Richard Wirthlin, a pollster who worked with Ronald Reagan died recently. Both 2301s and 2302s ought to read up on him as he is credited (if that's the proper word) with developing the field of campaign polling.
From the Huffington Post:
He first polled for Ronald Reagan when the future president was seeking reelection as California's governor in 1970. As recounted to author David Moore for his book, The Super Pollsters, Wirthlin had not previously been "a strong Reagan supporter," at least not "until I met him." Although he initially thought of Reagan as "a two-bit, B-grade actor, four degrees to the right of Atilla the Hun," Wirthlin's view changed after he spend two hours alone with Reagan explaining the results of a poll on policy issues.
He soon became a trusted adviser, chief strategist of Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign and the pollster who reportedly met with Reagan in the White House every month to brief him on his latest surveys. Reagan later described Wirthlin as "the best in the business ... when he speaks, I listen."
Former colleagues interviewed by The Huffington Post spoke of Wirthlin as a trailblazer in the then-emerging field of campaign polling. "When we started in this business," recalled former Wirthlin Worldwide Executive Vice President Vince Breglio, "there really only were three firms operating in the political realm."
. . .
Wirthlin's former employees and colleagues credit him with a series of innovations that continue to influence the practice of campaign polling today. These include:
The right direction/wrong track question. Colleagues credit Wirthlin with being the original author of the question that asks whether things in the country are "generally going in the right direction" or have gotten "pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." Most national media polls now track that question as a leading indicator of support for incumbent officeholders. As Wirthlin explained in a 2004 op-ed, the question helped inspire Reagan's now famous rhetorical question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
Nightly tracking polls. David Moore credits Wirthlin with the first systematic use of the nightly tracking poll, in which a relatively small number of respondents are polled every day and their results are averaged in "rolling samples" of those interviewed on the day before.
Dial group tests. Newhouse says Wirthlin was the first campaign pollster to do what is now called "dial testing," the process of wiring up focus group respondents to mechanical dials that they use to constantly rate a presidential speech or debate.
Other innovations may have been less about invention than application within the realm of campaign-sponsored polling. Breglio credits Wirthlin with the first extensive application of advanced statistical techniques such as multiple regression and factor analysis. Republican pollster Steve Lombardo never worked for Wirthlin, but nonetheless sees his most "powerful and lasting" contribution as his pioneering measurement of political values. "He forced us to go beyond surface attitudes and to find the key 'value' that was driving that attitude. His feeling was that core values like beliefs in fairness or freedom were often at the core of public opinion, and that only by peeling back that onion could we begin to understand how to change attitudes."
