What improvements in methodology his he use that the Literary Digests 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
