The Literary Digest was an American general interest weekly magazine published by Funk & Wagnalls.

The magazine gained notoriety when its poll of the 1936 United States presidential election substantially missed the final result, predicting a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon over Democratic incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt: in the election, Roosevelt defeated Landon in an unprecedented landslide.

Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications.

Although it had polled ten million individuals (of whom 2.38 million responded, an astronomical total for any opinion poll),[5] it had surveyed its own readers first, then two other readily available lists, those of registered automobile owners and that of telephone users, groups that all had disposable incomes well above the national average, and were also far wealthier than average Americans at the time, shown in part by their ability to afford a magazine subscription, a car and/or a phone during the depths of the Great Depression.

George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result to within 1.4%, using a much smaller sample size of just 50,000.