Frank Luntz, who has decades of experience measuring public opinion trends and has served as the pollster for at least two presidential candidates, said Donald Trump’s campaign is the “worst” he has seen in his professional life.
“There are states where there is not a single Trump headquarters. He spent more money on hats than he did on survey research, than he did on understanding voters. This is a campaign that is an absolute joke,” the veteran GOP pollsters told Yahoo News’ Katie Couric in an interview this week.
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During each of the general-election debates this cycle, Luntz has gauged voter opinions in real time by hosting focus groups in various battleground states. However, Luntz said it was a focus group hosted after the final presidential debate that truly showed the problems Trump has created for himself and his campaign.
“Every day there’s another batch of emails and every day we learn more about what [Hillary Clinton] has done,” he said, referring to the 30,000-plus hacked emails from the inbox of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that have been released by WikiLeaks since the beginning of October.
But very few voters have learned about the damaging revelations contained in Podesta’s emails because Trump “speaks so loudly that all the cameras are on him, removing the oxygen in the room that should also be about her,” Luntz said.
A recent focus group of undecided voters proved him right after many of them announced they would not vote for Clinton upon seeing news coverage of what was revealed in her campaign’s internal emails. When Luntz showed the group videos of Trump attacking Clinton for the same scandals, “they all went back to being undecided.”
“Not only did he not win them over, he actually turned them off because his language is wrong, [and] his presentation is wrong,” he told Couric.
Trump, Luntz said, deserves most of the blame for the failures his campaign has experienced.
“This candidate tapped into something unique [but] has absolutely lost his focus,” he said, later adding that the Republican presidential hopeful has run “the worst campaign that I have ever seen in my professional life.”
