Low-tech polling?

The President of the United States:

Abraham Lincoln and his policies, as you may remember if you’ve read any US history, were not universally popular with his contemporaries. He won the Electoral College in 1860 without a majority of the popular vote. He did win the 1864 election, but it helped that quite a lot of states where he wasn’t popular weren’t involved in the election, being on the other side of a war at the time.

There wasn’t any modern presidential polling at the time: the first serious attempts were by the Literary Digest early in the twentieth century. They got four in a row correct, then famously predicted that Landon would defeat Roosevelt.  Polling was hard: you couldn’t do it by dialling random telephone numbers because telephone numbers not been invented.  In fact, the advantages of random sampling weren’t widely appreciated back then: when the Literary Digest tried to predict election results they did it by taking as large a sample as possible, rather than a representative one.