If you’re feeling burnt by the previously reliable Iowa Poll showing Harris winning Iowa by 3 points just days before Trump carried the state by the biggest margin since Nixon in 1972, you probably don’t want to talk about polls. But it’s still an election year, and worth acknowledging that modern election polling was born in Iowa.
So was the man whose name used to be synonymous with it. George Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa in 1901. He attended the University of Iowa, where he played football and edited the Daily Iowan, earning his bachelor’s in 1923, a master’s in 1925 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1928. His dissertation was titled “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper.”
Gallup continued working on his objective method as he taught journalism at UI, Drake and Northwestern University. Then everything changed in 1932. He ditched academia for a job as director of research at a major advertising firm in New York City. Even more importantly for his polling future, Gallup’s mother-in-law decided to run for Secretary of State in Iowa.
Eunice Viola Babcock Miller, known to everyone as Ola, was no stranger to politics when launched her first campaign in 1932. Ola Babcock grew up on a farm in Washington County in 1871, and graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College. She taught school before marrying Alex Miller at the age of 24. Miller was the editor of the Washington Democrat and very active in state and local politics. In 1926, he ran for governor. Miller lost, and the following year, he died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
Despite her loss, Ola stayed active in politics. She had been a suffragette, and fought for other causes as a member of various women’s groups. In 1928, she worked on behalf of Al Smith, the Democratic candidate for president. Smith was always a longshot in Iowa. Many Midwesterners distrusted Smith, the governor of New York and the first Catholic presidential candidate. He had an additional problem here — Smith was running against West Branch-born Herbert Hoover. Hoover crushed Smith in Iowa, winning the state by 24 percentage points.
Four years later, Iowa Democrats were having trouble finding anyone to run for secretary of state. Babcock Miller stepped forward. She didn’t expect to win, but she did expect a little help from her son-in-law.
Babcock Miller’s 1932 campaign was Gallup’s first test of his polling methods in a political race. At the time, the dominant political polling method was to survey as many people as possible and simply tally their replies. Using demographic data and statistical modeling, Gallup tried to select a small group of voters whose characteristics matched those of the wider public for his surveys. His polls tracked voter sentiment, and accurately predicted Babcock Miller’s victory.
Having gained that experience, in 1935 Gallup started his own polling company, the American Institute of Public Opinion (later renamed the Gallup Organization and now just called Gallup). In 1936, he was ready for the big time and polled voters in the presidential election between incumbent Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas.
Two other national pollsters who used similar methods, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, also launched their careers with the 1936 election. The Literary Digest, a national weekly magazine that had correctly predicted the results of the previous two presidential elections, stuck with its approach of mailing out millions of questionnaires and counting the answers on the ones that were returned.
Shortly before the election, The Literary Digest announced the results of its poll: Landon wins in a landslide. Actually, Roosevelt won in a landslide that the polls by Gallup, Roper and Crossley correctly predicted. Their reputations were established; the modern era of political polling had begun.
Gallup and his two rivals correctly predicted the presidential election results in 1940 and 1944, when FDR ran for his third and fourth term. Then came 1948, Dewey vs. Truman. All three big pollsters got that race very wrong, resulting in the famous photo of the victorious Harry Truman grinning as he holds up a newspaper with the poll-inspired headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
In his 2020 book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failures in U.S. President Elections, political scientist W. Joseph Campbell showed 1948 wasn’t a one-off. Big polling firms also had big problems in the elections of 1952, 1980, 2000, 2004, 2012 and 2016.
Gallup would not have liked the title of Campbell’s book. He remained touchy about 1948 and other polling failures until his death in 1984. After it got the results of the 2012 presidential election wrong, the company George Gallup founded announced it would no longer do horse-race political polling.
Ola Babcock Miller’s victory in 1932 had more to do with FDR than her son-in-law. FDR defeated the local boy in the White House, Hoover, by 18 percentage points in Iowa, winning all but six of the 99 counties. That tidal wave helped Democrat Clyde Herring oust the incumbent Republican governor, and Ola Babcock Miller make history as the first woman elected Secretary of State.
Like FDR, Babcock Miller proved very popular once in office and was easily reelected in 1934 and 1936. When she died in 1937 at the age of 65, more than 3,000 people attended her funeral in her hometown of Washington. Among the mourners were all 55 members of the Iowa State Highway Patrol. Babcock Miller was largely responsible for the creation of the state patrol in 1935.
According to historian Kevin Mason, at the time of Ola Babcock Miller’s death in January 1937, “polls showed the State Highway Patrol stood second only to God in Iowa’s public esteem.” Of course as we’ve all been forcibly reminded by recent events, sometimes poll results have little to do with reality.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
