Trump called Harris a communist. Pollster explains how voters are reacting

It is a massive day on the 2024 election, and that's after an already very, very big week. Kamala Harris just outlining some of her economic plans. Two days after former President Donald Trump announced many of the key pillars of his economic plan, both of them choosing the same state as the backdrop for their remarks. Harris just laid out a plan that she says would make housing, groceries, health care and raising children more affordable, specifically calling for a new child tax credit, an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, calling for more affordable housing and assistance for first time homebuyers. From my more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. We will end America's housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals. I'll lower the cost of insulin and prescription drugs for everyone with your support. Not only our seniors. Harris says her plan is a direct contrast to Donald Trump and his economic plan. He plans to give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year. You know, I think that if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for. So let's start with what they're talking about. The top lines of the two plans from the former president and the vice president now facing off in the 2024 campaign. Harris laying out in detail tax cuts for lower and middle class Americans, an expansion of the child tax credit, a federal ban on price gouging has been something the campaign has been talking a lot about. The former president wanting to reauthorize the significant 2017 tax cuts and adding to that, actually lowering the corporate tax rate that was already lower during those tax cuts and implementing across the board tariffs. So that's the top line 30,000ft of the policy. What they're talking about, where they're talking about also absolutely critical. They've both been in North Carolina this week. Now this is a state that Donald Trump won by about 75,000 votes in 2020. In fact, the Republican candidate has won this state in ten out of the last 11 presidential elections. Barack Obama in 2008, the only Democrat to actually intrude on that effort over the course of the last several decades. What happened in 2016? Donald Trump won by actually more 173,000 votes in this state. So why is the vice president there? Why are Democrats keying on North Carolina? Well, look at one other thing that happened in 2016. Scroll down to the other statewide race. A Democrat actually won Roy Cooper, narrowly beating Pat McCrory. What happened in 2020? Joe Biden lost. Roy Cooper won. He actually won more votes than Donald Trump did in 2020. What else are Democrats looking at? Well Roy Cooper is term limited out. There's a Republican candidate, the current lieutenant governor, that Democrats believe is extreme. They believe it opens the door down ballots to have some opportunities. But what they're paying more attention to than anything else is population. Yes. There's politics. Yes, there's the pathway. Donald Trump has to win North Carolina if he wants to get the 270 electoral electoral votes. The Democrats are also looking at a massive increase in population in the state over the course of the last several years. In fact, more than 400,000 new voters have moved into North Carolina just since 2022. Places in particular the Raleigh Durham metro area and the Charlotte metro area. Democratic strongholds, no question about that. Among the top ten fastest growing metro areas in the entire country. Democrats think that means opportunity there. Often younger voters, voters of color, suburban voters, the voting bloc. Essentially, that's been critical to the Democratic winning coalition in 2020, some of their midterm wins as well. How do you actually show what this looks like? Why was the vice president in Raleigh, North Carolina? Well, let's look at this population growth now. This is from 2016 to 2022 where you see in these two metro areas, specifically the darker purple, that means more people have moved in. And you see in those metro areas 15%, 20% population growth just over that period of time, 2016 to 2022. Two counties in particular, Democrats have their eye on right here. You see the very dark purple and right here, Johnson and Franklin County. These are technically counties Donald Trump won in 2020. In 2016 and 2020, they have both seen significant growth over the course of the last several years, more than 11% since the 2020 election. For both of those counties, Democrats are eyeing that looking who's coming in, looking the makeup of those voters and thinking there might be opportunities not just to win in the actual urban areas, pushing out in the suburbs, but even into the exurbs as well. So why do you see Kamala Harris in North Carolina? That's why. Why do you see Donald Trump in North Carolina? That's why. Why do you see both campaigns now starting to spend big in this state? We talked about the battleground states. North Carolina, for the better part of the last couple of weeks, has not been considered one of the top battleground states. And yet, at the very end of last month, moving into this month, all of a sudden you started to see Republicans spending money there. They know they have a real battle on their hands. So the economic policies, the political pathway, the population growth. Let's jump right into how all of this is playing with voters, with longtime Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz. Frank, when it comes to the economic plans, we heard the vice president lay out part of her economic agenda today. Donald Trump at his news conference yesterday, tried to get ahead and cast her as a communist. Take a listen. Now, Kamala is reportedly proposing communist price controls. She wants price controls. That leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation. She's running on the Maduro plan. I think this is a different kind of virus. All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that's going to destroy our country for I think that's the the former president lays it out right there. Right. We're trying to define our opponent. They're very clearly trying to define her as a communist. Her policies are communist policies, although they are aggressive in terms of how they operate within markets. How do you think that line of a track attack is landing right now? It isn't. And it's one of the reasons why Trump has been declining in every survey, in just about every state over the last three weeks, and the public absolutely wants to focus on inflation and affordability. They absolutely care about prices for food and fuel, housing and health care. And they're not asking for an ideological solution. They're asking for a day to day solution. What Harris proposed in the last few hours is going to play well with voters, at least initially, because they're looking at their wallets and their pocketbooks, and they're saying, I can't afford day to day life. Trump would be much better off comparing inflation under his administration versus the Biden-Harris administration, much better off talking about the cost of a Thanksgiving meal, because that's something we can all relate to. Rather than accusing her of being a communist, which is simply not credible. And this is this is what has happened in the campaign over the last few weeks. And it's one of the reasons why so many voters are taking another look at Harris, not because of what she says, but because of what Donald Trump is saying and how much they don't like it. Yeah, and you can tell Trump's advisers know exactly what you're saying. They literally put props behind him yesterday to try and make the exact point. They're trying to get him into that space. I do want to ask you, though, Frank. We heard Trump raise some eyebrows at a later event yesterday. It was an event on anti-Semitism. He was honoring the widow of GOP Megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Yet in his praise for her, he appeared to take a swipe at veterans on some level. Listen. Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the white House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian. It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But civilian version. It's actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that soldiers, they're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead. Frank, as our resident expert on, focus groups, what are the dials doing when people hear that? Well, that's not an attack on veterans. And actually, as the resident professor at West Point, I will tell you that I'm very attuned to paying close attention to any mention of veterans or our men and women in honor in, in uniform. In this case, that is not what he meant. And he sometimes has a sometimes has, quite frankly, difficulty because he's trying to wrap an attack or trying to figure out some way to paint a picture that is not favorable to his opponent. And sometimes he gets trapped up in what he says. In the end, the veteran vote is going to be important because it's nationwide. And if veterans participate, the typical vote is somewhere between 70 and 75% Republican. It matters that they participate just for the sake of of their voice being heard. I think Trump has to be much more careful about what he says and how he says it. And I think he has to be really focused on paying respect to those issues and people and organizations that he agrees with. You're allowed to criticize, but you're not allowed to deliver ad hominem attacks. I'm very careful about what I say in your network, about what I say in all media, because in the end, we're so accustomed to delivering criticism and not sufficiently accustomed to delivering solutions. And that's what he should be focus on, and particularly the fact that he had a successful administration in many of these issues. He's not talking about it at all. He's just using it as an attempt to attack Frank Luntz. As always, my friend, appreciate your time. Thank you.