Why Trump’s 2024 Voters Are Turning on Him

Since he took office in 2025, Donald Trump's net approval rating has collapsed, falling by more than 30 points. And so now, as we head into the midterms, Democrats have the opportunity to do something that seemed unthinkable just a year ago. Take back not just the House, but the Senate, possibly even winning in places like Texas and Kansas. So how did Donald Trump go from winning his first popular vote victory ever to, in less than two years, when now looks like it could be an electoral wipeout for Republicans? Sarah Longwell is a political consultant and the founder and publisher of The Bulwark. And since the 2016 election, she has conducted hundreds of focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum, which have become this really extraordinary source of qualitative evidence of how voters have evolved in the Trump era, particularly voters who have leaned towards Trump and maybe now don't. Longwell is also the host of the Focus Group podcast. You can hear some of these groups there. and author of the recent book, How to Eat an Elephant. She joins me now. Sarah Longwell, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. All right. So Donald Trump takes office again in 2025, January. His approval rating is above 50%. He has his biggest electoral victory ever. He's now at 37.5%. I think you've probably personally done more focus groups with Trump voters of different flavors and variants than anybody else in America. So what happened? It's easy. Actually, this is like this is the easiest question in politics right now, which is Donald Trump made some very specific choices and they were his choices. And everyone knows they were his choices. The first one was when he did all of the unilateral tariffs, didn't consult Congress, just got into trade wars with a whole bunch of people. And the second thing was starting the war with Iran. And so those two things, voters identify completely with Trump. You can't say Joe Biden did that. You can't say it was someone else, Congress. There was nothing else. So Donald Trump made these choices and voters know it. And the consequences of both have been to raise prices for the American people at a time when they elected Donald Trump to do one thing, which was lower prices. And as a secondary matter, they said no more stupid wars. And so the voters right now recognize that their life's not getting better and that Donald Trump has broken his promises. And so that is the easiest way to explain what's happening right now. Tariffs were a promise from Donald Trump. I mean, he ran for office saying again and again and again, tariffs on everyone, tariffs in all directions. I can imagine if you're him, you look at your tariff policy as promises kept. So when his supporters tell you what they don't like about them, what do they say? Well, the thing about voters is that they are often not interested in the policy minutiae of how one gets to a place. They're just saying, what are we going to do to lower prices? You know, the thing I find has changed my relationship with voters is that the first thing we do is we ask people, how do you think things are going in the country? Every focus group, every single time, doesn't matter, left, right, or center. People say, bad. And then immediately they start talking about the prices of something. They talk about the prices of gas, the prices of beef, but they talk about something they did. I walked into the store today and the beef cost X dollars. And that's $2 more than it did. And it wasn't even the good stuff. Like Americans don't necessarily connect policy rhetoric to the outcome. They live through something, see the outcome, and then they decide how they feel about it. On that point about the ground beef, I want to play a clip that your team shared with me from one of the focus groups. This is someone who voted for Trump in 2024. I grocery shop every week. So, like, I know when prices are going down and up and, like, I'm like, he's lying. Like, nothing is. OK, maybe the eggs, like, have gone down. But, like, that's it. I've never paid $9 for ground beef before, ever, you know, like even the good kind. So that that is really, really crazy and getting very scary. And it's just like I really thought that it was going to be about us here at home. When that woman says to you, I really thought it was going to be about us here at home. What did she think? What did the people who swung towards Trump in 2024 see in him that they hadn't seen maybe in 2020? This is the promise of America First. America First has a lot of sort of racist origins, but for the voters, America First is an idea that the president is going to prioritize them, Mr. and Mrs. American. And they like that promise. They like the idea of we're not going to send all this money to other places. And I hear versions of this in basically every group that I do, which is we want to be taken care of. We want money spent on our schools. It's interesting actually watching Abdul El-Sayed because he's doing a version of this right now, his own version of America First. Often when he gets asked the question about Israel is to say, I don't want our money going overseas. I want it spent here in Michigan. I want it spent on our schools, on taking care of our people. I'm opposed to unconditional military aid for any country. That is Israel, yes, but that's also Egypt, where my family immigrated from. That's Pakistan, that's Saudi Arabia, that's UAE. And that's not because of a focus on what's happening anywhere except for a focus on what's happening here. We've got communities in my state where the median income is $14,000, and I believe they have a right to their tax dollars. And that is something that appeals to Americans deeply. They say, yes, we want to be taken care of. They feel like in the big maelstrom of conversations that so often, whether it's sort of the weird social issues that people get wrapped around the axle about or whether it's the big geopolitical questions that politicians are always talking about, really what they want to know is, what are you going to do for me? And I think that that disconnect between people that we talk about as elites, but let's just say you and I, we should admit this. We do not walk into the grocery store and say, I can't buy this now because it's $2 more expensive. Nobody in Congress has that experience. Nobody who is in a lot of decision-making authority has that experience. And so it is so easy to forget that that is the thing everybody wants. I think this is a problem that ends up afflicting both sides. It happened to the Biden administration, you know, in their term, and now it's happening to Trump, which is it you get elected and the voters who crucially put you over the top, not your kind of big base of voters who are always going to vote for you, but the people who made the difference in the election. They hire you to do often a job that is maybe not the job that you're most excited about doing. You know, voters