ABSTRACT
Polling industry is not only a dominant force in the United States, the industry is booming as well in many other parts of the world, especially in Western Europe, Australia, and Canada. A new frontier is even developing for the polling industry in those areas of the world once ruled by totalitarian governments. The point is that the polling industry has become successful that many pollsters have the luxury of picking their clients. In some respects, polling has become a very visible and glamorous profession. Sophisticated scientific polling is a modern phenomenon, but attempts to conduct unscientific polling in America go back to the early years of our republic. To prove that scientific polling techniques were superior to straw polling, Gallup set out in 1936 to challenge the undisputed leader in straw polls, The Literary Digest. The polling industry has been successful in producing huge mounds of poll data, yet a problem exists in separating the "gold" from the "garbage.".
