

QUESTION: Tell me about the presidential election of 1948. What happened and why did Gallup and other scientific pollsters miss the boat so badly?

DAVID MOORE: 1948 was a big disaster for the polling industry, for the scientific pollsters. The major problem with the polling in 1948 is that the pollsters did not believe that much could change. After all, they had done polling in 1936, 1940, 1944. They had done polling early on in the presidential year and it hadn't really changed very much in the whole election year. There was no real volatility of the electorate as we see today.

Now, one possible explanation for that is that they didn't really have as serious campaigning as we have today, and more important it was the same presidential candidate every time, FDR. But in 1948 it was the first time that FDR wasn't in the race, so people had two new candidates to consider. And Elmo Roper was probably the most eloquent in his misperception, because he said, "I think what we ought to do is do one poll sometime in the fall and then not do anymore because nothing could possibly change between now and the election." Gallup also did not poll all the way up until the election, but stopped about a week and a half or 10 days early, thinking that not much could change.

Now today we would really be surprised if they did that, because, after all, at that point Dewey was leading Truman by only about 6 or 7 percentage points. With a 6 or 7 percentage point lead today no one would say, "The race is over." We'd say, "A lot can happen" because we have the experience, but at that time they didn't know.

And a lot did happen and probably the most significant thing is that Harry Truman's whistle-stop campaign on the train in the last closing weeks had enough of an impact on public opinion to help switch the vote over in his favor.

But that was an explanation that came after the election. Before the election everybody - not just the pollsters - the politicians, the Broadway pamphlet came out asking, "What are we going to do during the Dewey administration?" Newsweek, Time, everybody came out expecting that Dewey was going to win. And it was in large part because the polls had shown that and because the pollsters were so confident.

So the net consequence of this disaster was a real setback for the polling industry, not only public opinion polling but commercially as well.

QUESTION: In addition to stopping the polling too soon, what about the type of the sampling method he was using?

DAVID MOORE: Most of the advances in sampling were being done by academics. And one of the advances had been that instead of doing the quota sampling, which George Gallup had been doing since 1936, they ought to do what they call probability sampling. Quota sampling is just saying, "Let's go out to the various states, to the various regions and make sure we've got so many women, so many men, so many high income, so many medium, so many low income people, so many of this age and so on." So you make sure that you've got a distribution.

Random sampling is different. It says everybody has an equal chance of being selected and as a consequence you'll get the right proportions of men and women, of people by age and income.

Some people felt that the 1948 election polling debacle was a result of Gallup and other pollsters at the time continuing to use the quota method rather than the probability sampling. And by the way today everybody uses probability sampling. As a matter of fact, the very next election even the public pollsters used it. They weren't going to get caught again.

Still, a very close analysis of the results suggests that that wasn't really the problem. Quota sampling can be okay. Even, you know, throughout the 1970s and 1980s and most of the 1990s quota sampling, if done correctly, can come pretty close. So it wasn't really a sampling problem. Still, I wouldn't want to use quota sampling today, because we have a better method, and particularly with telephone interviewing you can do the right method. But a lot of people felt that that was possibly the reason for the error in 1948.

QUESTION: Can you really get valid data from just a small number of people? Are these random probability samplings really accurate?

DAVID MOORE: When trying to explain sampling, Gallup always used this analogy. He said, "Assume you've got a pool outside and all the water has been removed and instead what's been dumped into there are jillions and jillions of marbles, a certain number of red marbles, a certain number of white marbles and they've all been mixed up. And your task is to find out what's the proportion of red and what's the proportion of white marbles in this great big pool. How are you going to do it?

"You're not going to count every single one of those marbles. What you're probably going to do is go in and get a bucket, which will be a sample, and count out the distribution. Now, if they're all completely mixed you've got a good example. The problem, of course, is if most of the red marbles are on one side and most of white marbles are on the other, then you've got a problem of trying to make sure that you pull out a proportionate number."

In any case, it's the same concept. You don't need to poll everybody. If you can get a good representative sample, small number of people but have all of the characteristics of a larger group, then you don't need a large sample. In fact, typically the samples that are used today are about a thousand nationwide. In most states pollsters tend to use about 500. Nationwide, if we use a thousand we say that we'll come in with what we would have gotten had we polled everybody; 95 percent of the time we'll come in within about 3 percentage points. If you do 500 you're up to a margin of error of about 5 percentage points. So, the sample has been tested by statisticians, not just pollsters but statisticians. It's a good technique if it's done correctly.

QUESTION: As a result of the 1948 debacle, what then happened to public opinion of polling then and through the 1950s and 1960s?

