Longtime pollster and former GOP strategist Frank Luntz on Wednesday had some harsh words for Donald Trump, saying that the current state of the presidential race shows he is “committing political suicide.”
On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Luntz noted that Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy has thoroughly altered the “entire electoral pool.”
“She’s bringing out people who are not interested in voting for either Trump or Biden,” Luntz told co-hosts Andrew Ross Sorkin and Mellissa Lee, adding that things are trending toward Democrats holding the Senate and winning the House.
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“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,” Luntz said Wednesday, about three weeks after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
One recent poll from progressive youth voting group NextGen America shows Harris with a much greater lead than Biden had with voters under 35.
Luntz then explained what he’s been hearing in focus groups. One common trend, he said, is young women moving away from Trump.
“The people who are undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. The people who are ‘weak’ Trump have all collapsed towards undecided. It’s this broad shift,” he 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.”
Luntz took issue with Trump’s fixation on certain issues at the expense of others he deemed more relevant to voters.
“[Harris] is talking about the number one issue facing the country, and Donald Trump is talking about crowd size. What the hell!” he said.
“It’s as though he’s lost control,” Luntz explained. “And I know that there are billionaires who watch this show who are spending a lot of money on Donald Trump, and they don’t understand why he’s committing political suicide.”
It’s not the first televised criticism Luntz has lobbed Trump’s way since Biden dropped out.
On CNN Tuesday, he struck a similar note, calling the GOP nominee “problematic” for talking about things that voters don’t really care about.
Trump “can’t stick to issues like inflation or immigration, can’t stick to policies that the public supports, [and] instead he has to deliver attacks against a president who’s not running against him,” Luntz said, referencing part of Trump’s conversation with Elon Musk the previous night.
And on Monday, Luntz similarly told the same network that Trump “has been very negative and very hostile” in his public statements.
Luntz publicly criticized Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign—leading to Trump calling for Fox News to fire him. But Luntz tempered those remarks while Trump was president, instead offering outright praise at times.
