Polls and Pollsters

Election Tools

Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) was the first to use opinion polls as an election tool. While the Democratic National Committee paid for polls conducted by Emil Hurja, FDR also used Hadley Cantril, a volunteer, to lead a secret polling operation. Since Congress refused to appropriate funds for public opinion polling, presidents have been forced to depend on funds from national committees or private sources. In the 1960 election, John Kennedy became the first presidential candidate to pay for private polling. Kennedy began using polls in 1958, hiring Louis Harris and Ted Sorensen to gather information on what the public thought about him and his policies. Kennedy was interested in learning what the public thought about his character, personality, image, and religion. He used the information produced by Harris and Sorensen to plan strategy for the 1960 presidential campaign, such as the focus on education. While the Harris polling operation has continued to build a solid reputation for conducting accurate opinion polls, Harris had been criticized for his liberal bias.

While both Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) also used polls to provide information, neither ever trusted their accuracy. After the inaccurate prediction that Thomas Dewey would the 1948 election, Truman distrusted polls even more and refused to pay for a private pollster. Polls became more accurate after that election in large part because of the scientific methods [Page 347]developed by polling pioneer George Gallup. Democratic pollster Louis Harris noted wryly that Johnson only believed in polls that supported his position. LBJ hired Harris protégé Oliver Quayle to conduct secret polls.

In 1968, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was the frontrunner in the campaign for the Democratic nomination. After he was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, hopes for a Democratic win in November fell apart. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who had chosen not to run in any presidential primaries, was chosen by party leaders to head the Democratic ticket. The furor over Humphrey's nomination, coupled with violent protests outside the convention hall, led to a major overhaul in the way Democrats chose delegates to the national convention. Afterward, the people rather than party bosses chose the nominee. As a result, polling became even more important to presidential candidates because they identified issues of particular importance to voters and areas in which candidates were strong or weak.

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