The company brought statistical random sampling methods to improve the accuracy of polling, with one of the firm's early triumphs being the successful prediction that Franklin D. Roosevelt would be re-elected in the 1936 presidential election, rebutting surveys that had predicted a win for Republican challenger Alf Landon.
[1] The polls done by The Literary Digest were based on 2.4 million responses from its own upscale readers as well as car registrations and phone books, characteristics that would have been more likely at that time to select Republican voters.
In contrast, Gallup used statistical methods to ensure that the field interviews his survey collectors gathered included a representative demographic sample.
This post continued after the company was bought out by Selection Research, Incorporated (SRI) of Lincoln, Nebraska in September 1988.
Despite efforts to maintain the unique use of the name, the term "gallup" has entered the dictionaries in some Scandinavian nations, where the word means "survey".