want lower prices. They're maybe not as bought in on climate change questions as Democrats are. And there are all these people around you who have your ear, who in fact do not have problems buying groceries in the grocery store. They have things they're much more excited about doing. And so you have this constant pressure to get off the course of what the swing voters wanted from you. And that seems to me to be a lot of the Trump story here. He won because inflation was high, but he didn't really care about inflation. That's not what gets him out of bed in the morning. No, what gets Donald Trump out of bed in the morning is Donald Trump's interests in enriching himself. And this, though, goes back to the earlier question of why do Americans think that Donald Trump is in it for them? The way that I heard so many voters characterize it is that the process was so slow and sclerotic. They felt like nothing was changing and the way that politicians talked all sounded the same. But mostly they thought, this guy is a businessman. And this is what Donald Trump pitched all the time. I'm going to cut deals for you. I know how this system works. It's rigged against you. I'm going to unrig it. And voters really did think whether it was because of The Apprentice, and I cannot tell you how important The Apprentice is and was to the lore that sort of sits inside voters. Still by 2024, it was so important? He lived in their living rooms at the top of a boardroom where he made decisions about business. And that is what voters really internalized about Donald Trump. And so when inflation was high, they thought he was going to come in and in some way that is magic from him, like the Kool-Aid man bust through the window and say, here, I'm going to lower grocery prices on day one. They think he sort of has some secret sauce that allows him to do that. When, of course, it is just a lie. He couldn't do it. There are a lot of ways that I think the people who interpret politics publicly, my job, for instance, end up having a lot of trouble understanding voters. And one of the ways, I think, is that we think of the primary divide in the electorate as left-right. But the primary divide in politics, I always think, is between interested, uninterested. The hardcore left and the hardcore right, MAGA, the liberals, resistance, whatever it is, they're all interested. they're all following some kind of media source constantly. But a lot of voters don't like politics. They're not that interested. And so I like that you talk about the different ways that people who decide elections but do not follow politics that closely in between elections, that kind of difference in the electorate and how they then understand what is happening. We talk in political science terms always. We're always slicing and dicing the electorate. And we often talk about low information voters. And I always think that that is an unfair term to people who are just not sick in the head like us, right, who are not following everything, who aren't don't let their nervous systems be hijacked on a daily basis by the vicissitudes of the political wrangling. Low neuroticism voters. Yeah, that's right. Like, I think it's a perfectly acceptable thing to be like, actually, I'm going to focus on my family and getting my kids out the door. And then I've got to go to a job that's quite demanding. And both parents in the household are working. So one of the things we ask about in the focus groups all the time is we always ask, where do people get their information? And it is unsatisfying, I think, now because it used to be people would be pretty clear. They're like, I watch Fox News or I watch CNN. I read this newspaper. I read The New York Times or I read my local newspaper. And the majority of people often actually would say that they watch their local news. But now what people mostly say is, I don't know where I saw that. The way that they scroll on Instagram or TikTok is like an algorithm driven information environment where they mostly wanted basketball or sports. But, you know, then there's Stephen A. Smith is talking and he's talking about politics. And so this is why when people said the left needs its own Joe Rogan, they tend to reach for people who are actually political pundits. But that's not what Joe Rogan is. Joe Rogan's a comedian who mostly, I mean, I don't watch a ton of his content, but I do think there's a fair amount of like getting stoned and figuring out like who would win a shark or a gorilla if they fought each other. And then they have a guest and the guest says whatever. And Joe Rogan really doesn't challenge him because he's not a subject expert matter in much because that's about culture. There are cultural people all over the place where politics is injected. You know, there used to be this phrase, politics is downstream from culture. And I think increasingly the overlap between politics and culture combines into something that is a deeply non-political science term, which we would call a vibe. And that vibe is what a lot of the low information voters are getting, something that washes over them, that is sort of algorithmically injected into the cultural things that they imbibe. Say more about that. What changes in politics or what have you watched change in politics as it's become more, in your language here, vibe oriented? I think it's the big difference between news seekers and news receivers. I think we used to live in a world where you spent time with the news and it was a specific time. You sat down at the breakfast table and you read a newspaper. You watched the evening news. You made sort of time for the news. And I just think that the news receiver means I didn't sit down to find something out. Information just washed over me and there was no mechanism to verify it. There was no, is this true? Does it even matter to me? I just, it just like flashes over them. And so they wake up with an opinion without any idea of how it was formed. So I want to talk about something that seems to have begun breaking through. And I don't really know why it's finally breaking through now, but it is. Corruption. I want to play a clip from a Trump voter talking about corruption and how it's sort of changed in his view. i'm a republican i'm just saying he's front and center now right and he's just blatant with corruption but like we tolerated corruption in a way or look the other way even them their own politicians look the other way at each other but because it was more minimal or more obscure every now and then you heard of a big corruption thing here or there whatever a pay for play but now it's just like bang like he just does it blatantly he just says what he wants to do You know, he's investing in crypto. His sons are invested in in drones, you know, with the war before just before the war started with Iran. It's just like it's ridiculous. It's so obvious and blatant now. See this Fox News poll from October asked voters how concerned they were about key issues. More expressed concern over corruption in government than any other issue. It came out higher in this Fox News poll than prices and health care, the war in Iran and immigration. Why is corruption, which has just been constant in the Trump administration, and I was watching corruption in polls through the whole administration waiting for it to attain salience, and it was just like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then suddenly, like, we get to it being the top issue. What broke through? It's prices again. So everything comes back to people's relationship to the economy, which is. And this is a bummer, actually, of an observation. But the American people, especially Trump voters and more low information voters, would probably let Trump get away with. And in fact, we know they would. He was doing a lot of corrupt things in his first term. People didn't really care. You couldn't get them to care about how much he was spending on golf or having big meetings at all of his hotels. Or the insane crypto stuff during the 2024 election. That was the one I always thought was crazy. The Trump family getting involved in crypto scams, meme coins during the election. They don't care. In the kind of like post-electoral period. But again, it comes down to people's relationship with their own money, whereas if they thought Trump could do something for them, and you can see this, especially with really people who are super engaged on the crypto stuff, if they think they can make some money off of Trump, they don't care about his corruption. The reason that corruption is breaking through right now is for two reasons. The first is people are suffering economically. And so all of Trump's focus on his ballroom, on the reflecting pool, it strikes voters as they're frustrated that he is not focused on them. He's focused on himself. But also the enriching themselves which is becoming difficult to ignore because it so out in the open when people are not doing well they angrier about it The second reason though that corruption has gotten so is now like a very high salience issue It the same reason that democracy became a high salience issue. So then this is, I think, to some of your work on polarization is that there's a backlash effect that happens when Democrats start accusing Republicans of being corrupt because Donald Trump is doing this brazen corruption. The thing that happens for Republicans is that they do the what about. And so they say, no, Democrats are corrupt or they're all corrupt. Right. And so part of what happens is there's this national conversation where one side is accusing the other of something. And so the other side does what about and then quickly it becomes a dominant issue. So democracy was another thing where Democrats were accusing Republicans of being a threat to democracy after January 6th. But Republicans were accusing Democrats of having stolen the election. And pretty soon, democracy is the number one issue. And Democrats think, oh, look, everyone cares about democracy. And I'm going, no, no, no, no, no. They don't care about it the way you want them to care about it. The Democrat who, it seemed to me, really figured out how to make the corruption case against Trump and get people to pay attention to it, the cycle is John Ossoff. And Ossoff in Georgia is fascinating because that should be, in theory, a swing state. It's a close state. We don't even talk about it as a swing state this cycle. It's like, is he going to beat his opponent by eight points, by 10 points, by 12 points? There's more interest in whether or not he's going to run for president than whether he's going to win in Georgia. So what worked there? Well, first of all, John Ossoff has the thing. He is a very talented person. He writes those speeches himself. He appears to believe it deeply. But he understands something about storytelling that I think oftentimes Donald Trump's scale of corruption, scale of venality, leaves Democrats sort of sputtering to make the longest list that they can make of all of the horrible things. And it leaves people just with their arms up. John Ossoff, he's taking it slow. He's taking it one bite at a time. And he is writing to say, hey, you've heard about this. Now, maybe you saw Trump so desperate he's begging Putin for diesel. But listen to this. Maybe they have. Maybe they haven't. He's inviting them in to a story that he's going to tell where he's going to give them information about what Donald Trump is doing. Y'all remember Jared Kushner? The president's son-in-law, the so-called special envoy responsible for diplomacy with Russia and in the Middle East? Do you remember the other special envoy, Steve Whitcoff, who co-founded the president's crooked crypto business, World Liberty? Okay, so follow me through on this. What Jared and Steve are doing right now is negotiating with Putin to sell billions in Russian oil fields and refineries and gas stations to the president's friends. You've got Sheikh Tanun, the Emirati spy chief who paid half a billion to the Trump-Witkopf crypto business. Then you've got the Al-Qaeda brothers, two Syrians who are financing Jared and Ivanka's multi-billion dollar Albanian resort project. And then the third partner, a billionaire mega-donor to Trump's campaign. Oh, and the U.S. government would take a 15% stake, by the way. Are you getting the picture? He's just very adept at saying, I'm going to walk you through what's happening. Amidst a global energy crisis, the president's son-in-law and the president's business partner are brokering the sale of Russian oil fields to the first family's friends. The same friends who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump family businesses. They are literally the elites they pretend to hate. And more Democrats need to figure out how to talk about this, because I do think Americans, whether it is all the court cases, like all the lawsuits against Donald Trump, I watch it when there is scale, how they get lost and it becomes white noise. It's why Hunter Biden, the specifics of it, Republicans can make a meal out of it. But the level of Donald Trump's corruption is so big and so multifaceted and so difficult to follow that it can become white noise if you don't lay it out step by step. And that's what he's doing. if you're not a subscriber to the new york times we have some news for you you can now explore the times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in the new york times app how much did epstein matter here i think it mattered in terms of setting up Donald Trump to fail his base immediately. One of Donald Trump's promises to his voters was that he was going to be the most transparent president in history. And this is something that I think people miss about Trump voters' relationship with Trump, is that they think he's their guy on the inside. There's the deep state, there's the elite cabals, and he is there to take it all and show it to the American people. He's going to share it with you. And so they thought Trump was going