Pollster awkwardly admits she was wrong about 2024 election and Trump in humbling on-air confession
Kristen Soltis Anderson acknowledged her mistake during a conversation with former NBC anchor Chuck Todd on his podcast Monday.
'The thing that has been the most surprising is someone like me, eight years ago, was completely hair-on-fire that [Trump] is going to take everything our party has been doing to try to win over young voters or voters of color, and he is lighting it all on fire and it is going to be unrecoverable,' she said.
'And now, if I am a person that follows the data, now you have to acknowledge that those are the very groups that he put his reelection - he built it on those groups. And he did better with Latino voters. He did better with younger voters than any Republican has in 20 years.
'And that's really remarkable,' she said.
Trump also increased his share of Latino voters substantially compared to his loss in 2020. Factors like inflation and policies surrounding the border were widely thought to be to blame. Identity politics also played a part, several said.
In 2015, the prominent New York Times opinion writer wrote how she was 'cautiously optimistic' that the Republican Party could win back young voters after two terms of Barack Obama.
In 2015, the prominent New York Times opinion writer wrote how she was 'cautiously optimistic' that the Republican Party could win back young voters after two terms of Barack Obama, though without someone like Trump (seen here during his first term)
Trump had announced his candidacy for president mere months before, with few giving him a chance.
Anderson, the cofounder of opinion research firm Echelon Insights, called out Republicans at the time for what she saw as a failure to earn followings on social media.
She also predicted at the time that since many Republicans belong to demographics on the decline - white, married, and religious - they would soon lose influence.
'Being a party of reforming, rather than necessarily getting rid of the government altogether, presents opportunity for a pragmatic generation,' she told the Harvard Kennedy School's Center on Media Politics and Public Policy.
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