An 88-year-old record of what we think comes to an end

In 1937, an anthropologist, a poet and a documentary filmmaker launched a project which soon caught the attention of the British government. It was called Mass Observation, or MO.

Months later, a former journalism professor who’d become involved in polling when his mother-in-law ran for Iowa secretary of state, George Gallup, introduced the first presidential approval rating.

These two events marked the beginnings of an unprecedented effort to bring the methods of science to bear on questions of what people really thought about things. It’s an effort that has shaped the world we live in, as well as measured it.

Election polls had been around for years before Gallup introduced the approval rating. The rating was an effort to add a new depth to the study of public opinion, beyond just who people were going to vote for in the next election, because it was to be a measure of attitudes changing over time.

Gallup used statistical methods to find a range of people who represented an accurate picture of the general public, and trained interviewers to ask them yes-no, either-or type questions. This became the template for a a host of polling operations, generally but not only associated with politics.

Last week marked another milestone in this story, as the Gallup Organization announced it will no longer publish favorability ratings of public figures, including the president. So many other ratings now exist that Gallup’s efforts are now better spent on other projects, the company said. Coming as it does when it has given a very low rating to a notoriously litigious president with a record of suing pollsters, Gallup’s announcement was met with skepticism.

“Our institutions, people that we’ve trusted all our life, are caving, crevassing, and generally making fools of themselves,” said Democratic strategist James Carville, who accused Gallup of bowing to President Donald Trump as some law firms and universities have.

Gallup, for its part, denied any pressure from Trump and said that it will now concentrate on “long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives.”
That sounds like an inelegant rendition of how co-founder Tom Harrisson described Mass Observation back in the 1930s in the United Kingdom. It was an effort, he said, to create an “anthropology of ourselves.”

Where Gallup was quantitative, MO was qualitative. It measured public opinion by what volunteers wrote in diaries and questionnaires, and what investigators heard people talking about as they left restaurants and theaters, and in other typical settings.

This may not sound as precise as Gallup, but as war clouds gathered, the British realized MO was an effective way to monitor morale and relied on its reporting throughout World War II. The historian John Lukacs’ brief classic, “Five Days in London: May 1940,” gives some vivid illustrations of the way these daily reports captured critical moments in history.

The great reporter turned political advisor turned racetrack lobbyist, Milo Dakin, told me about a race he managed somewhere in north Alabama once. Flat broke at the end of the campaign and desperate for some answers about where the voters were, he tore a page from the local phonebook and had volunteers call every other name. He claimed the results turned out to be spot on.

I’ve worked for a polling operation and written many polling stories, and have the greatest respect for the scientific rigors the best pollsters demand. But Milo’s story captures something about the science, the art and the budgetary realities of polling.

While MO recorded the wartime mood of the British public, the sociologist Robert K. Merton was using a similar method to test the effectiveness of U.S, propaganda on what would come to be called focus groups.

Ultimately, in the hands of people like the Republican strategist Robert Teeter, the qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding public opinion, as well as the essential fundraising a national campaign has to do, were intertwined.

Gallup has been a big part of the increasing reliance on scientific methods to measure public opinion, but through its own careful attention, it stood above the political fray. We’ve lost something with the end of this 88-year record of what we’ve been thinking, but maybe Gallup’s right. Maybe we don’t need another presidential favorability rating when we’ve already got so many. Maybe we need something more like Mass Observation, whatever that would look like in the digital age.