Everything about Literary Digest totally explained
The
Literary Digest was an influential general-interest
magazine in the early
20th century United States, published by
Funk and Wagnalls. The first issue was in 1890 and in 1938 it merged into
Time Magazine.
The
Digest is almost certainly best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise. It conducted a poll regarding the likely outcome of the
1936 presidential election. The poll showed that the
Republican governor of Kansas,
Alf Landon, would likely be the overwhelming winner. This seemed possible to some as the Republicans had fared well in
Maine, where the congressional and gubernatorial elections were then held in September - as opposed to the rest of the nation, where these elections were held in November along with the presidential election, like today. This seemed especially likely in light of the conventional wisdom, "
As Maine goes, so goes the nation", a truism coined because Maine was regarded as a "
bellwether" state which usually supported the winning candidate's party.
In November, Landon carried only
Vermont and Maine;
U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried the then other forty-six states; Landon's electoral vote total of eight is a tie for the record low for a major-party nominee since the current U.S.
two-party system began in the
1850s. The magazine was completely discredited because of the poll and was soon discontinued.
In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame. Although it had polled 10 million individuals (only about 2 million of these individuals responded, an astronomical sum for
any survey), it had surveyed firstly its own readers, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time (shown in part by their ability still to afford a magazine subscription during the depths of the
Great Depression). The magazine also used two other readily-available lists: that of registered
automobile owners and that of
telephone users. While such lists might come close to providing a statistically-accurate cross-section of Americans currently, this assumption was manifestly untrue in the
1930s. Both groups had income well above the national average of the day, and resulted in lists of voters far more likely to support
Republicans than a truly typical voter of the time.
George Gallup's
American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the election, and for correctly predicting the results of the
Literary Digest poll, using a smaller sample.
This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and was largely regarded as spurring the beginning of the era of modern scientific public opinion research.
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