Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a regular on Fox News and CBS News, reportedly conducted a recent focus group centered on Donald Trump’s candidacy and the conclusion Luntz reached is far from what he said after the first GOP debate.
Back on Aug. 7, after the debate, Luntz declared that Donald Trump’s performance guaranteed the “destruction” of his campaign for the party’s presidential nomination.
Public polling experts recently interviewed by the Washington Examiner media desk rebutted Luntz’s conclusion, saying that the opinions of a few dozen voters in a focus group are highly unlikely to reflect the broader electorate.
But in Luntz’s latest focus group, conducted in the D.C. area on Monday, left Luntz with a different sense of Trump’s candidacy, according to Time magazine.
“You guys understand how significant this is?” Luntz said to reporters after the focus group, Time reported. “This is real. I’m having trouble processing it. Like, my legs are shaking.”
“I want to put the Republican leadership behind this mirror and let them see,” he said. “They need to wake up. They don’t realize how the grassroots have abandoned them. Donald Trump is punishment to a Republican elite that wasn’t listening to their grassroots.”
The focus group was composed of people who said they like Trump and after it was over, “the vast majority said they liked Trump more than when they walked in.”
Several attendees cited Trump’s hardline stance on immigration policy and his promise to take care of military veterans as their reasons for supporting his candidacy.
Luntz declined to be interviewed for this article.
