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Frank Luntz, famed polster and founder of fil Inc, is joining us now. Frank, thanks for being back with us on Bloomberg TV and radio. We have been talking about this entire cycle how tight margins were likely to be. Turns out they're not quite as tight in most of these battleground states as they were in twenty twenty. And I just wonder your takeaway here when it comes to whether or not the polls were adequately reflecting the reality
in America once again. Doesn't it seem like Poles underestimated Donald Trump to a small degree.
Yes, and that is about turnout that every Trump supporter became a Trump voter. That is not the case with Kamala Harris, and that's one of the reasons why she fell short. Certainly, the idea that Trump would get a majority of the popular vote is a surprise to a lot of people right now. And is the the Iowa poll which I want to draw attention to because that changed the actual narrative of the campaign.
For the last forty eight hours.
Trump ended up winning Iowa by about a dozen points or so.
That the poll had Harris up by three.
It was not only beyond the margin of err, it actually changed how the race was being covered, which is really one of the rare times when survey research actually becomes part of the narrative. I think that there's a lesson for Americans in the future which has spent a lot less time talking about who's winning and losing, and a lot more time talking about what the candidates say they're going to do and why either we should believe them or distrust them.
Sounds like people were wrong about a lot, frank They were wrong about the protesters showing up at the DNC, they were wrong about violence around polls, wrong about pole watchers, wrong about, in some cases even though our polls were tied, the idea that there was momentum behind Kamala Harris as well.
I'm wondering if there's a reckoning here for posters.
Was there an overcorrection in the sample?
And what's going through your mind today?
Well, what's going through my mind, because I've been asked this in almost every show, is.
This is the media.
The posters did get it wrong, but the media went all over this IOWA survey when all over trying to see some trends, some movement in one direction or another, and that they're the ones who drove this. I tend not to talk about polling when I do shows like this, I talk about policy. I talk about language, what the public wants to see and hear, and whether the politicians
are doing it or not. And so much of this is actually driven by those who ask the questions rather than people like me who answer them, because we wouldn't answer them if we weren't asking them. I don't want to make a blanket statement because I take this so seriously and I so approve of the way your show handles politics the best shows in all of television or politics.
But I do think that there needs to be a reckoning for.
What we choose to focus on and how we cover it, because in the end it becomes misleading or even detrimental to the political process, as that Iowas survey clearly was well.
Frank, we appreciate the kind words, and of course, there always is room for critique when we consider how the narrative is shaped in America, and media plays a role in that as well. I think we can all agree. Earlier on in this cycle, there was a few conversations that happened in quick succession, one being whether or not the media was putting too much focus on the age issue for Joe Biden. Then became whether or not the media was complicit in covering up how deep those issues
may have run for the current president. And I just wonder, as we consider the role of Joe Biden and all of this, his late withdrawal from his reelection campaign, if ultimately you think that made a difference, if the timing mattered, or if it was never going to be possible for an incumbent administration given the kind of inflation experienced during it, to keep hold of the White House, don't I don't believe that.
I challenged the narrative which has been put forward now for weeks. Vice President Harris had one of the sharpest fastest rises of any candidate modern history. She went from five points down when she got into the race to three and a half points up in a matter of a few weeks. Because she was joyful. She talked about the things she wanted to do, instead of the negativity which he decried again and again. She was hopeful and optimistic and talked about all the things that she wanted
to get done. But then after the convention, she turned dark, she turned negative. It sounded as much like a Trump campaign as it did a Harris campaign.
And that was when she hit her ceiling.
And then she and by changing this by being joyful and then being harshly negative, calling Trump a fascist, voters started to wonder who is she?
Is she authentic? Is she genuine?
How do you go from being joyful to damning your opponents? And then Biden, of course made the comment about Trump's voters, and it just it didn't ring true.
That's number one and number two. She never articulated.
Exactly what she wanted to do in the first hour, in the first day, first week, first month, first one, under days and so on. If she had done that in the CNN town hall where it's done live, if she'd done that in the sixty minutes interview or the Fox interview, any of these, if she had done that until voters exactly what she wanted to do, she would have done much better because then she would have been about policy, and that's where she was weakest. But instead
she got driven around. She never answered the questions that voters had and so she never crossed that threshold. Whereas Donald Trump we knew him. There's nothing more we can learn about him. We knew his weaknesses, we knew his strengths, we knew his record because we saw for four years.
So her criticizing.
Him didn't add anything to her, did not detract from him, and I think that that's one of the reasons why.
She are the diagnosis from Frank LUNs on Bloomberg TV and Radio. All of that said, Frank, what did we learn about our nation last night, particularly if this in fact was about men versus women?
I love that question, and that's a question that we need to be talking about over the coming weeks and months, because there are some things that are more important than an election.
It's the next generation. And what are they learning.
They're learning that it's okay to tell your opponent apart.
They're learning that there.
Is no bounds to negativity, that there are right and wrong ways, but they need to learn that they're right and wrong ways to approach politics, to approach economics, to approach day to day life. And I'm just afraid that what we now learned is the wrong thing, which is as anything goes at any time for any reason, and that fightens me for the future.
Well, Okay, So if we keep looking at demographics here and what the future may hold, Frank, I look at Donald Trump's victory in Miami Dade last night. We haven't seen a Republican win that county for decades. It obviously is majority Hispanic. We did see a sizable break among Latinos for Donald Trump in a way we haven't seen in the past. Obviously, movement for black voters as well.
And I wonder if you think those demographic shifts are unique to this candidate who is now president elect, or if that may be something more permanent.
It's unique to this candidate, but also to this time that it doesn't matter with your white, black, brown, It doesn't matter if you have trouble at fording food, put food on your tables, put gas in your car, or the healthcare you need and the housing that you want, And it doesn't matter what your ethnicity is.
What matters is you're.
Struggling, you're living paycheck to paycheck, and that's what's happening right now. And Donald Trump an empathy to that much more explicitly than Harris did.
She tried to run away from it. Now.
Trump's greatest weakness is he didn't focus enough on prices, on costs, on affordability that instead he got sidetracked by issues that did not matter.
And in fact, I want to acknowledge something.
I'm going to go back to that presidential debate that clearly she did relatively well and he did relatively poorly.
In the end, it did not matter. I thought the debate performance would cost.
Him his candidacy, and instead it actually did not matter. And that's another learning that America has to face that even when you put two candidates side by side, the outcome does not necessarily matter and who wins for president.
Really great to have you back, Frank Frank Luntz, founder CEO FI L and just the voice we were looking to hear today. Thanks for being with us throughout this entire campaign.