Frank Luntz a phony? Say it ain’t so!
Republican pollster and Kevin McCarthy friend-slash-roommate Frank Luntz isn’t afraid of boasting about his personal achievements. “Dr. Frank I. Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today,” reads a biography on his website. But some of his former employees tell a remarkably different story.
Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company who worked at the company from 1997 through the early 2000s, told Salon that Luntz’s claim to deliver objective data is a “total shtick and a scam.”
Ingram described observing Luntz trying to manipulate focus groups that used “dial testing,” in which participants spin a small handheld device, yielding real-time results in response to questions asked by the presenter. “Frank, when he would be hired by clients, whether they would be corporate or political, would sit in that room yelling, ‘Keep turning the dials! Keep turning the dials!'” Ingram told Salon in a phone interview. Luntz’s primary concern, Ingram said, was results that would yield more “compelling” data to be “present[ed] to the client.”
Ingram said that Luntz does not work as an “impartial” or honest survey researcher but is better described as a pay-for-play pawn in Washington. In 1997, the American Association for Public Opinion Research largely agreed with Ingram’s current analysis, finding after a 14-month investigation that Luntz had “violated the Association’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.”
Luntz’s “keep turning the dials” approach, Ingram said, is “clearly not the type of stuff that legitimate public opinion and survey researchers employ,” adding that this was just one of many examples. He described additional ways Luntz would deceive viewers and media companies with such tactics, including screening and selecting participants in a manner that Ingram called “quite frankly bullshit.”
“The clowns at MSNBC didn’t have a clue about how the focus groups or panels worked, or what Frank what was doing,” Ingram said. “The actions were basically contrived: He screened out anybody that isn’t going to give the viewers the opinion that Frank, on behalf of his client, is looking for. Somehow, he is able to bullshit people.”
Yeah. He’s still doing it, wringing his hands over what the party has become. As you know, I’m pretty forgiving of Never Trumpers generally speaking, in the hopes that these heretics and apostates will somehow be able to lead certain people away from the fascist cliff. But Luntz is a tough one for me:
Throughout the pandemic, Luntz was living in his 7,000-square-foot luxury condo in Washington, and his former employees all told Salon he had no business taking the PPP loan, which was ostensibly meant to help struggling small businesses survive. Luntz also owns a Los Angeles mansion that includes a three-fourths scale replica of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office and a replica of the Lincoln Bedroom that features a photo of Clinton and Luntz on the bedside table — with a “version” of Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress hanging on a wall. (Luntz played an instrumental role in Clinton’s 1998 impeachment.)
The Gingrich propaganda machine of the 1990s opened up this new era in GOP politics (building on what came before, of course) and Luntz was right in the middle of it. He and Gingrich trained the right in this language of hate and derision that has metastasized into the toxic cult it has become. I hold him more responsible than most for what’s happened. And for all of his recent “concern” about the direction of the country, I haven’t really seen him come to grips with that. The fact that he still celebrates his role in the 90s turn toward nuclear partisan warfare tells me he’s still full of shit.