18 November: Gallup polls

George Gallup, pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll was born on this date in 1901. 10 things you didn’t know about the man and his polls:

1. George Gallup was born in in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of a dairy farmer. As a young man he played football, delivered Milk to earn money and ran newspapers for his high school and university.
2. For a while he was an academic, studying journalism and psychology and eventually becoming a professor in journalism, a position he gave up when he started his polling company.
3. The house he was born and grew up in, 703 South Chestnut Street in Jefferson, Iowa, now a registered historic building, is octagonal. His father had a thing for octagonal houses as this was the third one he’d had built.
4. He began to get interested in politics and polls when he conducted polls for his mother in law, Ola Babcock Miller, who was elected Iowa Secretary of State in 1932.
5. His American Institute of Public Opinion was founded in 1935 with the aim of scientifically measuring public opinions on things in the news such as government spending, criminal justice, and presidential candidates.
6. A year later, the organisation shot to fame when, using a sample of just 50,000 people, it predicted that Franklin D Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in the U.S. Presidential election. The foremost polls up to that point had been conducted by the Literary Digest magazine, but on this occasion, despite sampling more than two million people, the Digest got it wrong and predicted Landon would win. Gallup went on to conduct another survey, using a much smaller random sample which matched the demographic of Literary Digest respondents. This one, too, predicted a Landon victory.
7. Gallup polls weren’t always right, however. In 1948 Gallup predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman, by between 5 and 15%; Truman won the election by 4.5%. Even so, Gallup blamed the fact that he’d stopped polling three weeks before the election and during that three weeks, Truman’s popularity had surged.
8. As well as trying to predict who will win an election, the company also run a yearly poll in America to find out who the most admired man and woman are. This has been running since 1948. Most years the most admired man is the sitting President of the United States and the most admired woman is or has been the First Lady. Donald Trump, however, has only topped the list once, in 2019, and even then it was a tie with Barack Obama. Melania didn’t appear on the top 12 women’s list at all. As for who has won most times, that’s a tie, too, between Dwight D Eisenhower and Barack Obama who have both won most admired man 12 times. Hillary Clinton has won the most admired woman the most times (22) followed by Eleanor Roosevelt (13) and Margaret Thatcher (6). In 1999, there was a poll to find out who the most admired person of the entire 20^th century was. Mother Teresa topped that one, with Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill making up the rest of the top 10.
9. Another regular poll is the Gallup World Poll, in which a representative sample of at least a thousand people from different nations are asked identical questions in order to compare things like incomes, well-being, freedom and so on. The base line is a fictional country called Dystopia, which has the lowest incomes, lowest life expectancy, lowest generosity, most corruption, least freedom, and least social support. The premise is that no country is actually that bad and everywhere will compare positively with it. I await this year’s results with interest, however, since at time of writing it feels like the country I live in is fast approaching Dystopia. The happiest countries in the world seem to be those in Scandinavia.
10. It’s not all politics. Gallup polls ask all kinds of things, especially in America. Some of the things they’ve found out about Americans include: a third believe in ghosts. 41% believe in extrasensory perception, 37% in haunted houses, 21% in witches and 9% believe it is possible to channel spirits from the other side. 79% believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, while 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth and 3% have no opinion either way. As for which country they gained independence from, one in four of them don’t know. 2% think it was France, 3% some other country and 19% had no idea at all. If you happen to be one of those 24% it was actually Britain. 22% of Americans would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate, even if he or she was standing for the party they’d usually vote for.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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