DAVID MOORE: The consequence of the 1948 debacle was probably greater for some of the commercial clients. For example, up until that time Gallup had been doing a lot of movie research. The Best Years of Our Lives was a movie, was a 1947 movie that won the Academy Award that had been tested by Gallup, all the characters and things like that. But after 1948 a lot of the artists in Hollywood, who didn't like the whole concept of concept testing anyway, said, "Look, you can't even trust Gallup anymore." So the movie business for Gallup really went down.

Oddly enough there weren't that many cancellations of the newspapers, because even if you make a mistake, you know, you still say, "Well, what else is there? If you want to find out what the public's thinking, how are you going to do it? You're going to go back to Literary Digest or are you going to hope that the pollsters figure out what they did was wrong and improve it?"

So while there was some initial setback, I think in the long run it didn't really hurt the advancement of polling. Perhaps it helped it by forcing all of the public opinion pollsters now to move to the new methodology of sampling rather than the old antiquated one, and as a consequence it essentially grew.

QUESTION: Can't polls be used to manipulate public opinion as well as measure it?

DAVID MOORE: I think it's much more difficult today to say that polls can be used to manipulate public opinion, because there are so many polls. The advantage of having all the major network polls is that if there is a bias question other polling organizations who are competing with each other are going to point that out or ask their own questions. And I think one can safely say that among the major media polling organizations that are publishing results on a regular basis, national polling organizations, that they want to be accurate. They don't want to manipulate and they constantly check each other.

For example, during that whole period of [Clinton's] impeachment I would say that that was probably one of the best polled set of events that we've had, because you had so many polling organizations trying to figure out what was really going on, trying to understand how the public might continue to support a president who was getting all of this other negative kind of publicity. So the polls really tried to look at the issue from a lot of different angles. And because there were so many polling organizations it wouldn't have mattered, if one organization had had a bias for or against them it wouldn't have mattered. There were four or five others that were always going at it at the same time.

So from my way of thinking it was a dangerous period during the 1960s and 1970s when there were only two polling organizations [Gallup and Harris]. Too much emphasis was placed upon the results of those polls, too little recognition of how polling results can change with subtle changes in question wording and order. And so that now with more polls, more competition, we're in a better situation so that no one polling organization can dominate and no real manipulation of the public and more important of public opinions appearance so that it has an influence in Washington in a negative way can happen because of all these organizations.

QUESTION: What kind of criticisms do you hear about our reliance on public opinion polling today, and are some of them valid?

DAVID MOORE: Some people have argued that there are too many polls, that as a consequence politicians rely on polls and that's the question, what are they supposed to rely on? Well, one could say they should rely on their own views rather than what the public thinks or they should rely on their own views rather than what polls show. They should be leaders.

I'm a political scientist first and foremost. My sense is this: Politicians will always find a way to cater to the masses. If there are no polls, that didn't mean that politicians didn't try to cater to the masses, they just found different ways of doing that. When they would go back to their districts, they would go to, you know, Lions Club meetings and all the other kinds of meetings, they'd find out what the people would say. People who wrote to them were given undue influence, because, "Oh, I got letter from this constituent or I got a campaign of letters from these constituents," and he might pay more attention to those.

So I think those politicians who are not going to exercise leadership, who are going to try to kow-tow too much to the public are going to do it whether it's by polls or some other way. Those who believe that there are certain principles, that probably in the long run would help their constituency and they're going to follow them, will use polls to find out what the public is thinking and then maybe say, "It looks like I've got an educational problem on my hands. I've got to go out and explain my point of view to the public given what I know and they don't know." So I don't think polls change the character of people. It's just an instrument that can be used for good and for ill.

QUESTION: Is there anything about the use of polls today that gives you pause?

DAVID MOORE: One of the problems the polling industry is facing right now is a lower response rate. More and more people are refusing to respond, or if they don't refuse directly they make it difficult for us to get a hold of them. They've got answering machines. They've got cell phones. They've got, you know, screening devices and things of that nature. And so one is that the refusal rate has gone up. Once you actually get a hold the people, the refusal rate is greater than it used to be. It's harder to get a hold of people because of all the various other ways in which they can not be available.

[Something] that the polling industry would like to solve is the problem of telemarketing. We feel that the telemarketers are our problem, because people pick up a phone and you've got somebody who's trying to sell you something, so now you have the good pollsters, us, the legitimate pollsters who call you up and say, "Oh, we want your opinion. We're not trying to sell you anything." But you don't believe us anymore because that's what a lot of these other people are doing, they're selling under the guise of polling, which we call slugging. So they're out there slugging and we're trying to do something legitimate and the consumers are getting conflicted messages.

