Veteran pollster Frank Luntz, who has advised multiple Republican presidents and worked as the party's strategist for nearly three decades, predicts that Donald Trump will never again lead the United States.
Talking to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age after he spoke at the Conservative Party conference in the UK recently, Luntz said even if Trump nominated and the Democrats ran a poor candidate, the 45th president would never again prevail at the ballot box.
“He will not win,” Luntz said, adding that if Trump runs again he will be nominated by the Republicans, but he will never be elected president because there are too many people who hate him.
The comments come amid speculations that the former US president will vie for the 2024 polls race.
On October 9, he visited Iowa for a campaign-style rally, where he gave perhaps his clearest signal yet regarding the presidential bid again, according the Business Insider.
“Trump is the most popular Republican by far, but he can’t win a general election because in the end politics is about persona as much as it is about policy, and his persona is unacceptable to too many people, ” Luntz told the Australian newspaper.
He says as a result of the Trump presidency, he is no longer a Republican – and he also no longer feels like a US citizen, saying he remains worried about whether America can be fixed.
“I look at my country as an outsider, not as an insider or a practitioner or even a citizen,” he said.
Luntz says his concerns began before Trump but have accelerated in the years since 2016.
“What’s different now that did not exist before is a sense of revenge and that is Donald Trump – he put that into the chemical mix,” he said.
“Resentment is ‘someone else is doing better than me’, revenge is ‘I want to bring them down’; we had resentment over the last 20-30 years, we did not have a desire for revenge, that desire came into being in 2016.”
Trump's signal
Despite not having officially announced his candidacy yet, Trump at the Iowa rally teased a future campaign's potential political slogan.
"Make America Great Again, Again," he told the crowd. "Because we already did it."
This refers to the former president's 2016 campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," which is often seen on the iconic red hats of his supporters.
The new slogan, he said, is different from his 2020 slogan, "Keep America Great," because "America's not great now."