In the spring of 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt was worried. Running for reelection, he had lost the backing of two former supporters with important constituencies: Father Charles Coughlin, the fiery radio priest based in Michigan whose broadcasts commanded a huge national following; and Huey Long, the populist Louisiana senator whose radical wealth redistribution schemes had galvanized millions more. Despite Roosevelt’s many accomplishments, these populist firebrands were now denouncing the New Deal as weak tea and demanding stiffer measures. Nothing FDR did—steering patronage jobs to Long’s enemies, suspending federal projects in Louisiana—seemed to dent the men’s popularity. When former National Recovery Administration chief Hugh Johnson assailed the pair in March, Long responded with a radio address in which he took the high road, coolly presenting his “Share Our Wealth” scheme as a paragon of reasonableness. It won him his largest audience ever. Roosevelt and Johnson, concluded Turner Catledge of the New York Times, “probably transformed Huey Long from a clown into a real menace.” Long and Coughlin began planning a third-party presidential run with Long at the top of the ticket.
Anxiety about this populist brushfire led Democratic Party chairman James A. Farley to commission a secret poll gauging Long’s prospects. After a dinner with Roosevelt and several top aides, Farley and the pollster reviewed the survey results alongside a “greatly interested” president. The numbers were surprising: In a three-way presidential race, FDR still won, but Long took 11 percent of the vote, faring especially well among the economically distressed. The poll showed that Long’s popularity was far-reaching, confined neither to the South nor to rural areas. He polled strongly in western states (32 percent in Washington) and respectably in midwestern industrial cities (16 percent in Cleveland). Long, Farley concluded, could “have the balance of power in the 1936 election”: A strong showing could peel off enough FDR voters to elect a Republican. Worse still, the poll showed the president to be weaker than at any time since his inauguration.
Farley kept the poll results from the press. He told the Associated Press that he expected “no third-party [bid] of ‘serious proportions.’” Privately, though, he was less assured, and his doubts leaked. The veteran journalist Mark Sullivan reported that FDR was planning to “go so far to the left that there will be no reason for anybody on the extreme left to have a third ticket under Senator Huey Long or anybody else.” The “Soak the Rich” tax hikes on the wealthy and on corporations that Roosevelt signed into law that summer were only the clearest example of a leftward tack designed to steal Long’s thunder.
The man who conducted Farley’s poll, under the anodyne moniker “National Inquirer,” was Emil Edward Hurja, a jowly, somber-looking 43-year-old employee of the Democratic National Committee. An autodidact who taught himself statistics, Hurja rose to national prominence during FDR’s first term, making the cover of Time magazine in March 1936. FDR’s aide Louis Howe dubbed his brilliant prognosticator “Weegee” (a phonetic spelling of Ouija) for his seemingly prophetic powers, while Farley called him “the Wizard of Washington.” Roosevelt’s enemies called him “Farley’s stooge.” This renown was not undeserved: Though little remembered today—only one obscure but indispensable biography exists, by historian Melvin G. Holli—Hurja was, in fact, the first man to poll for an American president.
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Over the last few election cycles, poll-watching has become, for many hobbyists, nothing short of an obsession. Newspapers and networks, of course, have been commissioning public opinion surveys for decades, spinning them into the headlines and nightly news segments that punctuate our campaigns. But in the last decade private polls have multiplied, and, thanks to aggregating websites like Real Clear Politics and Pollster.com, the dense and abstruse data that they rely upon have become readily accessible to any amateur. Using their statistical know-how to study these numbers as shrewdly as any professional, some poll jockeys have made themselves vital resources for journalists and junkies: Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscientist; Nate Cohn, a twenty-something Washington researcher; and, most famously, Nate Silver, a onetime baseball-stats geek whose command of data and probability made him the most talked-about phenom of 2008 (well, the second-most talked about phenom).
But the amateur pollster who parlays his head for numbers into fame and influence is not a new phenomenon.