QUESTION: What was George Gallup's view of the role of public opinion polling in a democracy and what did he see as its potential?

DAVID MOORE: Gallup's vision for polling was that it would be a way to monitor the pulse of democracy. Up until then even with Literary Digest, which only did a poll around election time or maybe once every two years, there was no way to ascertain what the public in general was thinking about a lot of public issues of the day. You just had to wait until an election when people would go and vote in our vote out those people who had made the decisions, but there was no way really to figure out what the meaning of an election was without knowing why people voted a certain way.

So he felt that by having polling continuously we would essentially get the reaction of the public to a lot of various issues. He was also very attuned to the notion that you can ask people questions about issues that they aren't aware of, and so he came up with his five-step method, that's called his quintessential method for making sure that we ask people what they've heard about it, how involved are they about it, and then once we ask about the issue and then, you know, how intensely they feel about it. There simply isn't enough time in any given poll for every single issue to do it that way, but he was attuned to it.

I think today a lot of our polling asks people about issues that they don't know anything about. We don't always do the question that says, "Do you favor, oppose, or are you unsure?" We often, even though we don't give them projective questions, we often give them forced choice questions, thinking that whatever they're inclined to at the moment, at least has some relevance for what we're reporting.

In any case, I would say that Gallup's vision of the polling industry that helps to monitor the pulse of democracy has largely been fulfilled, that the industry is, in fact, providing as accurate information as we can about opinion that is constantly in flux about a lot of different issues, but nevertheless is at least of some relevance in a democratic form of government.

QUESTION: Jumping back to 1935, the very first question in the very first Gallup poll found that 60 percent of the people thought government was spending too much on relief and recovery. This runs counter to what most people would think about New Deal America. Do you have any thoughts on why he got the result?

DAVID MOORE: In 1935 people had a lot of assumptions about what the public was thinking. Although it's true that the very first question that Gallup asked about whether the government was spending too much, too little or about the right amount for the New Deal, and he showed that people felt the government was spending too much, that viewpoint, that kind of skeptical viewpoint about the government spending money has remained a very important part of American politics for these last sixty-five years.

I think in retrospect it's not as surprising as it was at the time, because at the time people thought, "Well, the government is helping a recovery." Now, it wasn't absolutely clear to all of the people necessarily that the government spending was always beneficial.

We also know that question wording could play a part. For example, today if we asked whether there should be more or less government spending on some things, we often, particularly on welfare, if we use the term "welfare", you get a strong majority say no. But if you ask whether or not the government should provide more, about the same, or less assistance to the poor, you get more people saying support for assistance to the poor.

So, I'm not sure myself when I look back at that question whether it was a question wording or a problem, and had it been worded differently he might have gotten more support, or whether it was just a part of the general American skepticism about government spending, one or the other.

QUESTION: Just a few months later he asked the question of whether people favored old age pensions, and over 90 percent said yes. Is that not contradictory with the previous poll?

DAVID MOORE: I think what Gallup was finding in 1935, 1936 is what we find today, and that is on the one hand people have a certain set of ideas about what government role should be. We find that, for example, with respect to guns, we say, "Do you think there should be more laws regulating guns or not?" And a slight majority of people say, "No, we don't need more laws." And then we say, "Would you favor or oppose" and we mentioned a whole bunch of new laws such as registration of handguns and trigger locks and things of that nature, and an overwhelming majority say yes.

So there is oftentimes a conflict in the public opinion results between a conceptual, general matter on the one hand and very specific items on the other. What Gallup found in 1935 is that while people felt too much spending for relief by the government, that most people felt there was too much spending, that when it came down to a very specific program they supported it by again strong majorities. And we find that kind of conflict today, apparent conflict today in public opinion polling.

Sometimes the reasons we get would appear to be conflicting responses in poll questions, where people support one thing and then seem to support exactly the opposite is that we're addressing issues that are very complex. And sometimes when you hit it from one angle what you get is people's general feeling that, yes, we ought to spend some money on that item, but over here, no, we ought to have a balanced budget. And so sometimes questions can appear to be conflicting.

And what we've discovered now is that the only way to try to resolve those apparent conflicts is to do trade-off questions, where we ask people, "Well, would you rather have A or B", and sometimes in that approach we can take what otherwise seem to be very conflicting ideas among the American public and make them more understandable.

Sometimes one of the reasons we have a conflict is that too much is going on. The issue itself is very complex. There's a lot of changes that are going on, and there's no single set of questions, maybe one or two, three questions that could really address the full complexity of the issue. So we report it out, but somebody else asking it a little bit differently might come up with a very different viewpoint. And both could be correct, but still apparently conflict.