Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Bryant. Today's crash Course. Polling versus the twenty twenty four election. Polling, the very inexact science that is the lifeblood of political analysis and guesswork is very much with us, built upon a series of queries that asks respondents essentially, what do you think about X? Polling aims to make
the intangible concrete. It is the stuff from which predictions are made, the data that fuels a political marketplace, aiming to artfully respond to voters preferences and priorities. But polling, via its siblings, focus groups and messaging, also aspires to shape voters preferences two in the best interpretation, understand and serve them with greater clarity in the worst interpretation. Messaging
makes voters more malleable, more easily swayed. The modern polling era may have begun in the late nineteen fifties when Joe Kennedy retained the services of a polster named Lou Harris to help him market his son John. Just like another consumer product, today, polls beget messaging, which begets spin which sometimes begets disinformation and other dark arts. It's tough out there, and the twenty twenty four presidential race will be a cage match. Joining me today is Frank Once.
Frank is a political and communication strategist and polster who has spent much of his career working for Republicans. He also has been a polster for some of the biggest media companies in the country and specializes in leveraging the emotional content of language to win campaigns. Welcome to Crash Course, Frank.
Thank you, and can I just start by saying I've listened to your introduction, yes, and there are forwards that I want to address right off the bat, disruption, prediction, disinformation, and leverage the issue disruption is absolutely accurate from you, even in the fact that I've just disrupted your conversation right now. But the goal of the work that I
do is not disruption. It's actually understanding. It's comprehension. My job is to understand the people that I'm researching, to understand what they really want from what they're telling me. It's the exact opposite of disruption. If I do my job well, it's not disruption. There are no surprises there's predictability and stability. Second prediction, I should not be doing it and polsters should not be doing it. Yes, that's
what we're called upon to do. That's actually the least important aspect of what a polster should do, and frankly, the less predictions they do, the better off the profession would be. Third information, which I am absolutely resolute in the accuracy of what I tell you. In the accuracy of what I put out doesn't mean I've got one hundred percent record of success, but we have to be the opponents, the most hostile people to any kind of
misinformation or disinformation. And finally, it's the idea of leverage. To me, leverage is about knowledge, and I want to know more than anyone in that room. I want to understand not how people think, but what they believe and why they communicate what they say. I don't look at
it as leverage. I look at it as wisdom to hopefully reduce the conflicts and the surprises, and to help either candidates or governments or businesses or anyone be able to fully understand so they can keep their promises, they can do the jobs that they were set out to do. And most importantly, they will reinstill a level of trust and confidence that what they say and what they mean is what they actually do.
Well, Frank, I love that you put your linguist Scalpel the use on the introduction. It's a great way actually to start the show. Disruption is more about the ethos of the show that we sort of look at disruptive events to glean an understanding of them. So it was less about polsters being disruptive agents. But certainly the other three words that you've focused on, leverage, disinformation, and prediction.
I think those are good themes for us to weave in and out of our conversation today because it is the essence I think of where campaigns are won and lost and where polling is right now in terms of navigating around those rocks. And you've set this up wonderfully. You've been around. You worked for Pap Buchanan, you worked for Nude Gingrich, you worked for Rudy Giuliani, more recently, Kevin McCarthy. You worked for the Bushes. You've represented a lot of people and.
Never worked for the pulp On. Never work for the Bushes ever, And this is an example.
Can you work for the Bush, White House in terms of health and craft their method. Well, then let's get to that later. Well let's handle that chronologically. I could readdress this.
Though I don't want you to cut this out of the show. Okay, this is a perfect example of misinformation.
Somebody notice that, because misinformation would be I intended to say you worked for the Bushes to fake out my audience and have them believe bad things about you, knowing that you didn't work for the Bushes. I honestly thought you did, and I thought you advised them on climate change initiatives.
But that's why this is so important. Don't cut this from the show, please, because somebody wrote that more than twenty years ago to hurt my reputation, to say that this was done in a negative way. And that's exactly the problem.
Back the matter. You actually never did work for the Bushes, for either one of them.
No, they have no idea who I am.
They never retain to work on anything.
No, and that's why no.
One in their White House retained you. No one acting as their representatives retain you.
Absolutely, there are people that I know, but I never worked for George W. Book direct, directly or.
In so that's what I was wondering, and that's right, qut.
And this is really important for the listeners to hear this. Don't believe the crap that you read on the web. Don't believe social media. I know by the names that you used. You said Papu Canon and not Ross Paro. And the fact is I was much more engaged in the Ross Paro campaign. But I know the article. I know where this comes from. So I know the list of people that you give. I've worked for so many.
