Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz argued that Kamala Harris’ decision to align herself “tightly” with Joe Biden led to her losing the election to President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday.
“Was she loyal? Absolutely. Did it hurt her in the campaign? Absolutely,” Luntz said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, as Mediaite noted.
Luntz weighed in after a senior Harris campaign official told CNN’s MJ Lee that the president holds “a lot of blame” for her defeat.
A number of Democrats have slammed Biden in the wake of Harris’ defeat for his decision to seek reelection last year, declaring that he “hung on too long” before abandoning his presidential bid in July.
A Harris aide has also pointed to a moment during the vice president’s interview on “The View” last month, when she told hosts that she couldn’t think of something she could’ve done differently from Biden over the past four years, Reuters reported.
Luntz, who described the 2024 race last week as reminding him “so much of 2016,” said that Harris decided “not the differentiate herself” from Biden by the end of the campaign.
“And you can be supportive of someone and still say, ‘I’m something different. I don’t look like him. I don’t sound like him. We have complementary points of view, but they’re not identical,’” Luntz said.
“And then she could’ve gone off and differentiated herself. Once again, it was her choice to align with Biden that tightly.”
Luntz told Blitzer that there was “no reason” for her to not distinguish herself from Biden.
He added that she had to tackle the “two most important issues” in this year’s election: affordability and immigration and “overall personal security.”
“And on both of those, she had to get involved. She couldn’t push it off,” Luntz said.
“It’s not enough to talk about health care. It’s not enough to talk about women’s health. She had to address those issues. She didn’t, at least not until the end. And it was a big cost to her, again, because she didn’t want to differentiate between herself and the president.”
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