Louis Harris, pollster at forefront of American trends, dies at age 95
Louis Harris, the nation’s best-known 20th-century pollster, who refined interpretive polling methods and took the pulse of voters and consumers through four decades of elections, wars, racial troubles and cultural revolutions that ran from tail fins to the internet, died Saturday at his home in Key West, Florida. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by a grandson, Zachary Louis Harris.
From the 1950s, when he founded Louis Harris & Associates, until he retired in the early 1990s, Harris with remarkable accuracy forecast the elections of presidents, governors, members of Congress and scores of other public officials. Along the way, he used polls to sharpen their images, change their speech patterns and focus their attention on issues of interest to voters.
He told companies how to market products and services, and conducted polls for industry groups, religious organizations, colleges, unions, banks and government agencies.
He also documented trends in U.S. life, from the women’s movement and the ups and downs of the economy to evolving attitudes about marriage, religion, the arts and countless other matters.
He preferred to be called a public-opinion analyst rather than a pollster, a word that he believed trivialized what he did, which went beyond gathering data into new realms of interpretation — useful to clients of his consulting firm and more meaningful to millions who watched his analyses on the CBS and ABC television networks or who read his nationally syndicated newspaper and magazine columns.
His results were sometimes wrong. And critics questioned his early practice of using his polls to promote candidates — notably John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential race — for whom he worked as a campaign strategist. But he gave up political advocacy after a few years to concentrate on public polling and analyses for the newspaper and television jobs that made him a household name in the United States.
In the 1960s, he developed television’s ability to project national election winners on the basis of early returns after polls closed in the East. But critics said projections before the polls closed in the West discouraged some voters from casting ballots, and the networks voluntarily ended the practice.
Harris denied that his work affected the outcome of elections. He rejected charges that he was too commercial, although he made a fortune in market research. And he scoffed at accusations that his polls reflected a liberal Democratic bias; he said he often worked for Republicans and was guided by principles of fairness and accuracy.
Like Elmo Roper and George Gallup, his pioneering predecessors, Harris plumbed attitudes with face-to-face interviews, using carefully worded questions put by trained interviewers to subjects selected as part of a group that was chosen as demographically representative of the nation.