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, Fla. 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, including California Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown Sr., D; a number of congressional lawmakers; mayors, including New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., D; and city officials. Many officeseekers sought Harris’s advice on how to shape their campaigns around certain issues, and others sought his approval before publicly announcing a bid.
