Earliest possible development of opinion polling?

When is the earliest reliable opinion polls could be invented with a POD of 1900?

It's possible to conduct scientific polling as soon as regular, cheap postal service becomes available, as long as you 1) understand sampling techniques and 2) have the resources to print the questionnaires, mail them, and study the responses.
 
They didn't get the kinks worked out until the 1950s, most spectacularly shown in 1936 and 1948. (Gallup for one had a massive inbuilt GOP bias that put Ras to shame) My question is how to do that earlier.
 
They didn't get the kinks worked out until the 1950s, most spectacularly shown in 1936 and 1948. (Gallup for one had a massive inbuilt GOP bias that put Ras to shame) My question is how to do that earlier.

I wouldn't use 1936 as a counterexample, as Literary Digest had a horribly unscientific method - they were much more lucky than good. 1948 failed for three reasons: The pollsters over-relied on phone contacts, which biased the sample in favor of more upscale Republican voters. They used the quota system instead of random sampling, which is much more likely to produce a representative sample. And perhaps most damagingly, they were so convinced of Truman's weakness that they actually stopped polling a few weeks before Election Day, and probably missed a huge shift in undecided/weakly decided voters.
 
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It's possible to conduct scientific polling as soon as regular, cheap postal service becomes available, as long as you 1) understand sampling techniques and 2) have the resources to print the questionnaires, mail them, and study the responses.

The problem though with mail-in polling is that the sample which responds is smaller than that sought out. It's a biased sample because the only respondents are those who care enough to fill out the questionnaire and mail it back, possibly at their own expense.
 
The problem though with mail-in polling is that the sample which responds is smaller than that sought out. It's a biased sample because the only respondents are those who care enough to fill out the questionnaire and mail it back, possibly at their own expense.

Selection bias is inherent in opinion polling - and Gallup used postage-paid envelopes, for one thing. It was less of a problem in the first half of the 20th century, when mail was the primary form of long-distance communication for most Americans. Response rates to mail contacts were greater then than today.

I agree that mail is a horrible way to build a sample today. There is one newspaper which does a famous mail-only poll, but the name is escaping me.
 
Selection bias is inherent in opinion polling - and Gallup used postage-paid envelopes, for one thing. It was less of a problem in the first half of the 20th century, when mail was the primary form of long-distance communication for most Americans. Response rates to mail contacts were greater then than today.

I agree that mail is a horrible way to build a sample today. There is one newspaper which does a famous mail-only poll, but the name is escaping me.

The sampling bias would also reflect who it is that is mailed, and who at the address fills out the survey. The ANES has arguably the most reliable, but also the most costly, approach.
 
The sampling bias would also reflect who it is that is mailed, and who at the address fills out the survey. The ANES has arguably the most reliable, but also the most costly, approach.

I'm not sure if ANES can be replicated in the OP's scenario. In polling or in GOTV, face to face is always the best, but it's also the most resource-intensive.
 
I'm not sure if ANES can be replicated in the OP's scenario. In polling or in GOTV, face to face is always the best, but it's also the most resource-intensive.

That's eather correct, and given that tavel in the United States was not easy before the Second World War except to or between cities, it is not a means which could be developed much earlier than actually was the case.
 
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