Alec Gallup

Who was Alec Gallup?

Alec Miller Gallup was an American pollster, who served as chairman of the Gallup Poll, after the 1984 death of his father, George Gallup, who created the poll in 1935.

Gallup was born in Iowa City, Iowa on January 4, 1928. After three years at Princeton University, he attended the University of Iowa, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1950. Gallup did graduate studies Stanford University in communications and at New York University in marketing and advertising research.

He was hired by The Gallup Organization in 1959, the company his father had founded in 1935. The company brought statistical random sampling methods to improve the accuracy of polling, with one of the firm's early triumphs being the successful prediction that Franklin D. Roosevelt would be re-elected in the 1936 presidential election, rebutting surveys that had predicted a win for Republican challenger Alf Landon. The polls done by The Literary Digest were based on 2.4 million responses from its own upscale readers as well as car registrations and phone books, characteristics that would have been more likely at that time to select Republican voters. In contrast, Gallup used statistical methods to ensure that the field interviews his survey collectors gathered included a representative demographic sample.