In November 1980, the great TIME correspondent and editor John F. Stacks (a mentor to such stars as John Dickerson and many others) won the unenviable task of analyzing how and why every single public pollster (including ours) missed the Reagan landslide earlier that month. Wrote Stacks:
For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was “too close to call.” A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.
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