In the first decades of the 20th century, survey methods were relatively unsophisticated, and general knowledge of statistics and probability was shallow. Newspapers and political parties took tallies of how people said they expected to vote, but they paid little or no attention to how well their samples actually represented the public. Politicians measured public opinion mainly by monitoring the press. Around the turn of the century, advertisers developed questionnaires for researching consumer preferences,and in 1932 psychologist Henry Link, using more sophisticated methods, created what has been called the first modern poll—which he named the “Psychological Barometer”—to test attitudes toward soaps, coffees and other goods. The public opinion analysts—most importantly George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley—soon applied these market research methods to politics and public affairs.
As these pioneering professionals were starting their businesses, Emil Hurja was quietly figuring out for himself new statistical methods for gauging public opinion. And while the Gallup and Roper firms would exert influence for decades, making their founders household names, it was Hurja who had the president’s ear.
One of 12 children born to Finnish immigrants in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Emil Hurja worked a series of odd jobs as a young man, roaming from Butte, Montana, to Yakima, Washington, to Fairbanks, Alaska. In the 1920s he settled in Breckenridge, Texas, an oil town, and published a newspaper, the American. Having learned about mining from his western peregrinations, Hurja became an expert on extractive industries by covering the oil-drilling business. This knowledge soon earned him an invitation to work on Wall Street, and in 1927 he moved with his wife, Gudrun, to Manhattan’s Riverside Drive.
Along with his taste for numbers, Hurja had a passion for politics. After reading Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 nomination acceptance speech, he became a committed Democrat. He was a history buff, too, and developed a special love for Andrew Jackson and his vision of an expansive democracy. Over time, Hurja’s office walls would boast a dozen portraits of Old Hickory, and Roosevelt himself would number among the friends and colleagues to whom Hurja sent assorted Jackson books and paraphernalia. When he moved to New York in 1927, Hurja began combining his two pastimes, applying his statistical knowledge to politics.
His work in the extractive industries had given him some insight. “You apply the same test to public opinion that you do to ore,” he later explained. “In mining you take several samples from the face of the ore, pulverize them, and find out what the average pay per ton will be. In politics you take sections of voters, check new trends against past performances, establish percentage shift among different voting strata, supplement this information from competent observers in the field, and you can accurately predict an election result.”
Convinced he could help his party with his amateur knowledge, Hurja in 1928 walked into the waiting room of Democratic Party chairman John Raskob, volunteering to apply his talents to voting trends and demographics for the upcoming presidential election. Raskob judged Hurja a crank and declined to see him.
Four years later, however, after the Great Depression turned Herbert Hoover from a beloved savior into a despised technocrat, Hurja thought he might try again. With the charismatic Roosevelt, then governor of New York, poised to lead the party, prospects looked brighter. In January 1932, Hurja approached Frank C. Walker, a longtime FDR ally. He explained how Raskob in 1928 had squandered funds in states such as Pennsylvania that Hurja could have predicted would go Republican no matter what. In a memo to the DNC, Hurja detailed how he would employ “a definite method of statistical control and analysis of political sentiment during the coming campaign.” First, a staff would gather and aggregate all manner of data on voter sentiment. This would range from the national straw polls conducted by the Literary Digest and the Hearst newspapers to state and precinct surveys carried out by party operatives. Since these polls were unrepresentative, Hurja would try to reweight them for greater accuracy. Then he would analyze it all, noting how opinions changed from one election to the next to gauge where potential lay for winning new voters. Finally, he would map out a longitudinal “picture of sentiment” that could pinpoint which counties were leaning for which candidate, and which battleground states and counties could be won with the proper resources. Impressed by his plan, James Farley, who had taken the party reins from Raskob as party chairman, hired him—although, he told Hurja, he would have to work without pay.
Hurja got to work. He set up a color-coded map of the United States in his office, with individual counties shaded in dark blue (strong Roosevelt), light blue (leaning Roosevelt), dark red (strong Hoover) and light red (leaning Hoover). To color each state, Hurja drew on his array of polls correcting for bias as best he could. Each day he reported his findings to Farley.
Farley was spellbound. Hurja’s confident updates made a Roosevelt victory seem inevitable. By late September the chairman was letting his number cruncher write press releases prophesying victory, even predicting state and electoral vote totals. Armed with Hurja’s data, Farley would issue statements that the Democrats would carry the eight states along the Rockies by 300,000 votes; days later he would add that they would prevail in the Dakotas by 185,000. Unaware of his secret guru, the campaign reporters—and anyone else watching—thought Farley was just trying to psych out the opposition.
