Republican pollster Frank Luntz is cautioning Republicans against interpreting their midterm election victories as any kind of sign that voters want them to impose a conservative agenda on the public.
In the New York Times, Luntz says the results from Tuesday were more anti-status quo than pro-Republican.
From Luntz’s op-ed:
True, there will now be more Americans under Republican representation than at any time in decades. … It was a tsunami; someone needs to get the Democrats a towel. But that anti-Democrat wave was not the same as a pro-Republican endorsement. In many races that went from blue to red, Republican success was hardly because of what the G.O.P. has achieved on Capitol Hill. In fact, if Americans could speak with one collective voice — all 310 million of them — this is what they said Tuesday night: “Washington doesn’t listen, Washington doesn’t lead and Washington doesn’t deliver.” …
The current narrative, that this election was a rejection of President Obama, misses the mark. So does the idea that it was a mandate for an extreme conservative agenda. According to a survey my firm fielded on election night for the political-advocacy organization Each American Dream, it was more important that a candidate “shake up and change the way Washington operates.”
Luntz compares the 2014 midterms to the so-called “Republican Revolution” of 1994 led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Nobody voted Republican to start a revolution,” says Luntz, who helped engineer that landslide election for the GOP. “They did so because they were fed up with a Democratic president overreaching on health care and a government seemingly incapable of doing even the smallest thing effectively.”
[Photo via Fox News/screen grab]
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