The Wizard of Washington

"Historians have tended to point to John F. Kennedy's 1960 bid for the presidency as the first time a candidate relied extensively on public opinion polls to drive a campaign. Polling has come to define American politics, and is perhaps most clearly embodied in Bill Clinton, the most poll-driven president in history. Melvin G. Holli dismisses this notion, however, and reveals that presidential reliance on public opinion polls dates back to the New Deal Era, when Franklin Roosevelt employed a first-generation. Finnish-American named Emil Hurja to conduct polls for his 1932 and 1936 presidential campaigns. Holli shows us how Hurja, through a combination of networking, political acumen, and dogged persistence, convinced the Democratic National Committee to allow him to apply the new science of polling to Roosevelt's presidential campaign of 1932. Roosevelt's triumph at the polls in that year and again in 1936, as well as the spectacular 1934 Democratic mid-term congressional victory, is legendary. What few people know is what occurred behind the scenes in the 1930s to secure the dominance of Roosevelt and his party. Emil Hurja was the driving force behind the Democrats during the New Deal Era. Holli restores Hurja to his rightful place in American history and politics, showing us that the Washington press corps were right on target when they dubbed Hurja the "Wizzard of Washington.""--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.