Let's slow for one second. There's no ill intent on my part in warming up your client list. It's not to cherry pick any of them. It was more just to convey to the audience that you have a long track record doing this and you've represented notable people. And if I've messed any of that up, I'm happy to clarify it. But it wasn't meant to misrepresent your bona fides or your CV.
But when it was put out initially, there was no acknowledgment that I worked with a Biden Weight House directly on COVID language. There is no discussion that I work with the Clinton White House on global trade, specifically NAFTA. There's no comment about sitting down with so many leaders from across the globe, because I know where this comes from.
And I love the fact that this begins with this conversation me too, because it tells the listener be careful of what you read, be careful of what you see, because it may not be accurate at all.
So is it inaccurate to describe you as a Republican pulster? Do you feel you're a bipartisan pulster?
They've stopped calling me a Republican?
No, no, no, no, But what do you consider yourself?
I consider myself a nonpartisan by partisan means you work for both sides, not partisan means you don't take sides. I have relationships with the Republicans absolutely, and I was a partisan polster ten years ago, twenty years ago, but beginning with the Donald Trump election in twenty sixteen, I've actually publicly eschewed partisanship and even the word itself. You
can say I'm a language guy. Even the word partisan itself, it's not accurate for what I do because in the end, it's not my job to represent Republicans or make them look good. It's not my job to speak ill of Democrats. It's my job to be honest and accurate to every question you ask me.
So, in the interest of accuracy and the chronology, I think we should have a new timestamp BT and AT, you know, before Trump and after Trump. So the Frank Lunce of the BT era was a partisan polster who worked largely, perhaps almost exclusively, for Republicans. The Frank Lunce of the AT period is spreading his net more broadly and working for people he believes in. Is that accurate?
That is accurate, and it's not just domestically. We're doing this interview with me in London, which shows you how great technology is that you and I can communicate five thousand miles apart from each other in real time. And my perspective is much more global. Having traveled to I will hit my fiftieth country this year. It does give me a different perspective, not just as a pholster or
as a communicator, but as a human being. Now that I've visited every continent except for Antarctica, it teaches me that there is a different way of speaking, that there's a different way of life, and that the priorities are the things I take for granted as an American are simply not the same as those from an Asian country or an African country, for example, and that it makes me not only more tolerant of other cultures and other societies, but it makes me more curious to understand, to learn
about what they have to offer to a humankind on a global scale.
Since we've invoked Trump already, I was going to get to that a little later, but I think it could also still be a useful departure point right now. Well, what was the intervention in your worldview and in your life as a pulser in a human being when Donald Trump entered your mindscape? As I understand it, it actually took a physical toll on you. You had a stroke
a few years ago. I've seen in some public statements you attributed that in part to the stress philosophically and emotionally and physically you experienced when Donald Trump ascended into the White House.
I think that's fair. I think that's accurate. But go back even further. I'm the person who interviewed Donald Trump in Des Moines, Iowa, in twenty fifteen when Donald Trump was condemning John McCain, and I intervened to say, wait a minute, John McCain's a war hero, and Donald Trump famously said, talking over me, he's not a war hero. He was captured. I like the ones who weren't captured. That was my interview. You hear me, but you don't
see me on camera. And from that moment on, I had a problem with him.
He rather than what what was the specific problem you had with him?
I didn't think he told the truth. To mean nothing matters. No, you're gonna use that word. I know.
I'm asking is did you consider him a liar?
I considered that he didn't tell the truth.
What's the difference?
A huge difference.
Explain that one.
If I call someone a liar, I'm immediately asking you to judge me by that accusation. If I'm saying he doesn't tell the truth, you're simply analyzing the statements and the delivery of the person that we're focused on. I don't want to be accusing someone of lying, because I know that that causes people not to listen, causes them to shut up. But if I say is he telling the truth? If I turn it as a question, it is much more likely that I will contemplate what I've said.
You are more likely to take what I say and accept it because I'm not being accused a to him.
But I was just talking about your own decision. You said you were turned off because you believed he wasn't telling the truth. You were making your own subjective value judgment about it.
Yes, I'm just not willing to use your language to describe it now.
I was just series about how you parts the difference between the two in terms of your own view of him. But we can probably get stuck on that one forever now.
Actually, but here's the thing, Okay, I listen to every word when a politician is speaking, when a business person is speaking, when a cultural icon is speaking, I pay attention to what they say. It's in listening to how people formulate their statements and the words that they use. And I used to just let it go when it
was about me. I would never correct someone. And now I realize that on a podcast like this that it is essential that the listeners hear the words that I wish to speak, absolutely, because that is clarifying either my story or my beliefs, or my principles, my.
Priorities, your place in the world did go.
That's perfect.
