Ed Renwick

{{Infobox person | name =Edward Francis "Ed" Renwick
Professor, pollster, and political analyst) | image=Ed Renwick of LA.jpg | birth_date=June 26, 1938 | birth_place =Joliet, Illinois, US | death_date =March 6, 2020 (aged 81) | death_place=New Orleans, m[[Louisiana}} | party=Democrat | occupation=Professor, political analyst | religion=Roman Catholics | spouse=Polly Matthews Renwick
(married c. 1974-2020, his death)
Parents:
Frank and Frances Renwick
Alma mater:
Georgetown University
University of Arizona }}

Edward Francis Renwick, known as Ed Renwick (June 26, 1938 – March 6, 2020), was a political scientist whose principal position was a professor and the former director of the Institute of Politics at Loyola University in his adopted city of New Orleans, Louisiana.

According to Renwick:

"We're so divided in Louisiana -- by ethnicity, by race, by religion, by language, by geography. You have the French and the non-French, the Catholics and the Protestants, North and South, black and white, liberal and conservative. Having all these different forces makes the politics lively. It's never boring here. ... Because Louisiana is so divided, it's difficult to put together 51 percent of a legislative body, and if you're going to get anything accomplished, you have to do that.

In the 1992 U.S. presidential election, Renwick attributed the defeat of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush to the Reform Party candidate, also from Texas, Ross Perot. Renwick said that the winning candidate Bill Clinton ran little better among white voters than had the 1988 Democratic nominee, [[Michael Dukakis] of Massachusetts. "Perot gutted the Republican vote," Renwick told the organization, the Council for a Better Louisiana. Renwick took the view that Bush would have been the alternate choice of the Independent dissenters that year and that the Perot candidacy enable Clinton to win the election with 43 percent of the popular vote.

Honors

In 1999, Renwick was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield, the ancestral home of the Long dynasty. The Renwick Lecture Series at Loyola University is named in his honor.

Peter Burns, a political science professor at Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, California, said of his mentor, Renwick: "For most of the last fifty years, there are few political events in the state or the city that didn’t have Ed Renwick’s fingerprints on them." Burns continued, "very time Ed walked into a New Orleans restaurant, half the people in the place would point and whisper and say, ‘There’s Ed Renwick,' The other half would get up from their table and ask him who was going to win the election and which bottle of wine they should order.”

David Marcello, a fellow and board member of the Institute of Politics, said of Renwick: "He was a very no-nonsense guy. People who listened to him for his analysis, people who hired him as a pollster knew that they were getting the straight stuff".