These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Kennedy prevailed, in part, because he was the first packaged, market-tested president, liberalism for mass consumption. Weighing the possible party nominees and its platform, the Democratic National Committee, uncertain how to handle the question of civil rights, turned to a new field, called “data science,” a term coined in 1960, to predict the consequences of different approaches to the issue by undertaking the computational simulation of elections. To that end, the DNC in 1959 hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from MIT. Pool and his team collected old punch cards from the archives of George Gallup and pollster Elmo Roper, the raw data from more than sixty polls conducted during the campaigns of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, and fed them into a UNIVAC. Using high-speed computation and “a simulation model developed out of historical data,” Pool aimed to both advance and accelerate the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections. “This kind of research could not have been conducted ten years ago,” Pool and his colleagues reported.