Yeah, that is an ideal outcome. I hope that listeners come up close to you and your place in the world and how you see it, and I appreciate you course correcting as we move along. So we've arrived at this Trump moment. But this is such a rich subject and let's not tie it all to Trump just yet. Let's talk a little bit about the pre Trump era in your life. I think you sort of enter polling as a main part of your life around the early nineties,
more or less. And how was the world that you entered then polling and messaging and then actualizing those things and campaigns and strategy positions. How was that world different than the one we're in right now.
Frank, Oh, that's good. That's a tough question to answer because there's so many facets of it. And even in my own life. I learned how to do survey research in nineteen eighty when I was eighteen years old, and I was supposed from nineteen eighty till about nineteen ninety four. And it was a breakfast that I have a new Kingridge in April of ninety four, where he said to me, gave me two pieces of advice. Pollsters are a dime a dozen You can find a dozen of them in
the Republican Party. No big deal, nothing special. I want you to be a wordsmith. I want you to use polling to study how to communicate difficult principles and how to explain the conservative philosophy in a way that we win not for the next election, but for the next generation. And I followed that. That was when I started focusing on language. The other advice he gave me was learn Spanish because it's going to become the most important subgroup
and no Republican polster really understands it. That one I didn't do because guy, Frankly, I'm an idiot when it comes to language. And my first big client in life were people running for office in Puerto Rico, the governor, the Resident Commissioner. Yet I couldn't speak the language. And from that point on, I'm always trying to figure out how to say it, how to communicate it, how to show it, how to present it. Everything from my PowerPoint slides to the videos that I create to the interviews
like this one. It's always trying to clarify and simplify the language.
But come back to me different idea of what was different than compared to now, what's the great change you've witnessed over say, the last thirty years, give or take a few.
The greatest change in polling is that people want to know why not what so nobody is asking is the direction of a country positive or negative? They want to know why positive and why negative. They want to understand the reaction that certain politicians have on the electorate, not who they trust necessarily, but why they have trust or distrust. What is the root cause of some of the challenges
we face. So just asking people what's the most important issue in America today is irrelevant in twenty twenty three. What is relevant is the root cause of that concern? Is it economic anxiety? Is it loss of faith and trust in the system? Do we now believe that democracy or capitalism don't work. It's trying to understand the second degree, the third degree of any issue, because in the end, if we don't understand the root cause, we don't understand how to fix it.
You have always been attuned, though, to the idea of emotion, the emotional quotient that underlies people's preferences and choices. I think you've spoken very specifically and articulately about that over the years. I have a feeling you're going to say that that's also been pulled off of some weird spot on the Internet, and it doesn't really reflect who you are.
But I bring it up not to zikatcha, but just as an attempt to get at your statement of purpose in terms of what you see the essence of I think this is a an accurate quote. Eighty percent of our life is emotion and only twenty percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think, or another one along the same lines. It's all emotion, but there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational. We are emotional.
My job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion. We know that words and emotion together are the most powerful force known to mankind. So explain to me. Do you also think that that was a relatively novel insight within the polling community, This idea of move it beyond simply issue based polling and get at this emotional motivator for voters.
Other people have done that long before me. What I learned and where I'm different is to find the language that best articulates or best connects to emotion, passion intensity. I know right now, for example, that there is probably thirty percent of Americans, thirty percent that don't believe in our electoral system, and I'm trying to figure out how to speak to them because I believe that the right person,
the accurate person, won in twenty twenty. For example, I believe that what happened on January sixth, twenty twenty one, was a tragedy an embarrassment. I can't believe that some people try to downplay the events of that day. I need to understand what is triggering this level of anger and more importantly, distrust. I can work with anger. I can work with disappointment. I can work with fear. I can work with anxiety, and when I say I can work with it, I can understand it and craft a
language to address it. But I cannot do anything about mistrust. I cannot do anything if the public believes that those who are telling the truth are lying and the liars are actually truth tellers. And that's the situation that we're in right now. And the reason why I was so eager to do this podcast is that that, to me, is the single greatest disruption in American society. Today. It's
not economic, it's not financial, it's not even political. It's the fact that there's so little in our lives that we now trust, and that we believe that the institutions and the people who run them that matter most are untruthful. And if that's the case, our democracy is in jeopardy, our economic freedom is in jeopardy. And I can't fix it because I don't know how to instill trust when it is lost.
