Published in Technology and language
Author Angus Grieve-Smith
In 1936, Literary Digest magazine made completely wrong predictions about the Presidential election. They did this because they polled based on a bad sample: driver’s licenses and subscriptions to their own magazine. Enough people who didn’t drive or subscribe to Literary Digest voted, and they voted for Roosevelt. The magazine’s editors’ faces were red, and they had the humility to put that on the cover.