...So That's What Happened to Dewey

We've got some political eductaion tips today from the liberal Daily Kos: Statistics 101: Polls and surveys

"In the famous Literary Digest poll (which predicted Dewey beating Truman, and led to the famous picture of Truman with the newspaper saying he lost) the big problem was the sampling frame. They used a list of people with phone numbers or cars. This leaves out a lot of people, and counts some twice (even now, but this was much more so back in 1948). Not only does it leave people out, but it leaves them out in a way that is biased (it oversamples wealthy people, and wealthy people, then as now, were more likely to vote Republican). Nowadays, people get much better sampling frames, but I do not know the details of how they do this."