Do you know this is actually a phenomenon that was gaining traction before Trump even landed in the White House, a fraying of trust in US institutions. I think it accelerated around the financial crisis. Certainly a lot of the analysis of people's faith and institutions and the idea of public authority had taken noticeable downturns in the mid two
thousands and surveys compared to prior to that era. I would suggest or think that it had to do with how devastating the financial crisis was for a lot of people, And then I think it's accelerated since then. But one of the interesting constants that's gone along with that during that period and it remains so today, is that people still trust their own personal network, they trust their family, they trust their friends, they trust people they have direct
contact with. And that's a hard thing to leverage in terms of rebuilding trust for people. Is it has to happen at this very granular local level. When we run campaigns that are national league, when we run companies that have national footprints. I think some of the solution involves a lot of very granular direct contact among people, and I think that that's going to be an ongoing challenge
for the political process. And this is also to me why it's so interesting to do an episode of polling, because I think the accuracy of polls and their ability to actually drive into people's needs in a broad based way and marry that understanding to personal interaction and then to policy in order to get better civic result is the challenge in front of us all right now.
It's one of the reasons why I do focus groups, and I stopped doing it for about a year after January sixth because people were so rude and so vicious and so mean to each other.
And occurring within the focus groups.
You mean, within the focus groups. I'm about to publish some of the worst ones. There were seven sessions that I did that were so awful.
In that this is post January sixth, this is.
Right around there, this is post election twenty twenty. That the group's never made air that from the beginning to the end, people yelled at each other, they didn't listen, they didn't want to listen. They were accusatory and just mean. And the various networks that I I did it for said to me, we can't put this on the air. This is a I don't want to use the language. But rams would hit and no, and it was embarrassing to me, and I finally decided that now was the
time to put it out. So if you're a listener to this program, just know if you type in my name and Straight Arrow News, you'll be able to see snippets of these sessions. I just warn you, it's going to break your heart and it's going to scare the hell out of you. Because this is the country that we have become.
Why was it important to you to publicize those focus groups gone wrong?
Because my health is not that great, which I've acknowledged, and because I'm trying to put out as much information and facts as I can to show people that we are dangerously close to coming apart, and I don't want
to play the role of divider. I want to play the role of truth teller so that we can consider a different approach to how we talk to each other, how we treat each other, and most importantly for the next generation, our commitment to civics and decency, so that this doesn't get any worse in an election cycle that I'm afraid is going to be the worst of modern times.
Frank, we're going to take a break on that note, and we will come right back after we hear from one of our sponsors. We're back with Frank Luntz, a prominent polster and political strategist and always full of insights. Frank has been simultaneously educating me, correcting the record, and having a great conversation with me in the previous session. So we'll continue on that path. You know, I wanted
to talk again about this epiphany you had. You know, I topped off the show talking about Joe Kennedy had this insight in which he famously said he wanted to sell his son John like a box of soap flakes, laundry detergent, and the rap on John Kennedy at the time was he hadn't paid his dues in the Senate, he didn't have a lot of experience, but the family's marketing prowess and money allowed for the celebrification, if that's the word, a celebrification of the presidency, and that that
really launched us into an era when you could go above the party apparatus, go beyond the resume, and bring a candidate directly in front of voters if he or she was packaged the right way. We saw that obviously with Ronald Reagan, a formidably telligenic candidate, and then in the Trump era with social media, Trump went around all the gatekeepers. He was able to go to his supporters directly through social media, and he is the personification of
a certain form of celebrity the United States. I think his celebrity was built on sand. He was the entrepreneurial guru from the masses, while in the real world he was a serial bankruptcy artist. Nonetheless, I think there is a strand you could tie from John CA Kennedy to Donald Trump in terms of the political process, and polling is so tied up in that right. Polling is an element of how you package the candidate. Maybe the core element.
Have you had thoughts about any of that. I know you've said in various places you've tried to reckon with the life you led as upholster prior to Trump. We talked about that earlier and the life you're trying to lead. Now, tell me what you think of that long list of particular as I just put on your doorstep.
It's an interesting list, and I would have stopped at Bill Clinton, Who's the one who taught me that there's a difference in how people hear you depending on words you use. It was Bill Clinton who first came up with the idea that we're going to have revenue enhancements. That's what we call them. Any normal human being would have called them tax increases, but that kills the popularity,
so they're now revenue enhancements. I know. In nineteen ninety four, new gingridg focused on the Crime Bill to essentially ridiculed Democrats for supporting midnight basketball, dance, lessons for convicts, all sorts of programs that the public would hate. And then I saw how it was used George W. Bush versus
Al Gore in two thousand. We've had a steady progression of candidates on both sides of the aisle that have used polling arguably to know what matters to the public, but in some ways to know how to manipulate that public. And that's one of the reasons why I got further and further and further away from politics, from elections, because I didn't want to be part of that.
Because you felt that the polling process was corrupting both policymaking and the packaging of candidates.
