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Poll-inspired cockiness and its hazards
BY W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 10/15/20 09:00 AM EDT 325THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
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Poll-inspired cockiness and its hazards
© Getty Images
In the buttoned-down field of survey research, Warren Mitofsky is remembered as something of a legend. In the 1960s, he developed the exit poll for CBS News, a technique in which voters are interviewed as they leave polling places. Mitofsky, who died in 2006, also helped initiate random-digit dialing by telephone, a randomized sampling method that revolutionized survey-taking and was polling’s gold standard for years.
More so than his colleagues, Mitofsky was a student of the history of survey research. In speeches, he was known to refer to such pioneers of the field as George Gallup and Elmo Roper. Mitofsky kept displayed on a wall the famous photograph of President Harry Truman in victory, holding aloft the front page of the Chicago Tribune that erroneously declared he’d lost the 1948 presidential election to Republican Thomas E. Dewey.
“There’s still a lot of room for humility in polling,” Mitofsky said in an interview at the 50th anniversary of the 1948 polling debacle. “Every time you get cocky, you lose.”
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