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,