I thought it was making American politics way too negative. And the irony of that is, I'm now so pessimistic, I'm now so frightened of the future candidly, and I should have spoken up much earlier challenge this situation. That's probably my greatest regret of my career is that I saw some of these trends happening and I didn't speak up.
Why Why didn't you speak up?
I don't know. Because my friends were in politics, they were in business, and I don't want to make their lives any more difficult.
Was it the paycheck? You were making a good living? Was that hard to walk away from.
It's easy to walk away from it.
Money does, so that wasn't a factor.
Money is not a factor. Power is not a factor. Fame is not a factor. It's just simply easier to do.
So, did you feel like you were part of a community you didn't want to leave. You mentioned that too, that your friends were in politics. I'm just interesting because at some point you did make a decision to step away, and that's an interesting process for anybody to go through.
Yes, And I don't recommend it to anybody because people around you, your friends, will tell you do the right thing, and they're correct. But there is a cost to doing the right thing, to calling out people, particularly on your side of the aisle, particularly clients of yours. If you start to call out people who you are aligned with, allied with, even friends, guess what you pay a price, not financially, emotionally, personally, And at the time I didn't want.
To pay that because you get exiled from the community.
Because you find yourself at odds with your friends. You're the host of this show. Have you not called somebody out who you like very much on your podcast and then had to explain to them while you took them on, while you publicly criticize them. Because if you haven't, then you don't know what it's like to go through the process. And I did, and I took a whole lot of craft for it, and there were times when I regretted it, But after three years now of having done it, I'm
glad I did. I just wish I'd done it sooner.
What was the first glimmer you've got of that? And again, let's talk about BT Before Trump, was there a moment where you felt like your work as a pulser was going sideways, that it wasn't contributing to the world in the way that you wanted it to.
Absolutely, and that's the issue of climate change, the work that I did that media people still cite today still after twenty three years. I began my polling as an opponent of the climate issue. I raised questions about the science. I tried to understand. I challenged those who were so absolutely convinced that it was happening. And this is back in two thousand and two thousand and one, and to this day there are still people who pretend as though I still feel this way, as a way to attack.
Me, when in fact you later testified in front of Congress that you thought you were wrong in the early two thousands, your position on climate Chang was wrong, and that you wouldn't say the same things currently that you said about it then.
Exactly, And that, by the way, that testimony was five years ago.
You brought up climate change at a moment when you started to feel like your work is Polster was going sideways. What about your work at that time made you uncomfortable about polling?
Because I was learning that I was wrong and the work that i'd done was really, really good. And now it's the work that I've done since then. And I'm going to give you two great examples. The community that is concerned about climate that believes it's a crisis or climate chaos, however you want to communicate it, continues to use the word sustainability, that we need a sustainable environment.
The problem with sustainability is that it's status quo. So when I started to look at the climate science and realize that I made a mistake, I wanted to come up with language that I would address the things that I had written about. And so I realized that being cleaner, safer, healthier was better than being sustainable, because sustainability is the status quote. Cleaner, safer, healthier means better. Trying to get the climate community to use better language is just about impossible.
A second example is that the public absolutely cares about the next generation, cares about their children. To focus on how this climate issue is going to affect them is the most powerful way to reach the public. But the same climate activists want to talk about what it's doing to the planet. The planet is too big. Their children is just the right focal point.
So there's some frank consulting work going on right there. If you want to win the climate change battle, focus on its impact on the people you love, and not a big, amorphous planet that you can't get your arms around. You can get your arms around your kid, you can't get your arms around the planet exactly. You can use
that in your campaign, Frank, I'll let you so. Also, to get back to just correcting the record on this, that whole climate change work during a period when people were calling it lie warming, and you offered advice by calling it climate change instead, none of that was in the service of the Bush administration. I must have had that wrong when I brought that up earlier.
It's been written about, so I'm not surprised that you said it. I never not once met George W. Bush in the White House and anythings that he did, and he actually shook his hand at a Republican events. He had no idea who I was. He never ad my stuff. I was doing this at the time for the business community. But that isn't sexy enough. That doesn't sell.
And no one from the White House, no one representing the Bushes had retained your services. No, okay, No, Well, that's good for people to know that, and we should try to excize that from the public record, and we can do that now through this show forever on this issue of Trump's intervention in your worldview and how it was such an eye opener for you, and you said earlier in the top of the show that it was because he didn't tell the truth and you lost faith
in him as a political actor and a person. I guess out of that. One of the curious phenomenons watching right now is that trump Ism and the uses and abuses of propaganda and social division I think pervades a lot of the Republican messaging right now. When I look at what I think are some of the foundations going into twenty twenty four of Republican messaging, I look at the backlash against immigration, I look at some of the anti woke statements, and obviously those pushes touch on real things.
