Reagan Pollster, Richard Wirthlin, Remembered

Richard Wirthlin, a longtime pollster and strategist for Ronald Reagan, passed away on Wednesday of natural causes. He had just turned eighty.
 
Wirthlin earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a pollster. An early client, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, recommended him to then–California Gov. Reagan. Wirthlin quickly became a valued advisor to Reagan, and continued working for him through the end of his presidency. Throughout, the results of Wirthlin’s polling were key to shaping Reagan’s approach to campaigning and governance.
 
During the 1976 presidential primary, Wirthlin’s polling guided Reagan’s criticism of President Gerald Ford for his plans to cede control of the Panama Canal, contributing to victory in a number of primaries. In the 1980 presidential campaign, he urged Reagan to attack President Jimmy Carter’s economic leadership. Once Reagan was in office, Wirthlin’s polling helped drive and shape the president’s confrontations with the air traffic controllers (by showing that the public was overwhelmingly in favor of firing them) and the Soviet Union (by showing that the public wanted Reagan to present a tough posture while maintaining lines of communication). Reagan once said of Wirthlin, “When he speaks, I listen.”
 
In his career, Wirthlin pioneered a number of new polling techniques, among them the use of computers to assist in telephone interviews and the inclusion of voter-precinct targeting in surveying. He launched his firm in 1969 under the name Decision Making Information, which was later changed to the Wirthlin Group and Wirthlin Worldwide. Wirthlin sold the firm to Harris Interactive in 2004, but stayed on as a member of the acquirer’s board of directors.
 
Humphrey Taylor, chairman of The Harris Poll and a colleague and friend of Wirthlin, shared his insights on Wirthlin with C&E. “I’ve known Dick Wirthlin since 1968, believe it or not,” said Taylor. “He was a real gentleman, kind and generous. Very low key and cool. A terrific human being.”
 
Taylor added that Wirthlin’s biggest impact on the polling industry was to shift its focus from issue-based tracking to surveying respondents’ emotional impressions of candidates. “[He] helped everyone understand that people didn’t choose candidates based on the criteria the media was writing about,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t positions on issues that was important so much as a gut feeling about the character and values of a candidate.”
 
Taylor says that this revelation forced the polling industry to start asking questions of respondents that were very different from the standard, rigid questions on policy perception and traction.
 
Wirthlin is survived by his wife, seven of his children, twenty-seven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E.E-mail him at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com