PHOTO/ Pru Sowers
Renowned pollster Lou Harris outlined his political predictions this week at a lecture for the Friends of the Key West Library.
Famed pollster Lou Harris sees dragons at the political gate
The dean of American political polling, Key West resident Lou Harris, is scared, really scared.
He made that clear in a speech he gave at The Studios of Key West, where he declared, “I must tell you that the forces of government destruction are at our gates. The time for dealing with such a threat has arrived and we must mobilize the forces to stop such a threat dead in its tracks.”
The 93-year-old political analyst issued the call to action to about 120 people in the audience. He outlined a strategy of using the upcoming 2014 mid-term Congressional elections to “stop the coup to destroy the U.S. Government.”
It was interesting to hear such outspoken political opinions from Harris, who for half a decade put the country’s political opinions front and center, not his own. Harris ran one of the best-known polling organizations of his time, Louis Harris and Associates, known for the Harris Poll. He was also chief polling analyst for CBS News, and later ABC News, as well as columnist for the Washington Post, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News.
In an interview before his speech, which closed out the Friends of the Key West Library 2014 lecture series, Harris called himself “a political junkie” who is very disappointed in today’s poll takers. He called much of the current polling “political propaganda” and said pollsters are hired today to shape voters’ opinions, not gauge them.
“People [poll takers] get hired because their sponsor pays a lot of money to get a specific answer. There is this notion that everything is up for sale. If anyone had said that to me [when he was conducting one of his Harris Polls], I’d say our relationship just vanished,” he said.
Harris lays the blame for what he considers nothing less than a destructive revolution squarely at the feet of Congressional Republicans, particularly the conservative right wing of that party, which he said is “mesmerized by a burning desire to destroy the entire federal government.” He pointed to the on-going refusal by the GOP House, led by Speaker John Boehner, to negotiate with President Barack Obama during his first and second terms. Then, Harris said, Congressional Republicans withheld authorization of funds that forced the federal government to shut down for 17 days last year.
“The American people woke up fast and reflected their horror in the polls by giving the Democrats a temporary, record high eight-point advantage in the polls,” he said.
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
Harris must be a socialist. ha.
The reportage seems a little sparse given Harris’s warning that: “…the forces of government destruction are at our gates. The time for dealing with such a threat has arrived and we must mobilize the forces to stop such a threat dead in its tracks.”
I would suggest that a more thorough and definitive exploration of Harris’s concerns and stratagems should have proceeded and been reported.
Further, to write that: “It was interesting to hear such outspoken political opinions from Harris, who for half a decade…” seems at the least somewhat shallow and ill-considered. Did you really mean “half a decade” or ‘half a century’? Because there is a difference.