'Trump should be quaking': Pollster’s inability to find women for focus group spells trouble for GOP

19 August 2024

Veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz last week said during a CNBC interview that "the issues and conditions" many voters have longed care about — such as inflation, crime and immigration — "favor Donald Trump," and because of that — the ex-president "should be winning this election."

However, The Hill reported that Luntz noted "he is seeing a 'broad shift' in the 2024 polls toward Vice President" Kamala Harris.

In a Monday, August 19 op-ed published by the LA Times, writer Jill Lawrence explains why.

The The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock author writes:

In actual America, inflation is easing, crime is down and Democrats can persuasively argue that the border would be far more secure and orderly if Trump hadn’t killed a tough bipartisan immigration package negotiated by a conservative senator and endorsed by both Harris and President Biden.

In other news from Planet Earth, election results of the past four years have made clear that 'Big Lie' election denialism is not a winner, abortion bans are not winners and Trump has problems with enough fellow Republicans to cost him a close race in a presidential battlefield like Pennsylvania.

In addition to her own findings, Lawrence also shares what never-Trump author, strategist and election data analyst Mike Madrid says is blocking Trump and 2024 GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance's success.

"There are two major obstacles in their path, and they are related," Madrid suggested. The first "is the shift of women — specifically white, college-educated, Republican women — away from Trump and the GOP," Lawrence writes.

"The second obstacle is that Trump and Vance are in denial," as both GOP hopefuls claimed this month that abortion is not an issue that matters to women.

"Trump and the GOP should be quaking at the prospect of reproductive-rights voters," Lawrence emphasizes. "Not 'everybody' wanted abortion sent back to the states. In fact, in an eye-popping new Kaiser Family Foundation poll of 3,901 reproductive-age women, 74% opposed leaving abortion up to the states — including 53% of the Republicans in the poll," she adds.

Lawrence also noted that "Luntz said Wednesday on CNBC that Harris has transformed the electorate — that undecideds had shifted to her, and that voters who used to weakly favor Trump had shifted to undecided. And he said the change, though statistically small, could spell victory for Democrats."

The GOP pollster said, "I’m trying to do a focus group tonight with undecided voters under the age of 27 for a major news outlet. And I can’t recruit young women to this, because they don’t exist as undecided voters."

Lawrence's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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