Although most major polls predicted George W. Bush as the winner of this election, their predictions were wrong. They should have forecast a tie. So what is wrong with these polls?
In this talk we will discuss possible reasons that led to the false forecast. We will also talk about two other well-known presidential races in which the major polls failed. They are the 1936 race between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, and the 1948 race between President Harry Truman and Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. We will see how the Literary Digest Poll in 1936 made one mistake after another (it went bankrupt soon after), and how the Gallup Poll missed the forecast of the 1948 race, even though it had learned a lesson from the Digest Poll and carefully planned to chose its samples.
Hanxiang Peng is a Fellow in the Preparing Future Faculty Program at SUNY Binghamton, where he is a PhD student in Statistics.