In 1932, the American electorate was surveyed in a poll that has languished in the archives. The survey was conducted by Houser Associates, a pioneer in market research. It interviewed face-to-face a representative cross section about voter choices and issue attitudes. Although conducted on behalf of the Hoover campaign, the poll was not biased in his favor. The most striking revelation is that the electoral sway of the Depression was quite limited. The government was not seen by most voters as the major culprit or as having been ineffective in alleviating it. Even many FDR voters agreed. Moreover, there was no widespread “doom and gloom” about the future. What loomed larger in 1932 was the issue of Prohibition. The American people overwhelmingly favored repeal. The Democratic stand on it—that is, outright repeal—was a sure electoral winner, given Hoover’s staunch defense of Prohibition.
This is the abstract of an article by Helmut Norpoth, “The American Voter in 1932: Evidence from a Confidential Survey,” published July 27, 2018.
In short, FDR won because he was a deregulator.
Think about all the thinking and conclusions that this piece, if credible (I’m betting it is) overturns.
HT2 Tyler Cowen.
READER COMMENTS
Nick Ronalds
Aug 13 2018 at 2:08pm
Great find. It’s news to me that the two candidates in 1932 were at odds on prohibition, and that it was a big deal to the electorate. Wonderful to unearth such bits of evidence that put a different light on things we thought we knew were true.
David Henderson
Aug 13 2018 at 2:54pm
I knew that FDR was on the deregulation side and Hoover was on the pro-regulation side. Recall that it was Hoover who called Prohibition a “noble experiment.” What I hadn’t known was that that dominated the Depression as an issue. The unemployment rate for 1932 averaged 23.6 percent. Interestingly, though, according to the abstract, government was not seen as the culprit. Of course it was, mainly with Federal Reserve policy.
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 13 2018 at 6:12pm
Achen and Bartels in their magnificent book, ‘Democracy for Realists” present evidence that shark attacks in New Jersey took votes away from Woodrow Wilson in 1916. While intriguing, the analysis is probably flawed. Polling, particularly that conducted during the 1930s was terribly inexact. One of the first case studies that we looked at when I took a course in political polling as an undergraduate was the Literary Digest poll in 1936 that suggested Alf Landon would defeat FDR by almost the same margin that he actually lost the election.
I don’t have access to the original paper that David cites but would be highly skeptical of such a facile explanation.
gwern
Aug 14 2018 at 12:51pm
This isn’t a time-series correlation, though (which have been infamous for misleading results since at least Yule’s classic 1926 paper), it’s a standard quota survey with interviews asking direct simple questions. I’d provide a download link for the paper, but the Econlib moderators have made it clear to me that if I do that anymore, I will be banned, so I will simply note that you can get the fulltext the usual ways. Anyway, the survey does sound basically correct based on Norpoth’s summary of the Houser Poll report, and was done with attention to demographics to avoid the _Literary Digest_ fiasco:
It also has the face validity of finding that Hoover was going to lose massively (as he did). Norpoth throws in an interesting anecdote about the NYT coverage of FDR’s victory:
Makes one wonder what a comprehensive statistical/NLP analysis of election coverage would show.
David Henderson
Aug 15 2018 at 1:07pm
Wow again! That NYT headline just after the election is amazing. Thanks, gwern.
Don Watkins
Aug 14 2018 at 1:52pm
Interesting fact: Ayn Rand voted for FDR that election. Because prohibition.
David Henderson
Aug 15 2018 at 1:08pm
Interesting. I think I would have voted for FDR also. He was, on paper, clearly the more libertarian candidate.