Public opinion polling began with apparently admirable intent. George Gallup and Saul Rae wrote in 1940 in The Pulse of Democracy that “elections can never be the sole channel for the expression of public opinion.”35 And so they wanted to engineer another medium for the public voice, and a scientific method of ascertaining it: polling. Initially, said Michael Korzi, “the poll was seen as a tool to give the common people a voice in government, later the poll became the sole measure of public opinion. After a period of time, public opinion came to be ‘what opinion polls poll’; the poll was normative no more, it was descriptive.”36 The poll carried the preconceived notions and biases of the pollster. Public opinion became the measure of a passive populace or presumptions about them, not of their active voices. In the first issue of the journal The Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937, at the birth of the field, Floyd Allport warned against losing the perspectives of individuals and communities: “We cannot speak of the opinion of this public, because it includes too many alignments of opinion, many of which may be irrelevant or even contradictory.”37 De Tocqueville cautioned against the tyranny of the majority while Gallup and Rae feared a tyranny of the minority: interest groupsthat could sway the whole public through lobbying. Lippmann worried about the susceptibility of public opinion to propaganda, but he also opined that masses do not hold opinions, for “thought is the function of an organism, and the mass is not an organism.”38 James Carey disagreed, replying that Lippmann “conceived of citizens primarily, if not exclusively, as the objects rather than the subjects of politics.”Carey believed the poll was fundamentally corrupting, preempting the public conversation it was intended to measure: