Leadership Quote by Frank Luntz

Luntz isn’t confessing a harmless preference for good yarns; he’s laying out a governing principle of modern persuasion. Coming from a Republican pollster famous for engineering language that “tests well,” the line reads like a field manual: feelings aren’t a byproduct of politics, they’re the payload. The provocation is in how casually it treats factual accuracy as optional, as though the only real metric is emotional “compellingness,” the way a focus group measures warmth, fear, pride, resentment.

The subtext is blunt: truth is a content category, not a trump card. In Luntz’s world, “dry recitation” isn’t just boring, it’s politically negligent - a failure to translate data into identity. He frames the contest as story versus fact, not story-with-fact, which quietly licenses a whole ecosystem of strategic misdirection: cherry-picked anecdotes, sticky metaphors, slogans that smuggle policy into moral drama. If the narrative moves people, it wins; if the truth can’t compete on affect, it loses.

Context matters. Luntz’s career tracks the rise of message discipline, cable news sound bites, and the attention economy’s reward structure: outrage outperforms nuance; simplicity beats complexity; repetition beats correction. The quote anticipates our current “post-truth” fatigue, but it also helps explain it. When politics is treated as marketing, voters become consumers of emotional experiences, and accuracy becomes just another feature that can be downgraded to improve performance. The unsettling genius here is its honesty: it’s not an excuse, it’s a strategy.