People have concerns about the border. People have real concerns about an unmanaged border. People are concerned that perhaps college curriculums are getting overtaken by people who have ideology in the front of their minds rather than learning. But as to whether or not either of these things amount to the kind of a crisis, the candidates, like RHN de Stantists,
for example, pedal constantly in their messaging. I think it's an interesting referendum around whether or not the GOP right now now has the right messages lined up going into twenty twenty four. And I was wondering what you thought about that.
So allow me to tell you a story about an interaction with Trump that had such an impact on me, and I've not spoken about it until now. I was fortunate enough to be invited to write on Air Force one between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Trump is doing a speech. So being sat in the very back of the plane, the plane takes off, they come and said for me. I brought to the front of the plane
and there's the President sits me down. It's just myself the president, the Republican leader at the time, House Leader Kevin McCarthy, and we begin to have a conversation about language and messaging, and he says to me, what would you tell me? What have you heard out there? And I said, you're trying to get a border wall built. But their Democrats are not going to build a wall.
They will build a security barrier. They will build something that makes it more difficult for people to come across illegally, but they won't build a wall. So Trump hears this and his response to me is, but Frank, I've been saying build a wall, build a wall. All my supporters know that chance, they chanted at every event I do. That's a horrible chance. Build the security barrier, build the security And I said, sir, that's not what I mean.
In Washington as policy called it a security barrier, and then in your rallies, you can call it a wall. So he doesn't like that answer, so he calls Jared Kushner to come in first. Then he calls Steven Miller to come in, and then he says, hey, guys, Frank says, we got a new chance, build a security barrier. And I said, sir, that is not what I mean, and I was genuinely angry. So we get to Vegas, it's
a very short flight. He does this thing. I'm invited to come back to Washington, d C. Because it's where I'm heading anyway, and once again we get into the same conversations. I'm about to acknowledge something I've never admitted before until now. I was so agitated that he was making fun of me, that he was cheapening the advice, that he was politicizing something that I thought was very important to policy, that the only way that I could respond is simply to close my eyes and fall asleep.
So I must be the first person ever the Jews spoken to who fell asleep on Air Force one in front of the president. It was the way that I took myself out of the conversation. Your point is well taken. The Republican Party used to be the party of Ronald Reagan. The eleventh commandment shall not criticize another Republican. Now that's the focus of most Republicans. That the focus of primaries.
That's all you see in these presidents of the debates is candidates feeding up on each other instead of focusing on what's wrong with the Democrats. They're focusing on what's wrong with each other, their personal attack, their visious attacks. And I credit the origination of that to Donald Trump in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and now it's become commonplace for the Republican Party.
So that's internessine warfare that would have happened in the past. What about the message that's going outside of the party to voters. How do you see that situated strategically within the GOP right now?
It's the exact opposite of where I came to politics. Ronald Reagan. His language was about its morning in America. His language was about doesn't matter who we are, but where we came from. What matters is where we're going. So his was a future focused and an uplifting message. And Donald Trump is exactly the opposite. He even uses the word revenge, and it's all about the kind of politics of having a gripe. There's a word for it. I can't come up with it right now, but it's resentment.
It's the politics of resents, and it's the politics of getting even, and I don't think that's healthy for a country. I think we've seen the impact of that. He's not alone I believe the Democrats do it as well, but clearly, with social media at an all time high in terms of impact, we now get our information to affirm us rather than to inform us, and that's where the politics of resentment comes in, and I think that we're now in danger of losing the ability to talk to each other as a result.
The conundrum in that, too, Frank, is that the politics of resentment have proven to be an effective path to power, even if they create problematic results divisions within society, a lack of policy. As a power acquisition strategy, it's worked, and Trump demonstrated that in spades, which is why I think you have some of these Trump light candidates like Ramaswami or the Sciantists trying to walk in his shoes without his charisma.
I want to take the restraint to that just before the break, yep, which is that I agree with that, and it's why over the last twelve months I've started to say to people and this came after the events of January sixth, twenty twenty one, so it's only within the last really two years that there's some things that are more important than the next election that you can absolutely win votes win seats and maybe even win an election, do the politics of resentment and woke, but you will
be very sorry about the country you have because you may win that election, but you're lost in an entire generation. And I'm now telling people overtly publicly that be very careful about what you say to get elected, because it'll come back to haunt you after the election.
