Why is george gallup famous

Dewey is calling up Gallup so often they have to have a clerk to answer him. Gallup was also accused of trying to get Thomas Dewey elected against Harry S. Truman in the Presidential Election. Truman lost all nine of the Gallup Poll's post-election surveys.

In late September, Dewey had a 17 point lead. According to Albert E. Sindlinger , who worked for Gallup, claimed that "before the election Dewey and Gallup were on the phone constantly.

Dewey was looking for a handle on public opinion and he turned to George Gallup. I found that they were heavily pro-Truman, but Gallup just didn't count them. If the results squared with our story, we'd congratulate ourselves on how smart we were. But if they didn't, then the data would be adjusted, supposedly because there was something wrong with the sample.

Gallup was severely embarrassed by Truman winning with Sindlinger believes that Gallup's biased polls helped to defeat Dewey as it made the Republicans over-confident.

Sindlinger admits that during the campaign he came across a lot of people who said they would not bother to vote because Dewey was a certainty: "pollsters may deny it, but if you look at the evidence it's overwhelmingly clear that polls do influence people.

A number of his subscribing newspapers threatened to cancel their contracts because Gallup's polls did not reflect the result. Gallup replied that scientific surveys be expected to take into account "bribery of voters" and "tampering with ballot boxes"? By Gallup's market research business picked up.

Gallup later explained: "The fact that the polls would recover was in my mind absolutely inevitable. The one thing that sustained me was the fact that no one had ever found a better system for understanding public opinion and I didn't think anyone ever would. David Ogilvy published a book, Confessions of an Advertising Man in It sold over , copies and made him the only advertising figure whose reputation went far beyond that of the industry.

It included a great deal about his work with Gallup. For example: "Dr. Gallup is a fountain of useful information on how people react to different kinds of commercials. He tells us that commercials which start by setting up a problem, then wheel up your product to solve the problem, then prove the solution by demonstration, sell to four times as many people as commercials which merely preach about the product. Gallup also reports that commercials with a strong element of news are particularly effective.

So you should squeeze every drop of news value out of the material available for your commercials Gallup has discovered that the kind of photographs which win awards from camera clubs - sensitive, subtle, and beautifully composed - don't work in advertisements. What do work are photographs which arouse the reader's curiosity He glances at the photograph and says to himself, What goes on here?

Then he reads your copy to find out. This is the trap to set. He points out that Charles Colson worked for Richard Nixon in the Presidential Election : "Colson also hoped to develop a fruitful relationship with the Gallup organization, but gave that a much lower priority than his courting of Harris, because Gallup was already thought to be sympathetic.

Gallup has always been tagged as a Republican partisan - his protestations of neutrality notwithstanding - in part because he overestimated the Republican vote in each of the first four presidential elections in which he polled, and in part because many of his polling associates have worked for Republican candidates. One of his oldest associates, Claude Robinson, ran Nixon's polling operation in , and Robinson's firm, Opinion Research, polled for Nixon in Gallup's lifetime closely reflected the turbulent events of this period.

He sought the public's views on reform in education, in the criminal justice system, and in politics, including a better way of seeking out the ablest men and women for high political office. Gallup never tired of saying that there were billions of ways to live a life and that each one should be studied.

Among his most ambitious projects was a global survey conducted in to determine the quality of life in all areas of the world, a study that sampled populations embracing two-thirds of the world's population. And in the late s, he conducted an international values study that dealt with the social, moral, and religious attitudes of the peoples of most major European countries, including the Eastern bloc, and around the world.

For more information about Dr. Gallup, visit The Gallup House. Today, Gallup employs over 2, professionals in 30 offices around the world committed to providing analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems -- by knowing more about "the will" of 7 billion employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization.

He turned that research into a Ph. In , with a presidential election approaching, he decided to see if he could use his ad-testing ideas to assess the state of politics, TIME explained :.

Anderson jumped at it, urged Gallup on. He was also convinced that the famed Literary Digest poll was heading for a disastrous cropper. The millions of Digest postcards were mailed on the basis of telephone and auto registration lists and took no account of the low-income voters who had swung solidly behind the New Deal.

On election night, , Gallup flipped on the radio and knew he was in. After that, it was simply a question of convincing newspaper publishers that there was still news for pollsters to report. By , the Gallup Poll organization—officially called the American Institute of Public Opinion—operated in a dozen countries, influencing everything from the titles of Hollywood movies to Book-of-the-Month Club picks, in addition to its political predictions.

By its sheer omnipresence the Gallup Poll released data to newspapers a whopping four days a week Gallup became synonymous with polling. And, with a Gallup poll readily available, the American media and public came to expect that elections—and so much else—could be correctly predicted. But even then, some of the obstacles confronted by pollsters today held true: high voter turnout had helped Democratic tickets ever since the New Deal, so calculating the likelihood of voters showing up—and their relative Electoral College weight—made politics more complicated than the other topics Gallup tackled.