Don't Blame Me I Voted For Alf Landon Unisex T-shirt

INSIDER'S ELECTION SEASON HUMOR

“As goes Vermont and Maine, so goes the nation,” said no one ever.

Presidential pollsters at Literary Digest provide the most famous cautionary tale on the perils of selection bias. These two tiny states are featured on our shirt because they are the only states carried by Alf Landon in 1936.

Data scientists, six sigma black belts, statisticians, and industrial engineers in your life—not to mention political junkies—will know Alf Landon's story and this shirt will hit ’em square in the funny bone. 

Offered exclusively to QI Curiosities customers in three colors. 

Get up to 25% off when you buy multiple shirts in any combination. 

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If you don't know, Alfred “The Fox” Landon was the Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937. Today he’s the poster child for careful and deliberate random sampling. Landon would be unknown to today’s statisticians if not for Literary Digest. His story is really their story. Literary Digest was a weekly news and opinion magazine. The “Digest” part was appropriate because they carried condensed versions of articles from other publications from around the world.

Literary Digest was also known for correctly predicting presidential election outcomes. They had gotten it right every time since 1920. In the 1936 election Literary Digest predicted a landslide for Alf Landon based on 2.4 million responses to a nationwide poll. That is, 2.4 million Americans wrote to the Digest and 57% of them said they were for Landon. Landon carried only Vermont and Maine. That’s only eight (8) electoral votes, which is a record low that still holds today. Even his home state of Kansas abandoned him.

(Incidentally, no one appreciated Alf Landon like Walter Mondale, the second biggest loser, winning only 13 electoral votes in 1984. Mondale eked out a slim victory in his home state of Minnesota that year but won no other state. In the Land of 10,000 Lakes, he bested his opponent by only 0.18%. Without these 3,800 votes, Mondale would have received the votes of only three electors from the District of Columbia.)

Literary Digest went out of business shortly after the 1936 debacle. So what happened? The magazine's pollsters used three sources to build their list of survey targets: Its own subscription list, registered automobile owners, and people with registered telephone numbers. Well, in 1936 the Great Depression was roaring and Literary Digest’s list was generated from pools of people who could afford luxury items, namely hoity-toity magazines, telephones, and cars…though even poor people had cars but perhaps they didn’t bother registering them.

This is what’s known as selection bias and it can drastically mislead researchers. The lesson we take is that a sample size of 2.4 million is not much better than, say 2,000 if those 2,000 were truly randomly sampled.

Our comfy shirts are soft and lightweight, with the right amount of stretch. 

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz./yd.² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US

This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!

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