Don’t trust the polls? Neither did The New York Times in 1956 (spoiler: it didn’t work out great)
In response to national pollsters’ failure in forecasting election outcomes in 1948 and 1952, The New York Times pursued in 1956 a weeks-long, multi-state exercise in on-the-ground reporting to assess public opinion about the presidential race. The Times’ experiment, which these days would be recognized as “shoe-leather reporting,” included two dozen journalists assigned to four...