Pollster and political consultant, 95

Lou Harris, an influential pollster and political consultant who was among the first to provide polling services directly to candidates and officeholders and helped guide one client, a junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, to the White House, died Dec. 17 at his home in Key West. He was 95.

The cause was a heart ailment, said a son, Peter Harris, a retired pollster who worked with his father.

Polling for much of its history was a public affair. Surveyors mined data from voters and released results without consulting with party bosses or candidates. Starting in the 1950s, Harris helped pioneer a new brand of private political surveying tailored to the needs of an individual client to quickly gauge public reaction to a candidate or a policy.

Harris was also on the vanguard of blending his polling business with his work as a political consultant. He considered himself a political analyst more than a pollster, differentiating himself from industry leaders such as George Gallup, who believed the numbers should speak for themselves.

Harris once told People magazine that he did not think pollsters should be numerical “scorekeeper” in the Gallup mold, likening that role to serving as a “political eunuch.”

“Digging beneath the surface to find out what people think,” he added, “is the obligation of public opinion research.”

As a political consultant for CBS News in the 1960s, Harris helped shape what Americans now know as the spectacle of televised election night coverage by providing simultaneous analysis and prediction of election results earlier in the evening.

Pollster Peter D. Hart, who started his career at Louis Harris and Associates before going into business for himself in 1971, said Harris was an innovator on many fronts. “Lou was to political polling what Henry Ford was to the automobile industry,” he said.

After starting his polling firm in 1956, Harris supplied polling for 45 U.S. Senators; 25 state governors, a number of congressional lawmakers; mayors, and city officials. Many office seekers sought Harris’ advice on how to shape their campaigns around certain issues, and others sought his approval before publicly announcing a bid.

Before the proliferation of telephone cold calling, Harris had honed an ingratiating style of questioning and personally interviewed 3,000 people in their homes. He avoided simple “yes-or-no” questions in favor of conversations that would last as long as 90 minutes.

Harris gained his greatest national reputation when he worked for Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.

Kennedy was not an obvious front-runner at the start of the race. Kennedy feared, Harris later said, that his political career would be over if he lost either to Sen. Hubert Humphrey in the primary election or to then-Vice President Richard Nixon in the general.

Victory in West Virginia, a key Democratic primary, seemed a long shot. The state was protestant and poor, and Harris recognized liabilities in Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism and wealth. He had begun polling for Kennedy as early as 1958.

Kennedy triumphed in the primary, catapulting him to the party nomination. After his win in West Virginia, Kennedy quipped to Harris, “Lou, you got me into this, now get me out.”

The Kennedy win against Nixon that November made Harris a force in his industry. He worked, by his count, on more than 200 campaigns before he shifted in 1963 away from private polling to focus more on public polling (through his weekly syndicated Harris Poll).

Louis Harris was born in New Haven, Conn., on Jan. 6, 1921. He was 6 when his father, a real estate developer, died. Harris was a 1942 economics graduate of the University of North Carolina and served in the Navy in the North Atlantic during World War II.

Harris sold his firm in 1969 to the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Gannett acquired the Harris firm in 1975 and owned it for 20 years. The Gordon S. Black Corp., a consulting firm, bought the renamed Harris Interactive in 1996 and took it public in 1999. Nielsen acquired Harris Interactive in 2014.