Roosevelt grew enamored of Hurja’s ability to mine his information banks. The governor was known to be obsessed with plumbing the public mind. According to Hadley Cantril, another pollster who worked for FDR in the 1940s, Roosevelt was “the most alert responsible official I have ever known to be concerned about public opinion systematically.” As president, Roosevelt would read samples of citizen mail and monitor newspapers and radio opinion. He also collected reports from his press aide Charles Michelson, who kept feelers out for rumblings across the country, harvesting comments, one reporter wrote, from “the filling-station attendant in Secaucus” and “the proprietor of the general store in Shakerag, Ky.”
Before starting a campaign swing through the midwest in October, Roosevelt summoned Hurja to Albany. Having perused the pollster’s state-by-state briefings, he peppered his new aide with questions. Roosevelt was especially interested in what Hurja called his “trend analysis”—the changing responses to the same questions over time. Before the pollster left, the two men shared a few laughs at Herbert Hoover’s expense.
More important even than these forecasts were Hurja’s analytical reports. He worked with DNC staff members to target key constituencies, especially women, who his numbers said were breaking for Hoover. “The women’s department calls up every day for ‘dope,’” Hurja told a friend, about a bureau that aimed to improve the party’s standing with female voters. Hurja also devised strategies to shore up the votes of loyalists to Al Smith, whom FDR had beaten in a brutal fight for the Democratic nomination.
Hurja had confidence in his predications because, unlike most Americans and even many survey-takers at the time, he grasped key principles that would come to underpin modern polling, such as the need for random sampling (to ensure that the group surveyed wasn’t skewed toward a biased subset) and the need for weighting (correcting for over- or underrepresentation of demographic groups). He saw the value, too, in focusing not on registered voters but on likely voters, which he determined by looking at turnout in previous elections.
As the 1932 campaign progressed, Hurja’s reports to Farley turned exuberant. Roosevelt would carry all but 41 of the largest one thousand cities, he predicted. “We have tabbed 387 different polls taken by newspapers, magazines, volunteers on radio, trains, ships, airplanes, for 1,921,000 votes and show Roosevelt winning an overwhelming vote,” he crowed. “A single straw ballot doesn’t mean a thing but a million straws in the air tell which way the wind is blowing … a whirlwind for Roosevelt.” On the Friday before Election Day, Hurja forecast “a revolution at the ballot box” that would leave the GOP weaker than at any point since the Civil War.
Roosevelt’s triumph made Hurja a hero. He had predicted a popular vote margin of 7.5 million; the final number was 7.2 million. (His prediction for the mountain states was even closer: the final margin of victory was 295,489, where he had predicted 300,000.) For his reward, the pollster hoped to be given the ambassadorship to Finland. But Farley—who would serve simultaneously as both postmaster general and party chairman in the new administration—had the all-important job of allocating patronage positions, and decided he needed his wizard’s talents at home.
Farley placed Hurja in a series of posts where he could help dole out spoils. As he had with campaigning, Hurja infused the old haphazard spoils system with his data-driven methods, as his loose-leaf binders recorded information about every state and congressional district. His index-card file kept track of the 60 to 70 closest congressional races. He used these factors to determine the relative worthiness of job seekers. Republicans complained that Hurja was using his data to distribute “dams, dog pounds, wading pools and canals where they produce the most votes for the New Deal,” as one journalist reported. Some smelled scandal, but Hurja was just carrying on an age-old practice with modern efficiency.
By 1934, with the midterm elections looming, Roosevelt approved the pollster’s return to the DNC, as executive director. With his maps and binders, Hurja channeled resources to the key races and ensured it wasn’t wasted on hard-to-win contests. Each county was scrutinized: Examining one West Virginia congressional district, he said that three counties were locked up, three beyond hope, and four in play—and concentrating resources on the largest two of those four would bring victory. It did.
Where most seers expected the party in the White House, in keeping with historical patterns, to lose congressional seats, Hurja predicted Democratic gains. “The Republicans haven’t a chance,” he declared in August. On Election Day Hurja was again vindicated, guessing wrong in only a handful of contests. For the first time since 1902, the president’s party picked up seats in the midterms.
