Roosevelt Predicted to Win: Revisiting the 1936 Literary Digest Poll

Lohr Sharon L. () and Brick J. Michael
Additional contact information
Lohr Sharon L.: Westat, 1600 Research Boulevard, Rockville, MD 20850, USA
Brick J. Michael: Westat, 1600 Research Boulevard, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 65-84

Abstract: The Literary Digest poll of 1936, which incorrectly predicted that Landon would defeat Roosevelt in the 1936 US presidential election, has long been held up as an example of how not to sample. The sampling frame was constructed from telephone directories and automobile registration lists, and the survey had a 24% response rate. But if information collected by the poll about votes cast in 1932 had been used to weight the results, the poll would have predicted a majority of electoral votes for Roosevelt in 1936, and thus would have correctly predicted the winner of the election. We explore alternative weighting methods for the 1936 poll and the models that support them. While weighting would have resulted in Roosevelt being projected as the winner, the bias in the estimates is still very large. We discuss implications of these results for today’s low-response-rate surveys and how the accuracy of the modeling might be reflected better than current practice.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2016-0006 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:8:y:2017:i:1:p:65-84:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/spp/html

DOI: 10.1515/spp-2016-0006

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics, Politics and Policy is currently edited by Joel A. Middleton

More articles in Statistics, Politics and Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().