Frank Luntz and Focus Groups are Destroying the GOP Message

American Thinker ^ | April 29, 2013 | C. Edmund Wright

[2ndDivisionVet]

Frank Luntz may smugly believe that Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and other right wing talk radio hosts are "responsible for the stark polarization within the nation's political discourse" and therefore "problematic" for the Republican Party.

I submit the problem is that Luntz, and a misguided over-reliance on focus groups, has neutered and thus destroyed any semblance of courage in the GOP's message. Luntz is conflating, as many wonks and number crunchers do, cause and effect with regard to the bigger realities and polarization. The country is polarized because, well, we are polarized. Rush and "the great one" didn't make it so simply by speaking the truth. And pretending to believe the same absurdities the lo-info crowd believes won't make us any less polarized either. Logic dictates that as long as we run low information campaigns, we'll suffer at the hands of the low information voter.

Meanwhile, it is becoming obvious that Luntz has become a prisoner of his own results over the years, and as such, has become obsessed with what misinformation voters already believe. He seems to have lost interest in the value of persuading voters to believe the truth. To Luntz, and to Karl Rove, and in fact most to Republican consultants, a poll or a focus group is not the starting point for voter education, it is the end point for candidate capitulation. This explains the constant surrender in the arena of ideas by candidates and spokes persons who are ostensibly on "our side."

Rove admitted as much to the big money donors when he was forced to explain why the message -- from the Romney Campaign and from Rove's Crossroads organizations -- was so tepid....

[BobL]

...and not a word about his sexual orientation.