The original sin of American polling came in 1936, when Literary Digest surveyed its readership and declared that Alf Landon would likely be the next president. Landon lost, and a year later, the magazine was no more. George Gallup, whose organization got that contest right, pioneered the world of random sampling in polls. But barely a decade later, his firm was also on the wrong side of the “Dewey Defeats Truman” upset, giving him the most famous black eye in all of polling history.

Polling has rarely been perfect, and in recent years, response rates have fallen to around 6%. Phone polling has become incredibly expensive, and while new methods such as online polling continue to evolve and improve, there is no single “gold standard” polling method these days.