Washington wise men were floored. “I’ll never question another election prediction of Emil Hurja’s!” vowed the influential columnist Raymond Clapper. The president told Farley that Hurja’s spot-on forecast was the “most remarkable thing” he had ever seen in politics. Magazine profiles, including the Time cover, followed. Hurja and Gudrun took to the social life of the capital, entertaining diplomats, Supreme Court justices and congressmen at their yellow brick Georgetown manse.
In political magazines, Hurja became an object of starry-eyed fascination. Reporters dropped by his back-room office at Democratic headquarters, describing for their readers a gallimaufry of binders, maps, charts, newspaper clippings, almanacs, legislative reports, slide rules, adding machines, books of logarithms, colored crayons and index cards analyzing political behavior in every state, country and city in America. “He would strew maps on the floor and look at them all day,” said one visitor. “Then he would play with the calculating machines and with a pencil and pad. Finally, he would come up with the information that it was necessary to concentrate speakers and propaganda in certain counties of a state in order to win.”The press painted him as no more partisan or irrational than a machine. “His method,” wrote Time, “is simply to avoid opinion, stick to statistical facts.” Another profile imputed superhuman power to Hurja, extolling his ability to render “an X-ray picture of the national brain.”
For two more years Hurja polled for Roosevelt. He not only gauged Huey Long’s strength as a presidential candidate but systematically compared FDR to other potential rivals. He tested reactions to Roosevelt’s programs, speeches and tours, as well as to Republican counterthrusts. In the 1936 campaign, he developed a strategy of focusing money and time on the large states where Roosevelt’s numbers rested close to the 50 percent mark, “carrying the largest possible Electoral Vote at the least possible cost.”
By Roosevelt’s reelection campaign, not only the president and his team were watching. “The excitement centered around public opinion polls has reached a new high in the current campaign,” declared Hadley Cantril. “Millions of people are watching the tabulations.” Hurja was now joined in the presidential polling business by Gallup, Roper and Crossley, who were using their own sophisticated weighting techniques to gauge voter opinion. And many Americans still placed their trust in the straw poll run by Literary Digest, which had called the last four elections correctly. Newspapers stories speculated breathlessly about the polling “sweepstakes,” wondering which pollster would get it right.
Late in the summer, 1936, the Digest sent out 10 million ballots across the country, a quarter of which were returned completed. But despite the large sample the Digest didn’t get a true cross-section of the populace, and it predicted that Republican Alf Landon would clear 55 percent of the vote. On Election Day FDR romped once again, taking 61 percent of the vote and losing only the combined eight electoral votes of Maine and Vermont. The Digest became a laughingstock, as the wisdom of “scientific” polling was seemingly confirmed. Hurja was jubilant. He sent the White House his black leatherette binder about the presidential polls as a kind of souvenir. (The other three professional pollsters also got it right.)
After the 1936 election, however, Hurja receded from public view. He had hoped again for a diplomatic assignment to Finland in Roosevelt’s second term, or perhaps the governorship of the territory of Alaska. Neither offer came. He also developed qualms about the president’s leadership, bothered especially—as were many onetime supporters—by FDR’s ill-advised plan to pack the Supreme Court. Making matters worse, Hurja fell out with Farley, who seemed to resent his aide’s Svengali mystique and adoring press. In 1937 Hurja abruptly quit the administration. He had left a mark, augmenting the president’s leverage over public opinion by equipping him with sophisticated tools that rivals couldn’t hope to match.
Hurja returned to his roaming ways. He handled public relations for Walgreens drug stores, took over a moribund newsweekly called Pathfinder, lobbied for Alaskan statehood and ran unsuccessfully for Congress from his old Michigan district. He also continued to conduct polls, sometimes for private clients, sometimes for Pathfinder.
But the Wizard of Washington had lost his magic. Although his forecasts still came close to the mark, no method of divining the future could ever be truly scientific. On November 2, 1940, three days before the presidential election, the man who had humiliated the Literary Digest for predicting a Landon presidency himself underestimated Franklin Roosevelt. Hurja failed to predict FDR’s take of 55 percent of the popular vote en route to a historic third term. Worse, he called the race for Wendell Willkie.