As news outlets actively seek inventive new revenue streams, perhaps consulting could be a profitable addition to their offerings. Consider: On the Monday before election day 2012, Gallup predicted that Mitt Romney would beat then-Senator Barack Obama in the presidential race. "Romney 49%, Obama 48% in Gallup's Final Election Survey," the headline read, capping off weeks of Gallup showing Romney in the lead. The results that rolled in late the next evening would tell a different story as President Obama defeated Governor Romney by nearly four percentage points in the popular vote, with a lopsided electoral college result in tow. But, as Ira Boudway argued in her tremendously insightful Bloomberg Businessweek piece "Right or Wrong, Gallup Always Wins,” the point wasn’t that Gallup was correct or incorrect in overestimating Romney’s support. Rather, the real kernel of the matter was that because Gallup was the outlier poll having Romney ahead, it received the lion’s share of attention in the closing act of the campaign push.
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