Luntz Explains His Mystery Man

Right after last night’s Republican Fox News debate, Frank Luntz appeared to demonstrate that, based on his focus group of New Hampshire Republicans, Mitt Romney was the big winner.

But as Josh pointed out, the group’s unanimity of opinion and blind insistence on Romney’s rout had a suspicious air to it.

Along those lines, a number of bloggers have pointed out that one man in the focus group actually appeared in a prior Luntz Fox News focus group four months prior. Both were gatherings in New Hampshire (at the same Manchester, New Hampshire restaurant, it appears) of approximately 30 New Hampshire voters — according to the lead-in last night, Luntz’s group were registered Republican undecideds. Although Luntz doesn’t identify the man by name in both segments, he’s easily identifiable through his appearance and voice — either that, or he’s got an identical twin.

While this isn’t necessarily evidence that Luntz has used actors or plants in his segments, it “says there’s something sloppy at best about his recruitment process, Mark Blumenthal, a veteran of the polling business and founder of Pollster.com, told me. “If you see a respondent show up twice, it’s a sign of professional respondents leaking through.”

But when I spoke to Luntz today, he said that he uses repeat participants by design. In a segment to air on Fox News tonight, he said, there should be a “bunch of people” who had been in prior focus groups, some of them participating as early as May of last year. “It allows me to see how people’s opinion have changed over time,” he explained. “I’m trying to isolate that moment that made the difference.”

When asked about the charge that he’d used actors or plants, his already rapid speech accelerated: “That’s ridiculous…. I’m sure that the person who said that doesn’t have a PhD, probably doesn’t have a masters, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

He’s conducting a “study of human behavior” with his dial tests (a mechanism that registers viewers’ moment by moment reaction) he said, not a traditional focus group. And if you “want to understand how people change their points of view, you have to ask them over time and multiple times. This is how social biologists do it. This is anthropology…. If you’re goal is to study how opinions change over time, of course you’ve got to call them back.”

Luntz said that he does pay polling participants, but when asked how much, said “it varies.” When I offered that I understood that $50 is the industry norm, he said that he’d paid New Hampshire participants “a bit more than that.” “You do what you can,” he said, to screen out professional respondents.

And as far as Mitt Romney’s rout last night goes, Luntz explained that Romney “has always been effective” at the format. He was actually quite pleased with how it went, but “the one problem we had was a couple hundred Ron Paul people outside, yelling and screaming.” (Here’s video of Luntz being beset by the angry Paul supporters last night, who were upset at his exclusion from the debate.)

Chuck, as Luntz identified the man in last night’s Fox News segment, would seem to be a prime candidate for the study of shifting allegiances in this election. He appeared at about the 1:38 mark of last night’s segment, which you can see here:

In the segment, Chuck was clearly on the Romney bandwagon, mostly, it seemed, because he could beat the Democratic nominee: “Romney comes across very clearly and concisely and I can see him being a viable opponent against the Democratic nominee. And I don’t see that coming from Huckabee or one of the other people.”

But when Chuck had his first star turn in a segment after a debate in September, he had a different opinion. John McCain was the one to beat Hillary Clinton, he said: “McCain is a respectable candidate, there’s nothing wrong with him.” You can see that here (Chuck shows up at around 3:44 mark):

And it’s these sorts of changing opinions that has Luntz excited. Luntz called 2008 the “most undecided, most fluid” election he’d seen in his lifetime. “I’m so lucky I get to study it. People wait for 50 years to have an election like this.” He said that he was in a prime position to reveal the crucial shifts, having conducted his dial tests at every single debate. “The stuff that I’m doing right now will become a book.”

Update: Apparently Time‘s Joe Klein had a front row seat to yesterday’s focus group. His impression: “I’m not sure this was a representative group of Republicans.”