to come in and he was going to open the JFK and the aliens and Epstein. And he was going to lay it all bare for the American people. And for him to not do that, not come through on that, broke trust with a specific strain of Trump voter. And many of them were swingier kind of voters. This is one of the early fights I had, both in the bulwark and other places where people said, Epstein's not going to matter. And I was like, disagree. I hear voters, especially young men, male voters of Donald Trump, talk about it all the time, how mad they are that he has not made them available. And it still comes up now. There is a, I think, an analogy here to something you were saying right at the beginning of our conversation, which is that Trump has made a series of decisions, more in Iran, tariffs, and everybody knows it's him. And one thing that it has always seemed to me as meaningful about Epstein and has been harder for Trump in a second term, is that in his first term, Trump did this slight magic trick, but there was also some truth to it, where he was the president, but he was up against the deep state. And there was a reality that he didn't really quite have control of the government he led. And it wasn't a deep state in the way he put it. But the sense that Trump could somehow be the president and still be anti-establishment was real. And the Epstein moment, I think, had a... In that world, right, Epstein has become this kind of synonym for a corrupt, pedophilic, untouchable elite. And the fact that it seemed to people that Trump was more on the side of whatever that was than on their side, seems to me to get to this larger reality of him that he's the establishment now. MAGA is in charge. He can't say it's like these guys over here are stopping me from doing it. It's all just him. I think that's right. And I talk a lot about the schism that I see between the MAGA establishment and the America Firsters. There is this new kind of break in the party and the America Firsters are sort of like real America first has never been tried. And this is your Marjorie Taylor Greene's. It's your Tucker Carlson's. These are the people who are anti-Israel. They think that Trump really broke faith over the Iran war. That's the thing that caused them to go out on him and to really start taking him on. And the MAGA establishment, though, is Trump now. It's Rubio. It's Mike Johnson. And these are people for whom Trump is the sun and the moon and whatever their public policy is, is going to be dictated by Trump. So, you know, you get somebody like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Why is Dan Bongino back out after being the deputy at the FBI? He's back out because he can't release the Epstein files and it was ruined in his street cred on his podcast. And Kash Patel is not really doing the job. He just runs around and hangs out with his girlfriend. And that's how Donald Trump wants it, because he wants a heat shield. That's why Pam Bondi had to go, right? He needs these heat shields for why he's not releasing the Epstein files. And I think his voters are hip to it. They know there's no reason this shouldn't be coming out. Why is Pete Hegseth still there? Well, I do think that Donald Trump needs somebody to take the fall for the war. My guess is that Pete Hegseth goes. But nobody buys that it was Hegseth's war. Yeah, I mean, Pete Hegseth would like it to be Pete Hegseth's war. And so he's out there stumping for it pretty hard. It's difficult to change course in the middle of this. Actually, I don't even know why I'm trying to explain this, because it's preposterous that Pete Hegseth was in that role in the first place. It's preposterous he's still there. What do you do when you're losing a war to Iran and then you give these weird Patton-esque speeches where you talk about no, what, trannies, fatties, beardos, and weirdos? You're going to live stream an execution of a paralyzed guy? I mean, it's all preposterous. We should not become numb and treat it like it's regular analysis here. Like, I have no idea why he's still there. He shouldn't be. But also, that also then tries to take into account that Donald Trump is some rational actor and not just somebody who thinks he still looks good on TV and he's out there defending me on this. I want to go back to something you were saying a few minutes ago, which is that there is this portion of MAGA, the real America first has never been tried portion, the Tucker Carlson's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's who began to break with Trump over the Iran war. Maybe let's start this way. The Iran war has been going on for a good number of months now. What has been the trajectory of people's interpretation of Trump in the Iran war over the months since it began? The first thing that happened was Venezuela and Maduro. And because that was such a, again, sort of a smash and grab job, right? We went in, we grabbed him, we walked away. Voters thought Iran was going to be like that. And Trump thought it was going to be like that. Sure did. And so one of the things that you hear from voters, what they'll say is, I thought it was going to be like Venezuela. It's going to be short. He's going to get in. He's going to get out. But now that we're so deep in it, now they look back and say, I think Trump thought it was going to be something he could do in a short period of time. But it's getting away from him. Like voters know that it's gotten away from him in part. If you think about it from their perspective, they care about it mainly because of gas prices and because they don't want us to be at war. But the thing that they have seen is Trump over and over again say that it's over and then have it definitely not be over. And voters have noticed that it continues to not be over. Why do his voters think he he did it? I want to play a 2024 Trump voter from one of your focus groups who's saying something that I've heard a lot of people say. My main concern is the wars, war with Iran and everything. And I think it's very saddening because, in my opinion, I think actually there's like, I mean, conspiracy theories here and there. But I think that realistically, Israel controls President Trump and a lot of the decisions that are made for Americans. And I think that's a hard reality that people are slowly coming to realize. I've heard that a lot. Like how present? I mean, that's from one of your groups. How present is that? It's incredibly present, but it goes to, I can tell that person is on the younger side, and that really tracks with Trump voters who are under 35 who have a very different perspective on Israel than people who are older. And they believe that Netanyahu walked Trump into this war. I think there are two ways to have that belief, right? One is to say that Trump and Netanyahu are allies and Netanyahu persuaded Trump that this war was a good idea. The Iranian regime would fall easily, smoothly. The second one, I mean, the way it was said here, right, by this woman, Israel controls President