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Longtime GOP pollster Frank Luntz has predicted that Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is now over after he gave “very close” to the worst debate performance ever seen on Tuesday night.
“It was a pretty negative performance – pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous,” Luntz said on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Wednesday. “And I think that this will cost him.”
He added: “This is not the worst debate performance I’ve seen in my career, but it’s very close to it.”
The pollster not only claimed that Harris defeated Trump on the debate stage, but predicted that the night’s events had lost Trump the race for the White House altogether.
“I’m trying to decide if I want to go on record,” Luntz continued. “And the answer is yes. I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”
One week before Trump and Kamala Harris came face-to-face on the stage in Philadelphia, the veteran pollster had predicted on CNN that “the debate is everything.”
On Tuesday night, a handshake and a brief exchange of well wishes between the presidential candidates set the stage for a cordial debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
But the former president quickly reverted to his personal and policy-based lines of attacks – including pushing wild, false claims that Democrats want to execute babies after birth and that migrants are eating pet dogs and cats.
His performance has been branded a “disaster” by several Republican heavyweights and even his new ally Robert F Kennedy Jr admitted Harris “clearly won” the debate.
“Vice President Harris clearly won the debate in terms of her delivery, polish, organization, and preparation,” RFK Jr told Fox News on Wednesday.
The public appears to agree, with a CNN flash poll finding that 63 percent of registered voters who tuned in to the ABC News debate believe Harris “won” the debate.
An average of national polls currently shows Harris has a 2.8-point lead over Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to try to claim he had a “GREAT DEBATE” in a post on Truth Social early on Thursday morning.
On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Luntz went on to highlight Trump’s missteps and inability to stick to script during the debate.
“The conversations about people eating dogs and cats, calling the leader of Hungary one of the greatest world leaders,” he said of his worst moments.
“Repeatedly missing the opportunity to focus on inflation and affordability, and the complete inability to present his point of view without completely tearing into her, into Joe Biden, into whomever was in his sights.”
Luntz and Trump have been embroiled in a feud since July 2015, when the political insider interviewed the Republican and suggested he took his comments about Mexicans coming across the Southern border as “too far.”
Years of clashing continued after Trump’s 2016 election victory – a win the pollster said took him by surprise.
Luntz later said he was wowed by Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address and owed the then-president an apology.
The analyst later claimed in his book The Big Break that he had a minor stroke in January 2020 “because of Trump” as he didn’t speak out enough against the former president.
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election in November, Luntz correctly predicted that Trump would take the lead on election night, but in the “hours and days that followed, Biden would catch up, move ahead, and would eventually be elected president”.
Before Biden stepped off the Democratic party’s ticket in July – in the wake his disastrous debate performance against Trump – Luntz believed that the former president’s re-election was almost certain.
“I can tell you now, that unless something dramatic happens to Trump, I believe he’s the next president,” he told The Times in June.
But when Harris then launched her presidential campaign on July 21, Luntz predicted the playing field leveled out. Now, he has forecast that Tuesday’s debate clinched the win for Harris.
