'People are wild.' Sarah Longwell on our weird political contradictions

Brian Lehrer (0:05)

From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Wednesday, September 23rd.

So are you ready for some political contradictions that might make your head explode? They come from Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of the new book, How to Eat an Elephant, One Voter at a Time. She'll join us in a minute. Her book is based on what she's learned after 400 focus groups she's conducted in the year since Trump was elected, and she shifted from Republicanism to what has sometimes been called never Trump, Republicanism. In that spirit, she founded The Bulwark, which now describes itself not in terms of Trump, but as committed to defending liberal democracy. Some of her recent Bulwark newsletter headlines include, Want to Understand Why Talarico Can Win? Listen to These Texas Trump Voters. The Three Issues Souring Trump Voters on Trump. Most Trump Scandals Don't Bother His Voters. These are the exceptions. We'll ask her about those.

Or one that's new this morning, Furious Republicans are Finally Breaking with a Weakened Trump.

Her book, How to Eat an Elephant, is kind of a guide based on all these focus groups on how to defeat Trumpism. But just as the tease about these contradictions that she says any successful candidate will have to confront, she found voters who lament our deep political divisions while raging about their political enemies, ones who believe in grace, they say grace, but cut their Trumpy brother out of their life forever, or they're married to an immigrant but voted for the guy who wants to deport millions of people with their wife's same immigration status, or they want to lower the debt and hate the government, but want the government to spend more to help them in their communities, or they're pro-life but believe in a woman's right to choose. Those are all in the book. Let's start there. Sarah Longwell, hi. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sarah Longwell (2:08)

Hey, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer (2:10)

First, tell everybody about your focus groups. Were these done with all voters, swing voters, who in particular?

Sarah Longwell (2:18)

Well, I think it's probably the largest qualitative data set that's happened in the Trump era, and we talked to everybody.

Now, when I do a focus group, though, we always section them off by some qualities. Sometimes it is education. We'll do college-educated Trump voters or versus non-college-educated Trump voters. We'll do women versus men. We'll do young people versus old people. We'll do black voters. We'll do Hispanic voters. And so there's always tons of swing voters. I would say for me in particular, because I started doing focus groups trying to figure out both why Trump won and how we could defeat him in the future, I did focus mostly, although again, like I said, we talked to everybody, but I would say maybe half of the groups really focus on these swingier types of voters, but swing voters come in a lot of different sizes. You know, I think Hispanics are very swingy voters. Young people are swingy voters because they don't really have their minds completely made up yet. You've got people who are shifting between the two parties. You've got people like me, you're sort of college-educated suburban voters who used to vote for Mitt Romney and John McCain who now absolutely won't vote for Democrats. They live in, you know, the Bucks County, a lot of the big suburbs of cities. But the trade there was that Republicans got a lot more non-college working class voters of all demographics, more non-college working class Black voters, Hispanic voters. And so, you know, there's a lot of different types of swing voters. And I lay them out. There's a chapter in the book called The Anatomy of a Swing Voter.

And I've really tried to figure out what makes that group tick and how do you do persuasion with that group? Because, you know, another category of swing voter are what people often call low information voters, which just means people who aren't particularly tapped into politics until it's time to vote. And so how do you reach people like that? And so that's been my research over the years.

Brian Lehrer (4:16)

Yeah. So you've identified some groups that voted for Trump in 2024, who might switch to the right Democrat, like Joe Rogan fans or people who kind of hate everyone in politics. Also young voters and Hispanic voters, some of whom were traditionally democratic and they might be again.

Where would you start to answer your own question as to, you know, who the swing voters are and how to talk to them?