The election year of 1936 was a very important year in the history of measuring public opinion.  A magazine called the Literary Digest conducted a poll using thousands and thousands of interviews, mostly done by mail, with people drawn from car license lists, magazine subscriptions lists, tax rolls and just about any other kind of list. Their conclusion was that Alf Landon, the Republican candidate from Kansas, would easily defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt who was running for a second term.

A college professor from Iowa by the name of George Gallup conducted a much smaller poll using scientific sampling techniques that had originally been developed in the field of agriculture to measure how weather, fertilizer, insects, the date of planting, and so on could affect a crop.  Appling some of these methods to sampling the voting public instead of acres of corn, he came to the opposite conclusion -- that Roosevelt would win hands down.

Charlie Parker was an active Republican and was doing some work for the Iowa Republican Central Committee.  He was asked to review the Gallup survey and compare it with the Literary Digest poll.  He had previously worked for Economy Products and was well familiar with sampling as a statistical technique.  Charlie studied the polls carefully and came to the conclusion that Gallup knew what he was doing.  The Literary Digest poll was not reliable because the people they chose for their samples tended to be well off and not a representative cross-section of the people likely to vote.

The more Charlie thought about it, the more he became convinced that there was a market for this kind of survey, and that it could not only benefit politicians but could be useful to companies trying to sell their products or services to the public.  He founded Central Surveys, Inc. in 1937.  Today, Central Surveys employs approximately 70 people and is 100 percent employee owned.