ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to remind students of public opinion about the lengthy chronicle of opinion assessment and to underscore some particularly interesting lessons from the pre-1936 past. It deals with the sorts of election polls that Americans see in their newspapers and media broadcasts, not academic survey research. In the 1992 presidential race, polls were omnipresent: On a typical day that autumn, any attentive citizen could locate a variety of election or issue polls in newspapers, newsmagazines, or on the evening local and national news broadcasts. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, political party activists, journalists and interested citizens engaged in the practice of straw polling. Polls by journalists were a vital and interesting genre of partisan rhetoric for many reasons. Straw polls had an air of science because they were quantitative, and in that way echoed the legitimacy of the already-thriving hard sciences. During every contemporary election, there are pleas to take polls "with a grain of salt."
