Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz on Sunday argued that Kamala Harris did “too much defining” of President-elect Donald Trump leading up to her election loss.
“We all know what Trump is, we experienced him for four years,” said Luntz in an appearance on ABC’s This Week.
“Whoever told her to focus on him committed political malpractice because in the end, you can not change someone’s point of view on him. It was all about her.”
Luntz is not alone in his post-election analysis.
Harris campaign aides along with advisers and strategists revealed to The Washington Post that there was too much of a focus on Trump while the party failed to register the concerns of the average voter.
In a clip aired by ABC earlier in the program, Luntz asked a focus group of “persuadable” and “undecided” Gen Z voters for a show of hands if they disliked both major-party candidates.
Every participant raised their hand including one Maryland resident, who slammed Harris for running on an “I’m not Trump” platform.
“That’s not enough to be a president, you need to have more than, ‘Well, I’m better than this person,’” the participant explained.
“You’ve got to explain how you’re going to fix our democracy, how you’re going to make the United States a better place and I didn’t get that from her.”
ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Luntz for the “bottom line” from the focus group.
“In the end, she didn’t answer the question that they wanted to know — what are you going to do in the first hour, in the first day, in the first week, in the first month and so on,” Luntz replied.
“They felt they had the right to hear this and if she won’t tell them that, then they couldn’t give her their vote and other voters, not just the young voters, felt like she wasn’t — she never came clean with what she wanted to do and the fact that she changed her positions on some issues, she never really explained it.”