Trump is different than that. Yeah. And what I see happening on the right, and not only on the right, but on the right, that maybe Trump is holding back a little bit, but is a real pressure for a story that Israel is in control and that's why all these things are going wrong in American politics, in a way that strikes me as actually quite dangerous. But it just feels like it has stuck as a kind of interpretive frame that I suspect is going to outlast Trump. It has stuck. And it's a big part of the conversation right now in both political parties. You know, the left is dealing with this anti-Semitism problem. There's this schism between old school Dems who want to support Israel and a rising tide of folks on the Democratic side who want to reevaluate America's relationship with Israel. There is the anti-Israel faction, but then there's also just the people who've now become convinced in part because of Iran that say, I don't want us sending money to Israel or why are we doing so much? Why are we so involved in their foreign policy? So I hear that a lot on the left. On the right, though, what I hear, especially from younger voters, it is closer to a very blatant kind of anti-Semitism. It is related to Trump can never fail. He can only be failed. And so you have to have a, and I use this term advisedly, scapegoat for why Trump is failing. And so it's funny because in part it's a dual admission because you have to also say Trump is so weak and so not smart that he can just be dog walked into a war with Iran. But that frame really has stuck among younger people on the right who share basically their counterparts on the left's suspicion of the role that Israel is playing in American politics right now. It's also just the reality, and I think this is like the other main way that the war in Iran has become a bigger problem than just a failed war for Trump, which is that it's another example of him raising your prices, doing something you didn't want him to do that has been bad for, you know, the price of the pump. It seems like a distraction from what you elected him for. I often think that people connect to issues, sometimes not so much about the issue itself, even if it's failing, but because it reveals something larger. And to me, the war in Iran seems like it has become like the ultimate, like Trump is doing his own thing, not your thing. Yeah, I mean, what really activates voters is when an issue hits them in several different places. And so the Iran war both is Trump getting into a war in the Middle East. And let me tell you, Americans do not want to be at war in the Middle East. That is like they remember this, like this activates something deep inside of them. Do not get us into a forever war in the Middle East. Indeed, Trump ran on that. It was literally how he ran against Jeb Bush in 2016. The war in Iraq. We spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives. We don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. So that is one part of it. Then the other part of it is the when voters are experiencing direct negative personal consequences. And that is obviously at the gas pump and they can connect. I listen to voters all the time. They can't quite pronounce or even conjure Strait of Hormuz, but they know about it. They know there's this reason that gas isn't getting here and that's why everything's more expensive. They also understand that gas prices aren't just about gas, especially in a place like Iowa and in the Midwest right now. And so none of these things are in a vacuum. You get these higher gas prices that are also raising food costs that are also raising farmers costs that are having an effect on supply chain and the trucks that drive it Americans actually understand more of that type of thing than they do a lot of the complexities around health care or other issues They understand that prices are rising across the board in a lot of different ways that are squeezing them. They experience it like a cavalcade of prices going up across the board that make them feel, and then they look and they see the war, and it gives them a place to say, that's the thing doing it. I think we are in an era of price politics that we were not in for a very long time because inflation was so low for so many years in America. Yeah. And if you look at inflation statistics during the Trump era, right, during Trump's second term, it's not actually that high. I mean, it's a little bit higher than would be the ideal trend. It's, you know, more three than it is two. But I do think one of the things that is just going to be very difficult for politicians of all parties for an extended period is that prices went up so much over the past couple of years that now every incremental increase is just agonizing because what they are not doing ever is going down. And this feels to me like something that he has not internalized. It's going to be very interesting to me to see whether or not Democrats have actually internalized it because right now you need to treat prices as a kind of emergency and anything you do that seems like it is raising prices is going to infuriate people. Trump is endlessly saying, you know, the affordability thing is a hoax. Prices are a hoax. And if you are being generous to what he's saying, like from what we are discussing, you would think inflation was 7% right now. It's not. But he came into office promising to bring down prices and instead they are going up and he is doing things that drive them up and gas has been particularly bad. And it's actually, I don't think people have internalized that the price level we are now at, like the baseline of prices, has just completely changed pricing as a political issue. I think that something that Democrats are going to have to start thinking about is, because I think that Democrats have internalized it from a messaging standpoint, they know that they need to talk to people about affordability. They know that they need to talk people and they know how to go on offense against the Trump administration, against the tariffs, against the things he is doing to exacerbate people's affordability woes. What they have not done yet is said, here's what we're going to do about it. I mean, you hear about health care costs in the focus groups. I hear about health care costs in the focus groups all the time. And so Democrats, I think, are going to come in and say, OK, the first things we're going to do is we're going to Trump's cuts to Medicaid, your Medicaid, you know, we're going to get rid of those and We're going to try to make health care more affordable. We are going to get rid of the tariffs, right? It's all like the things that Trump did to exacerbate it. We're going to stop. We're going to get rid of the war. But I think we will be in a vortex of backlashes if one party doesn't figure out a way of explaining to the American people that you can't just press a button and lower costs, that there is a series of choices that we need to make. and that the debt, it is $40 