On that note, I'm going to take a break, Brank, and we'll come right back. We're back with Frank, once a prominent polster, an observer of the political scene both in the US and overseas. Frank, in the prior segment, we were talking about where the GOP is with its messaging in the wake of trump Ism. With trump Ism still very present, tell me a little bit about how you see democratic messaging right now, how the Biden White
House is playing this. One of the things that's left out at me and all of this is that the Biden White House has struggled mightily to get credit for the economy, for GDP growth and job growth that's occurred since he assumed office. But when you look at the polling, that's getting very little traction. That's curious to me, and I'm also interested in any other thoughts you have about the Democratic Party's messaging right now.
Well, the public blames the Biden administration for inflation. Whether or not that's legitimate, that's a question for economists. But when inflation started to pick up, his exact word in response is that inflation is transitory. Tell that to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck. Tell that to the twenty three percent of Americans that literally don't know if they're going to be able to pay their bills at the end of the week. And they felt that the administration
paid no attention to it. And in fact, we went through our first Thanksgiving and our first Christmas when people couldnot afford to buy the dinners, they could not afford to travel because food prices were high, gas prices were high, insurance prices went up, housing prices, want everything, And there was no sense of understanding from the White House for months as this went forward. So that was part of it. And the other part of it is the president offered
to be postpartisan. He actually ran as a and I quote a uniter, but for the first year of his administration there was nothing about unity. He rarely met with the Republican leaders of Congress. He rarely gave aged in any kind of constructive conversation at a time when we desperately needed Democrats Republicans to be in the same room at the same time hammering out their differences. Because in
the end, we're a fifty to fifty country. You ask people to identify themselves as a Republican or Democrat, it's almost dead. Even so, we have to give people the voice. We have to recognize that the majority should not run rough shot over the minority in Congress or the White House versus Congress. And that did not happen. And now the reason why Biden isn't getting credits has nothing to do with his policy and everything to do with his age. And I know that listeners right now just by saying
that their hands explode. But all you have to do is look at the police. Joe Biden is old, and he's asking us to vote for him, not as an eighty one year old, He's asking us to vote for him as an eighty six year old. He would be eighty six at the end of his term. So the public is looking at him and they say, thank you for the Chips Act, thank you for fixing infrastructure, thank you for making these investments, thank you for writing the ship,
for adding some stability. But sir, it's time to go, and he's not listening to them, and the members of Congress are certainly not engaged. They sound so political, so partisan, so angry, that there's no sense of You mentioned early in this program, JFK I brought up Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. These are three Democratic leaders who understood that you had to focus on hope and opportunity rather than anger and despair.
So I'm very critical of both political parties for missing a special moment to reignite our faith in the future and to reconnect us both to our governing institutions and the people who run them. They're both failing.
So you've identified Biden's age and inflation as two of the things undercutting his ability to reposition himself. Is that something that polling and messaging can cure.
Well, it's interesting because Jeffrey Katzenberg, who I'm so eager to meet. He's a Hollywood mogul, producer, very active in entertainment and very successful, but he ought to stay out of politics because he's encouraging Joe Biden to lean into the age, to say, I've got the experience. He's telling Joe Biden to promote the fact that he's old not to use that language, and he doesn't understand that the American people do not want a president in their eighties.
Democrats, I would point out that if Donald Trump gets elected, he'd be eighty one at the end of his first term, so it's interesting the second term, well, right at the end of the second term. That was just wishful thinking on my part. So the age problem doesn't accrue to Donald Trump in the way that it accrues to Biden, So it's not simply a factor of chronology. Frank, I think that Biden doesn't present physically in the same way that Trump does on the campaign trail, you know, the
way each of them articulates and carries themselves. I think there's a visible quotient with Biden, isn't there with Trump just yet? Though Trump's become notably more mushmouth and notably more unhinged in his tour right now, I do think it's bonkers that anyone would think that Donald Trump would be a more reliable steward of the ship of State than Joe Bidenful.
Be careful your partisanship is showing.
No, it's not my partisanship. It's just my rational desire to have adults in the room making decisions as opposed to little kids on pogo sticks.
By the way, maybe give you the best example. Here's another example of language. Your comments, and I know how you feel, and there are tens of millions of people who agree with you and they want to get in that dig. But that's not how you succeed. The phrase you use. We need leaders who are reasonable, sensible, and responsible. Reasonable, sensible, responsible is far better than children on pogo sticks totally.
But I'm not running for office, Frank, I'm just in.
A jar hosting podcast.
I'm hosting a podcast, and I really do want leaders who are responsible in reason, intelligent, reasonable, aren't bouncing around on pogo sticks either. I would like it all as one package. Tell me. We've had some noticeable crackups and polling in this recent say Trump cycle, right like the poles didn't indicate that Trump would beat Hillary Clinton. The twenty twenty poles suggested there might be a blue wave, it didn't occur. The twenty twenty two poles suggested to
be a red wave that didn't occur. You know, we've talked a lot about the emotional side of campaigning, but on the day to drive inside on the statistical side and the analytical side of polling. Do you think this is just power for the course, Sometimes you get it wrong because there are margins of errors and people interpret the data in different ways. Or do you think something's gone off in terms of the methodology around polling.
