Frank Luntz Says Harris ‘Absolutely’ Blundered by Not Distancing Herself from Biden: ‘It Was a Big Cost to Her’

Pollster Frank Luntz said the unwillingness of Vice President Kamala Harris to distance herself from President Joe Biden helped doom her campaign.

Harris was soundly defeated by former President Donald Trump, who notched more Electoral College votes than he did in 2016. The vice president, who inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure and key personnel, had to run an abbreviated campaign after the president ended his reelection bid in July following a disastrous debate performance against Trump.

On the trail, Harris said her administration would not be a continuation of the Biden administration, but she declined to criticize any of his policies and said she would not have governed differently.

Luntz appeared on CNN on Wednesday afternoon, where he gave a postmortem.

“A senior Harris campaign official told CNN, Frank, and I’m quoting now, ‘Biden will hold a lot of blame for it, and frankly, he should,'” Wolf Blitzer said. “Do you agree?”

“Well, in the end, she decided not to differentiate herself,” Luntz replied. “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.’ And then she could’ve gone off and differentiated herself. Once again, it was her choice to align with Biden that tightly. Was she loyal? Absolutely. Did it hurt her in the campaign? Absolutely.”

Blitzer asked about Harris’s decision not to cite any policy disagreements with Biden.

“You think that was a big cost to her?” the host inquired.

“There’s no reason for her to do that,” he responded. “The two most important issues in this campaign, one of them was affordability, not the economy because in the end, people’s jobs were ok. They were secure and people were making more money. The actual issue of the economy was the prices, the cost of everything. And the other issue was immigration and overall personal security and safety. And on both of those, she had to get involved. She couldn’t push it off. It’s not enough to talk about healthcare. 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.”

Watch above via CNN.