trillion now. And interest rates are very high. And interest rates are very high. And that matters when you go to buy a home or get a car loan. This is why if a Democrat wins in 2028, it is not a small task what they are up against. And if they're not able, and this is one of the things I really was frustrated with Joe Biden about, because he wasn't in a position to communicate well or strongly with voters, He wasn't able to frame the economy as a recovery and to talk all the time about how we were recovering well, but it still wasn't good. It wasn't good enough. Instead, they were trying to tell people, no, things are fine. Things are good. Trump is doing the exact same thing right now. And I think whoever comes next is going to have to level with the American public about where our economy is. I also think that something Republicans are not preparing for, I don't see them preparing for it. that's going to be central in politics in 2028 is the Medicaid cuts haven't hit yet. The Medicaid cuts are enormous. They're going to throw millions of people off of healthcare, millions of Trump voters off of healthcare. The way the big, beautiful bill was constructed, they delayed it till after the midterms. But every state agency in the country right now is preparing to implement these cuts because it is statute, it is law. And so the Trump administration has sent Obamacare into a spiral. They've destroyed the expanded subsidies and a bunch of things that were keeping those markets stable. So the individual markets are moving into chaos. You have Medicaid being thrown into chaos. Medicare for All is polling higher than it has ever polled before. Meanwhile, the left of the Democratic Party has moved off of the idea that Medicare for All means abolishing all private health insurance, right? So they've moved off of the more dangerous political position. I think we're moving back into a period of healthcare politics. And I don't think the next thing is just going to be repatching Obamacare. I think that we're past that now. I 100% agree with this. And again, this has nothing to do with any of my own personal political beliefs, but only what I hear from voters, which is I think that some kind of universal healthcare is just an idea whose time is going to have come because of a variety of factors. All I hear about in focus groups from voters across the political spectrum, and this is where I do think some of the reasons that the DSA types are a little more ascendant and they believe that there is a sort of new coalition out there is that they hear Trump voters talking about wanting something to be done about health care. We're not talking about country club Republicans who, you know, want to talk about different insurance markets. You are just hearing rural voters, working class voters, non-college voters for whom health care is an enormous expense and also an enormous burden from a complexity standpoint and how they interact with their insurance companies or the health care systems. And voters want something that is more simple, less expensive and is higher quality. And I get that sometimes people say things to me like, well, we could never have comprehensive immigration reform or we'll never have universal health care. We had these debates and they lost. And I'm like, guys, the world has changed in ways that are making people more open than ever to the idea that we need some kind of universal system. because one of my pet theories is that actually in 2028 in the debates, you're going to see some Republicans starting to talk about universal health care because it is going to be such a popular thing. They may talk about it, but what they never actually want to do is they will not do it. healthcare is traditionally the strongest democratic issue. Immigration is traditionally Trump's strongest issue. It is an issue where his administration under the leadership of Stephen Miller has been more aggressive, more thought out, more planned on immigration than on any other single issue, right? It has been the place where they've been the most proactive. What do you hear from Trump voters about immigration? So Trump voters are a wide, they can be a wide range on this. And it is still Trump's highest polling issue, but he's still, I think, around 43% on immigration while he's in the 20s on affordability, inflation, the war in Iran. So it is still one of his better performing issues because he has, and I think he will get some credit from voters on the right in the focus groups, is that he has closed the border. That is the popular position broadly for people. They want the border to be closed. There are people who I would put as Trump's hardcore base who still think he's not deporting hard enough. And so you do hear that from Trump voters. But I would say the majority, especially the more independent voters who might not seem like traditional Republicans but have always been Trump voters because they find him to be a more populist, heterodox person. These are the voters you hear say, I thought he was just going to deport criminals. The masked agents in the streets are crazy. I talk about the last in, first out voters, young people, Hispanics. And Hispanics, a lot of Hispanic voters will be very tough. They have tough immigration policies. They do not want people to come here illegally. On the other hand, they live in the communities where ICE is showing up at schools and dragging parents off. These are voters who know people who are showing up for court. They're doing it the right way. And that's where ICE is apprehending them. And so there is an enormous frustration in the inhumane way that the deportations are being carried out. And there's a lot of criticism in the focus groups over the excesses. I want to play a clip from some of his voters talking about this in some of these groups. Border control for me was a very big thing. That was one of my biggest concerns with this election was cleaning up the country and getting these dangerous illegals out. But I don't like how innocent people, professionals have been incarcerated or taken. I don't like the way immigration is going. It seems like there's no rhyme or reason or system going. Are they just grabbing people and, you know, putting them in camps? I do agree that we should stay on top of actual illegal immigration and criminals. But there's plenty of criminals already here that we could do a better job with instead of focusing on people that are, even if illegal, working and kind of minding their own business. What I hear when I hear that, and I've heard a lot of this also on podcasts like Rogan's and some of the people who swung towards Trump on this issue in 2024, Democrats always have this problem where they don't like to deal with the fact that the public has ideas of the deserving and the undeserving poor. Democrats want to say, like, there's no distinction and like everybody deserves help. And that's not where the public usually is, right? They want people to work and to show up. And it often