'The entire electoral pool has changed': Top GOP pollster says Harris may deliver Dem trifecta

14 August 2024

One Republican polling and messaging expert is warning his party that if current trends hold, Vice President Kamala Harris may end up not only winning the White House, but also delivering majorities for Democrats in both chambers of Congress.

In a recent CNBC interview with Squawk Box, pollster Frank Luntz — who NJ.com regarded as "the Nostradamus of pollsters" — remarked on the jarring shift in momentum for Democrats between President Joe Biden's late June debate with former President Donald Trump and the emergence of Harris as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer in November. Luntz, who routinely conducts focus groups of swing voters in battleground states, noted that Harris is particularly strong with so-called "double haters" who were not excited about the prospect of a 2020 rematch.

"She’s bringing out people who are not interested in voting for either Trump or Biden, so the entire electoral pool has changed and if it continues in this direction you have to start to consider Democrats winning the Senate and Democrats winning the House," Luntz said.

"She’s got intensity now. She’s got an intensity advantage. She’s got a demographic advantage and I haven’t seen anything like this happen in 30 days in my lifetime,” he added. “Now my groups are broken up by young women saying, ‘I’m not voting for [Trump] anymore.’"

Luntz's predictions of a Harris-Walz ticket paying off big for Democrats in down-ballot races were similar to those of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who urged Republicans to take the prospect of a crushing defeat in November more seriously. The Kentucky Republican told state lawmakers in his home city of Louisville that if Democrats take the White House, flip the House of Representatives and maintain their majority in the U.S. Senate, they could kill the filibuster and grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

"That's four new Democratic senators in perpetuity," McConnell said. "If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they'll get what they want."

In his Squawk Box interview, Luntz said the momentum shift in Harris' favor could be enough to give her the advantage in close contests.

"The people who are undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. The people who are ‘weak’ Trump have all collapsed towards undecided," he said. "There are issues, attributes and the condition of the country. The issues and the conditions favor Donald Trump. He should be winning this election. But the attributes are so much in Harris’ favor that he’s not."

Despite his personal preference for Republicans, Luntz has not held back when forecasting losses for the GOP. In early 2021, he correctly predicted that both of Georgia's Republican U.S. senators would lose their respective runoff elections on January 5 after noticing billboards attacking them in deep-red Georgia counties. Both Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) went on to be sworn in as Georgia's first unified Democratic U.S. Senate delegation in three decades.

Watch Luntz's segment below, or by clicking this link.

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