… Like the other big-name pollsters of the day, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, Gallup predicted in 1948 that New York Attorney General Tom Dewey would rout President Harry Truman in the fall election. …
No one relished this epic fail more than the distinguished Columbia University political scientist Lindsay Rogers. For years, Rogers had been thundering about the unreliability of polling and — more importantly —the groundless faith that people placed in it. In an exquisite bit of timing, Rogers published a book in 1949 entitled The Pollsters. (The coinage, wags noted, evoked the term hucksters, though Rogers denied any intentional allusion.) …
At a philosophical level, he rejected the very idea that public opinion was measurable in the concrete way that the pollsters alleged. … Public opinion, he said, wasn’t like distance or mass or other scientifically measurable phenomena; it had no freestanding existence apart from the operation of measuring it. Polling thus pretended to quantify the unquantifiable. CONT.
David Greenberg (Rutgers), Politico Magazine
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