I actually think the latter, And this is why I say to other pollsters in my profession, stop making projections, because every time you do, you embarrass yourself. Twenty sixteen, the problem there was not people lying to the pollsters. It was that some people refused to cooperate. And I ran into this on election night. I have always trusted the exit polls because in my lifetime they were right
better than ninety five percent of the time. If the exit polls showed a candidate winning, let's say you thirty three centate races, the exit polls were right thirty two out of thirty three times. Every time in twenty sixteen they were wrong. And the reason why, it's not that people said they voted for the Democrat. It's that Trump voters refused to participate they thought the exit polls were part of the conspiracy, were part of the New York Times and CNN and other institutions who they did not
like trying to control the election outcome. So Trump voters would push past an exit pollster and go to the parking lot and drive home. And because they have to interview every tenth person or every fifteenth person, they would then talk to the next person who came out, and it was fifty to fifty whether that was Clinton or whether that was Trump. Enough Trump people did not participate that it biased the results by about three percent. Well
guess what. Three percent wasn't enough to allow the Democrats to look like they were winning control of the Senate, to make it look like the Democrats were going to have a good night. And we realized by about nine pm that evening that the exit polls were wrong. But I emphasize it, it's not because people lie, it's because they don't participate. The same thing happened in twenty twenty. I remember ABC News had a survey in Wisconsin that had Trump losing by some ridiculous number, and it was
an embarrassment. All the polls in certain states were off. And that's because they were trying to overcompensate for what happened in twenty sixteen. Use polling to understand why people think the way they do. Use polling almost as an X ray, to a diagnostic of what's right and what's wrong, whether in a business or politics or some sort of social issue. But stop making guesses about the future, because you're going to get it wrong.
In that landscape. Do you think any of the current polling around Trump. He has double digit leads within the Republican field, and he and Biden are polling more or less even, and it had to head national matchup. Do you have any observations about the qu of that polling right now?
I don't trust the outlying poll There's one survey that has Trump beating Bien by ten points. I don't believe it. I tend to use the real Clear Politics average of polls because that gets rid of the outliers that are too democratic and to Republican. I think for the most part that real clear average is what will happen. But I emphasize to the listener that we don't elect our
president by popular vote. We elect them by electoral college, and if you win the right votes in the right states that can allow you to lose the popular vote by one, two or even three percent. Hillary Clinton got millions of votes more than Donald Trump in twenty sixteen, so the polling was actually rather accurate. It just didn't record it in those individual states, and the same thing could happen again in twenty twenty four.
I always like to ask people at the end of the show what they've learned, you know, what their own educational moment was. What have you learned about polling and messaging in the Trump era that you didn't know before.
I teach all across the globe, and my students teach me and explain to me the results of the polling that I do across the globe. My African students the African Leadership University taught me that we have completely neglected an entire continent, the kindest, warmest, most hopeful people on the face of the earth, and the West has ignored
them or forgotten them. I've learned from my students at West Point about responsibility and service and civility and decency, and that if they can do it at the military academies, why can't the rest of America do it. I've learned from my students at Raleigh College in the UK that
education can work. You don't have to do woke, you don't have to do cancel culture, That students can feel safe to articulate an opposing point of view and professors not only don't punish them, but they actually welcome it
in a responsible fashion. I've learned from my students at USC that so much of what's being taught in high schools is not being remembered in college, and that if you allow students to write people off because you disagree with them, or you have something against a position they stand, then you're not hearing every point of view. My students teach me that I have to listen, I have to explore, I have to ask, and never ever ever be satisfied with the first answer you get, because there's a reason
behind that and a reason behind that reason. And it's like the peeling of an onion. If you can get to the center, may be painful, it may make your cry, but if you get to the core, you can actually do good. You can actually fix a problem. If you understand why, you can learn how. And that's what it's taught me.
Frank, we're out of time, I feel like we could have kept going.
Thank you for having me.
Frank Luntz is a political and communications consultant and polster. You can find him at fi LUNs dot com. Here at crash Course, we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that facts matter very much to Frank Luntz, as they should. They should matter to all of us, because in an era full of disinformation, facts still matter. What did you learn?
We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable Anna Maazarakus, Moses Adam and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Stage Bauman, Katie Boys, Jeff Grocott,
Mike Nitze, and Christine Vanden Bilert. Blake Maples does our sound engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another crash course.