Albion
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- Dec 8, 2004
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There is definitely a chance that a similarly mistaken prediction could occur this year. There are many more polls now, which probably is good, but they're not agreeing with each other anyway.The most famous gaff.
1948 - Truman runs against Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee in the 1948 presidential election. The scientific pollsters, including George Gallup, all predicted that Dewey would beat Truman. (Gallup had won a dramatic bet by correctly predicting the outcome of the 1936 election.) Newspapers were so sure the pollsters were right that they printed the headline, "Dewey Beats Truman." But they were wrong.
Truman beat Dewey and the race wasn't even that close (Truman won by 3.5 percentage points). What had gone wrong? The pollsters had stopped polling a week before the election. They thought that people's votes would not change before the election.
At this point of their election, the pollsters had Dewy by a landslide. And it was that way until a week before the elections.
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