‘He was pathetic and he could still win’: Republican strategist’s surprising insights on Trump v Harris

Frank Luntz had his mind changed during the election cycle, when he initially thought Harris was a sure winner. Now, he’s confused about why Trump’s extreme rhetoric isn’t having the same effect it had before. Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington DC

Frank Luntz is a veteran GOP political strategist who says his mind has been changed during the election cycle (AFP via Getty Images)

Surrounded by a group of British high school students and a small group of reporters he’d invited to his palatial condominium in northwest Washington, DC, one of the country’s foremost strategists admitted the race was still too close for him to call.

With early voting underway and exactly two weeks left until Americans cast ballots to determine the next president of the United States, Frank Luntz pointed out that this election’s polls consistently fall within the margin for error. Anyone making predictions right now, he added, is a complete fool.

“In those key swing states, on all of them … they’re within two points. The margin of error is four. So they’re half the margin of error. You can’t call it. Anyone who calls it is an idiot, because they really don’t know,” he said.

Referring to the group of journalists — including representatives from The Independent and a number of other British-based newspapers — Luntz told the students from Radley College that he would not risk his reputation by making a prediction in this year’s race between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“You have to know when … It’s better to be thought of as being stupid than to make a projection,” he added.

Luntz noted that he’d done that exact thing just over a month ago, when Trump was so soundly beaten in his sole debate with Harris that he’d declared the race all but over. He’d characterized Trump’s showing as “so bad that I thought there was no way he could win.”

Yet a month and a half later, Trump has rebounded in opinion polls and remains ahead, even, or within the margin for error against Harris in the seven key states needed to lock up 270 electoral votes — and the White House.

This means debates “don’t matter,” Luntz said. It also means “our entire process, everything we’ve known about politics, is not true anymore.”

“We had … 75 million people watching this. He was pathetic, and he could still win,” he said.

The idea that Trump — the only convicted felon to run on a major-party presidential ticket in the nation’s history, as well as the only former president to have attempted a violent coup against his own government — could be propelled back into the highest office in American government might be unthinkable to some. But Luntz is fully cognizant of the fact that a solid number of Americans are fully on board with the ex-president. Indeed, some are willing to embrace any outcome — however violent — as long as it ends with a Trump restoration. And he says he’s never been more pessimistic about the direction of the country no matter who wins in November.

Citing a recent poll which found that a full 25 per cent of Republicans say Trump should do “everything he can to assume his rightful position as president,” Luntz described the situation as “f***ed up.”

“That’s why I’m so concerned about where we go in the future, that there’s too high a percentage of Americans who, even right now, will say: ‘It’s our presidency. We have the right to take it, and Trump should try to do so’,” he said.

The veteran Republican strategist did suggest that Harris has other potentially destabilizing elements “on her side,” but he said the key thing uniting the extreme wings of both parties is a lack of institutional trust.

“We don’t trust our election system, we don’t trust our institutions. We do not trust the leaders, and we don’t trust the actual institutions themselves,” he said.

Why Harris might not win

When Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race and throwing his support behind Harris, the Democratic Party rapidly consolidated behind the vice president. Her sudden candidacy brought forth a wave of enthusiasm like nothing Luntz had ever seen in his decades of political work.

He described her opening weeks atop the ticket as “a genuine freight train” that “took the country by storm” and was “the best [political campaign] in modern American history — even better than [Barack] Obama” over that 45-day period.

But Luntz said Harris has been comparatively “abysmal” over the last month because of her outright refusal to separate herself from Biden and his policy choices.

“You have to give voters a second act. You have to give them a second reason to listen, and in her case, she’s not telling them what they want to know or need to know,” he said. “She has a responsibility to answer specific questions about what she would do, and voters are pissed.”

He also noted that after nearly a decade running an almost continuous campaign for the presidency, voters may have become inured to Trump’s increasingly extreme rhetoric. But he isn’t sure why none of it is breaking through, considering how bizarre the ex-president’s public remarks have been in recent weeks.

“What I don’t understand is he’s saying stuff that is absolutely extreme, and it’s not hurting him at all … He’s not [just] annoying or offensive. Now he’s saying stuff that we’d have to get the constitutionality of it … This is not the same stuff that he said when he was president. This is at a different level,” he said.

Why Harris might win

But Luntz added that there’s a bright spot for Harris in the public polling data — even though he does not trust polling right now in the slightest — and that’s the incredible gender gap in the American electorate.

He cited a recent survey which put Harris’s female support at 57 per cent to Trump’s 39 per cent, while Trump’s male support is at 56 per cent to Harris’s 39 per cent. That gender gap, Luntz said, means there will be “a lot of couples where one member is sleeping on the couch on election night, and not because they’re watching TV.”

“This is real, and this is huge,” he continued.

Because women tend to turn up to vote more than men, the gender gap could prove a decisive advantage for Harris. But Luntz still describes the contest as a “dead heat” unless the vice president pulls further ahead with women.

Luntz also warned that younger voters — a traditionally unreliable demographic — could make all the difference if they turn out, because Harris and Democrats have “an absolute positive advantage among any voter who’s under age 40, and even more so under age 30.”

But for Harris to really pull ahead in the final 14 days, he said she needs to figure out a way to make people see her as more than just a continuation of the mainstream Democratic policies that Biden has put into place.

“I don’t think we fully understand the degree to which so many Americans are really frustrated with how conditions are and they’re willing to vote for a convicted felon because she reminds them too much of the status quo — that’s her problem. She had a chance to be different. She was different. She changed everything. But she started to run, and after 45 days, she became the status quo,” he said. “She should be differentiating herself more.”