George Gallup Gallup polls incorrectly predicted that Thomas Dewey , instead of Harry S. Truman , would win the 1948 Presidential election . George Horace Gallup ( November 18 , 1901 – July 26 , 1984 ) , American statistician , invented the Gallup poll , a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion . Life Gallup was born into a poor farming family in Jefferson , Iowa . He entered the University of Iowa in 1918 , and earned a B. A. ( 1923 ) , M. A. ( 1925 ) , and Ph . D. ( 1928 ) there . While at Iowa , Gallup served as editor of the student newspaper , The Daily Iowan . His doctoral dissertation was entitled A New Technique for Objective Methods for Measuring Reader Interest in Newspapers . After teaching at Iowa , he left in 1929 to head the school of journalism at Drake University , leaving there in 1931 to teach and do research at Northwestern University . One year later he joined Young & Rubicam ( Y & R ) , an advertising agency , where he conducted public opinion surveys for its clients and became that industry 's first market research director . He remained with Y & R for sixteen years . While still at Y & R , he founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935 . In 1936 , his new organization achieved national recognition by correctly predicting , from the replies of only 50 , 000 respondents , the result of that year 's presidential election , in contradiction to the widely respected Literary Digest magazine whose much more extensive poll based on over two million returned questionnaires got the result wrong . Not only did he get the election right , he correctly predicted the results of the Literary Digest poll as well using a random sample smaller than theirs but chosen to match it . Twelve years later , his organization had its moment of greatest ignominy , when it predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 election , by five to 15 percentage points . Gallup believed the error was mostly due to ending his polling three weeks before Election Day . In 1958 , Gallup grouped all of his polling operations under what became The Gallup Organization . Gallup died of a heart attack at his summer home in Tschingel , a village in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland . He was buried in Princeton Cemetery . References Cantril , Hadley . Gauging Public Opinion ( 1944 ) Cantril , Hadley and Mildred Strunk , eds . Public Opinion , 1935-1946 ( 1951 ) , massive compilation of many public opinion polls from US , UK , Canada , Australia , and elsewhere . Converse , Jean M. Survey Research in the United States : Roots and Emergence 1890-1960 ( 1987 ) , the standard history Gallup , George . Public Opinion in a Democracy ( 1939 ) Gallup , Alec M. ed . The Gallup Poll Cumulative Index : Public Opinion , 1935-1997 ( 1999 ) lists 10 , 000+ questions , but no results Gallup , George Horace , ed . The Gallup Poll ; Public Opinion , 1935-1971 3 vol ( 1972 ) summarizes results of each poll . Lavrakas , Paul J. et al eds . Presidential Polls and the News Media ( 1995 ) Moore , David W. The Superpollsters : How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America ( 1995 ) Rogers , Lindsay . The Pollsters : Public Opinion , Politics , and Democratic Leadership ( 1949 ) Traugott , Michael W. The Voter 's Guide to Election Polls 3rd ed. ( 2004 ) Young , Michael L. Dictionary of Polling : The Language of Contemporary Opinion Research ( 1992 ) See also The Gallup Organization External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to : George Gallup Famous Iowans : George Gallup , from the Des Moines Register website George Gallup from a University of Texas website Categories : 1901 births | 1984 deaths | American statisticians | Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers | Statisticians | People from Iowa In other languages : Bosanski | Dansk | Español | Galego | Hrvatski | Italiano | Русский | Svenska 