<P> The Literary Digest is best - remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise . As it had done in 1916, 1920, 1924, 1928 and 1932, it conducted a straw poll regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election . Before 1936, it had always correctly predicted the winner . </P> <P> The 1936 poll showed that the Republican candidate, Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas, was likely to be the overwhelming winner . This seemed possible to some, as the Republicans had fared well in Maine, where the congressional and gubernatorial elections were then held in September, as opposed to the rest of the nation, where these elections were held in November along with the presidential election, as they are today . This outcome seemed especially likely in light of the conventional wisdom, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation", a saying coined because Maine was regarded as a "bellwether" state which usually supported the winning candidate's party . </P> <P> In November, Landon carried only Vermont and Maine; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried the 46 other states . Landon's electoral vote total of eight is a tie for the record low for a major - party nominee since the American political paradigm of the Democratic and Republican parties began in the 1850s . The Democrats joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont ." The magazine was so discredited by this discrepancy that it soon folded . </P> <P> In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame . Although it had polled ten million individuals (of whom about 2.4 million responded, an astronomical total for any opinion poll), it had surveyed its own readers first, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time, shown in part by their ability still to afford a magazine subscription during the depths of the Great Depression, and then two other readily available lists: that of registered automobile owners and that of telephone users, both of which were also wealthier than the average American at the time . Research published in 1972 and 1988 concluded that non-response bias was the primary source of this error, although their sampling frame was also quite different from the vast majority of voters . </P>

The failure of the 1936 literary digest poll was due to its