gets Democrats in trouble. Republicans have this on immigration. The right, the MAGA right at this point, it doesn't have like good immigrants and bad immigrants. It definitely doesn't have good illegal immigrants and bad illegal immigrants. It just really has an antipathy towards immigrants, right? And now you see this like spilling out into these crazy things like there are too many Indian American students at a college football game. And what is it? It's going into crazier and crazier places. There's more and more racist places to be blunt about it. But Trump always sort of merged these ideas. He would sometimes talk as if he was just talking about the bad illegal immigrants. He was going to be discerning and then sometimes just promise mass deportation. and he's been much more on the mass deportation side and people don't seem to like it. No, I actually really try to speak up for the American people on the issue of immigration sometimes because I do think that people think everyone who is a Trump voter is just profoundly racist and that that's where their desire to see immigration curbed is coming from. And again, there is a spectrum of Trump voters on this. And there are racist people and there are people who are just like deport harder, get every single person out of here. That is not the majority of Trump voters. The majority of Trump voters make a couple distinctions. One is the one we've talked about where they say dangerous criminals should go. But the person who's paying taxes and has been here for 25 years who lives down the street, like leave that guy alone. That's part of it. The other distinction they make, though, and I hear this all the time from voters, is it's a sense of fairness. They say, I want immigrants to come here, but I want them to come, and this is the key phrase you hear, the right way. And what they mean is, and this is very important for people to understand, Americans have no idea what it is to go through the immigration system. So when they say come the right way, they assume that there is some easy process by which one can become a naturalized citizen. They have no idea what it looks like though. So when they see people coming across the border illegally, they say, hey, somebody's standing in line over here who's trying to come the right way. And this person's breaking the law coming in. They do not want a country in which immigrants don't come here. Americans actually are quite good. As soon as you start talking about immigration, one of the first things they will tell you is their own immigrant story. When their grandparents came here or the immigrant that they know or the person that they're married to who is an immigrant or their family. And so, like, Americans are not as hostile to the idea of immigration. They are hostile to the idea of coming here illegally across the border. Is this another example of where people perceive Trump's priorities diverging from their own? Because there were two sort of instrumental arguments I would hear Republicans, including Trump, make. One was the dangerous criminal illegal immigrants. And the other was that immigrants were taking your jobs. They were buying your homes. They were pushing up prices in different places. And both those things sort of fit into a sense of disorder under Joe Biden. I mean, I heard a lot. New York City was a place where there was a big swing towards Trump in the election. And something I just heard from a lot of people in New York City was they just didn't like seeing the disorder around them. They don't like a sense that their government is not holding order. People prize order very highly. That is a job they entrust government with. Trump comes in what he like law and order Republicanism, right? There's a reason order is in that phrase. But he and Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino, they created disorder. When people looked at what was happening in Minnesota and Americans getting shot by government agents, when they looked at these deployments and all that, like the Trump administration seemed to be creating disorder. They were creating violence. They were creating frightening visuals. What instead seemed to be happening was things were getting all the more out of control just in the other direction. This is happening where they live. This is not abstract to them. When you talk to voters in the focus groups, they're the people living in the places that we're talking about on the news. And so they will say, I took my kid to school and there were ICE agents that showed up at the school and they had masks on and there are kids there. Like, what are we doing here? And yeah, they're seeing images on their TV of masked agents shooting an ICU nurse in the back. I can't tell you how much the agents covering their faces is a problem for voters. They don't understand why their faces are covered. That's not something they're used to seeing. I don't agree. I think people understand exactly why their faces are covered. Well, I think that's true. I think What I mean is they don't like it. They don't like their faces being covered. That's not something they normally see from law enforcement. And when people say, well, they're worried about being targeted, people are like, that's not a thing. We have accountability in this country. The police, the police go without face covers, right? I've heard this too. And it drives me insane. Like everybody knows what it means when the government begins sending people in masks after you. And it means two things. It means first that the thing they're doing is bad enough that maybe, yeah, they are worried about being targeted. It also means that the government knows that the thing they're doing is bad enough that it is a problem their faces can be seen. And when the government starts doing that, they are creating a zone of action that is wider because they're creating anonymity. They are shifting the relationship between the agents and the public, right? There's not a normal face-to-face relationship between them. Everybody knew what it meant. And God bless the people in Minnesota who stood up and Alex Peretti and Renee Good lost their lives doing it to push back on this. But I recognize, I've talked to many political consultants, you'll probably tell me the same thing, that this was not the most salient issue to most of the American people. As you say, Trump is still doing better on immigration as an issue than he is doing on, say, trade or prices or a million other things. But as a signal that the country was falling into a different regime like an equilibrium that is more like fascist takeover that was a profound signal Because a midterm is not just where people are in the polls There the polls and then there who actually going to come out to vote And the people who had reactions to the masked men in the streets they going to come out to vote When I listen to Trump voters in focus groups, they're sad. Like, they're bummed out. They don't like their candidates. They think they're