Frank Luntz Gets Defensive Over His Bad Midterm Predictions By Blaming CNN: ‘Stop Focusing on Who’s Up and Who’s Down!’

Pollster Frank Luntz got defensive over his bad midterm predictions by blaming CNN – while appearing on the network on Monday.

A day before the Nov. 8 midterms, Luntz tweeted, “When the dust settles from the 2022 midterms, the GOP will have between 233-240 House seats – outdoing their total from 1994. Republicans also will take control of the Senate, but that won’t be clear until Friday.”

Here’s how the exchange on CNN This Morning went down:

Co-host DON LEMON: How did so many people, including you, get it so wrong? And, as I said in the beginning there, we tend to over-index, we’ve been doing it since 2016, over-indexing the MAGA part of the electorate.

LUNTZ: There is a fear they did not include enough Republicans in their samples. Because we knew from 2016, 2018, and even 2020, that trump voters tended not to respond to pollsters because they thought that the results would be used against them. So there is an effort to, as you say, over-index, this time. that’s number one. Number two is that people came to the polls and they finally decided enough is enough. About 8-9 percent of the public changes, they come in undecided and they have to decide at that moment. And they come in potentially wanting to vote one way and they end up voting the other.

LEMON: Woah oh oh, wait. What do you mean?

LUNTZ: Where they come in and think I’m going to vote Republican. And they go and have to decide do they pull the ballots or do they want to make a statement voting Democrat? 8% of the population comes in and may change their minds. And third is that the independents, and this is where the Republicans have to take very close analysis to. The independents usually break 55/45 Republican. If they break 60/40, Republicans win. In this case, they broke 50/50. That’s a real problem for the GOP. It’s a major drop.

And one more, Republicans got 5 million more votes for the House than the Democrats. Five million. So why don’t the results show themselves in the congressional races? The answer, redistricting. That had a bigger impact against the GOP than anybody realized and you could not know this until election day.

Moments later, Luntz was asked by co-host Kaitlan Collins about polling and how it can be fixed.

“You don’t,” said Lunz.

“The polling is irrelevant is what you’re saying,” asked Collins.

Luntz and the co-hosts sparred:

LUNTZ: “You guys spend too much time focused on who’s going to win and lose and trying to predict that.”

LEMON: “Isn’t that what you do?” asked Lemon. “You’re a pollster!”

LUNTZ: I don’t do that. I don’t do that. I haven’t worked in a political campaign in more than a decade. I used the numbers that were given to me by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. And no matter what they say —

“Frank, how can you say that?” asked Lemon, citing Luntz’s tweet.

When asked by Collins whether polling has a purpose anymore, Luntz replied that the media should “stop focusing on who’s up and down, and start trying to understand why.”

He elaborated:

Give us insight. Give us information that we can use. People watch this show because they’re more informed by giving you their 10 or 15 or 30 minutes. They watch because they care about what’s going on and they want to stay up to date on all the events that are important. They’re not asking you to predict the future. They want to fully and completely understand the present. So let’s go back to using polling for what it was meant to do. Insight, information, knowledge, and, if you’re lucky, wisdom.

Watch above via CNN.

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]