Rep. Sean Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) says that House Democrats lost seats during the 2020 election cycle because of their messaging over the “Defund The Police” movement as well as inaccurate polling on Republican voters. House Democrats have a historically slim majority in the House after assuming they would handily win a number of elections, instead, quite the opposite happened and now Republicans are well poised to take back control next year.

The Democrat says that Republican’s attacks on progressive’s push to defund the police played a major role in their losses. Maloney also said that Democrat’s inability to track Trump supporters played a role in their losing multiple House seats.

The Hill reports:

“That creates what we call a systemic nonresponse bias, which is a mouthful. That’s a fancy way of saying the real Trump supporters don’t like talking to pollsters,” Maloney said.

“If you had a crystal ball, you would have surged resources around incumbents that we now know were in more danger than the polling suggested and you would have felt less enthusiastic about some red-to-blue opportunities,” he added.

Maloney also noted that the calls to defund the police that surged amid months of civil unrest in 2020 following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed Black people more negatively impacted House Democrats’ chances in 2020 than it did President Biden‘s in his White House campaign.

“We spent a bunch of time understanding how to respond more effectively, knowing that they’re going to do it again,” Maloney said Tuesday. “So we take that very seriously and I really want to be clear. I am not saying that those false attacks about defunding the police or socialism did not carry a punch.”