A straw poll is an informal opinion poll, originating from an American agricultural practice of testing wind direction with straw. In 1936, The Literary Digest’s flawed presidential poll caused bankruptcy, while George Gallup accurately predicted the outcome and became a household name. Virtual straw polls are now common, including on news websites and for organizational decision-making.
A straw poll is an informal opinion poll. The term is thought to come from an 1800s American agricultural practice of throwing straw into the wind to test its direction. By the 1820s, some American newspapers were including informal public opinion polls as a way to test the direction of the political “winds.”
Probably the most famous poll was the presidential poll conducted and published in 1936 by an American magazine called The Literary Digest. The Digest poll results had many people thinking that Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt would lose the election, but instead won by a large majority. The magazine’s problem was that their mailing list, which they used for the survey, consisted only of names from automobile registers and telephone directories. The names on that list didn’t cover the many Americans of that time who were too poor to have a car or a telephone. The oversight caused the Digest to go bankrupt shortly thereafter.
Interestingly, advertising researcher George Gallup was able to accurately predict Roosevelt’s huge victory. He built a lot of credibility for his company, the American Institute of Public Opinion, while also accurately predicting that the Digest poll would be flawed and cause the magazine to go down. The pollster, with his Gallup Poll, later became a household name.
In the Internet age, virtual straw polls are common. The online versions of television news and newspapers often have daily unscientific polls on various topics. Organizations sometimes post one on their website to give them an idea of how many members are interested in an event. For example, a survey asking how many members would be interested in congregating for a meeting at a certain location would help the organization decide whether the numbers would justify holding the meeting there.
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