In 1936 a magazine counted nearly 2.4 million ballots and named the wrong president. Decades later, researchers caught politicians in five democracies misreading their own voters, all in the same direction.
The Literary Digest trusted the people who chose to answer. Every politician runs a poll like that, and it never closes: the people who call the office, write letters and come to meetings. This video follows the mistake from the Digest’s mailbag to the politician’s, in the United States and in Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. It then widens the question to the public misreading itself, on climate policy, campus drinking and women working in Saudi Arabia, and shows what two experiments found when the picture was corrected.
Related reading, different angle on the same subject: A Poll Too Big to Distrust