lame. Often in a bunch of these places, Georgia, for example, hardcore Trump voters aren't voting for Jon Ossoff, but they understand that everyone else seems to be voting for Jon Ossoff, and that makes them annoyed. And it's one of the reasons, actually, I like qualitative work more than I like polling, because you can gauge a kind of energy and the absence of enthusiasm among Republicans right now for Trump. And some of them will still defend him because it's sort of deep in their bones to do that. But they know things aren't going well and that he's not doing a particularly good job. And so they stay home. But then what animates people to come out and vote? So are they animated to come out and vote because they want to lower prices? I'm not sure people actually think that a Democratic Congress is going to do something about prices. But the thing that animates them are things like America is betraying its relationship to the world. Donald Trump is cozying up to all of these dictators. They're shooting Americans in the streets. Like, I think that the anti-ice sentiment is a motivating factor for people that gets them to turn out in a way that immigration has been a turnout mechanism for Republicans in the past and will not be now. We've been mostly talking here about things where Trump is the central driver, right? He drives the war in Iran. He has a lot of space of action on prices and tariffs, immigration. We've been talking about corruption. The other thing that has seemed to be driving races all across the country, but doesn't seem like to be directly emanating from Trump, is data centers. I mean, when I look at a bunch of the key Senate races, you know, Bill Sayed in Michigan, Josh Turek in Iowa, you see a lot happening around data centers. So I'm curious in your focus groups how those have begun playing into what you're hearing. So the data center issue started to come up in 2025 in the offseason races where you had Mikey Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger. And that's when, and this is again why I love focus groups, it caught me off guard. It was the dominant thing that voters in those races were talking about. Like immigration, AI is one of these issues that activates people across multiple vectors, where it is both their energy prices are going up. They think that the data centers themselves are a blight or are disruptive in their communities in some way. And then the third thing is they say, are we building these things in our communities that are ultimately setting up to take our jobs from us? And that first started coming up in 2020. And the companies are like, maybe, maybe. That's right. So in 2025, it was coming up entirely organically as a dominant issue, mainly around energy prices then. But then I have watched it just go up and up and up in salience in terms of what voters are talking about. And it is dominant in 2026. In fact, in Ohio, Husted, who is running against Sherrod Brown. That's another race where it's been central. It's been really central. And as much as Donald Trump can talk about his rear end, you know, who's dead. He likes talking about who's dead. He's on a weird bender about men's bodies right now. He's been for a long time. Yeah, I know. I think people say we're not ready for a gay president, but I disagree. I think we've already got a bi president. That's right. So but this is who's dead. His big liability is that he had helped secure funding for a bunch of new data centers. And so that has shall Sherrod Brown is defined. He was the guy who was the flight man for the 200 plus data centers in Ohio, two and a half billion dollars in tax breaks, higher electric rates. We have some of the highest electricity rates in the country now and did this without anybody without anybody locally have any input. But it really is part of the part of the the rigged system that, John, you said, has been part of and tried to increase, frankly, and make make it even more rigged through his whole political career. When I go home to central Pennsylvania in the more rural areas, this is where you see the no data center signs. And so it's another thing that is, I think, taking the rural voters who usually show up in enormous numbers for Republicans and it is diminishing their enthusiasm for Republicans because they don't want the data centers. It is in the rural communities where there's lots of land that these are actually happening. And the other reason that I think the data centers are frustrating people is that they're turning out in their local communities to vote against them. And then they're often happening anyway, which is creating a real sense of frustration among voters that this is a thing being done to them. We were looking at some clips of voters talking in your groups about this, and you really get at this sense of powerless. So I want to play them. People are voting here in Pittsburgh in these old mill sites, and they're putting these data centers. And people are saying, we don't want them. We don't want them. We don't want the pollution. We don't want this. We don't want this anymore. But yet they just keep coming. And then there's no stopping. And then it's just like, it doesn't matter who the governor is, who the mayor is. They're all on board because it's job creation. And it's just, it's not job creation. It's short term for long term pain. We're actually having one right now in our town. And everybody voted no on it. And then it turns out it came out that it was already in the process and a done deal thing like the farmers had already sold their property and everything for this to start being built. So basically, yeah, like our everybody that showed up to the city hall, it was for nothing. And Trump, I've always thought of one of the things he really understood is how powerless people felt in politics. And he sort of presented himself as an answer to that. Like, you might be powerless, but I am powerful. I know how the system works. I have worked it. I have bribed these politicians before. Totally. And then this happens. And where's Trump? Trump is completely pro data center, right? He calls into the, you know, he calls it Jensen Huang during the all in conference. And like, they're all just talking about how Trump isn't going to fall for this anti data center hoax. Google wants to build a big one in Finland, which I'm not happy about, because they were unable to get permitting. And I'm telling you, it's all a hoax. The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy. And it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It's bigger than the internet and the AI, you know, much more so. Yeah, I mean, look, Trump is not an ideological person, and he certainly doesn't care about regular Americans. He does care what the all-in podcast guys say about him. He cares what the donor class that he is talking to, how they talk to him. And those are the people who stand to benefit the most from the data centers, and he is on their side. And look, I'm sure that there are a lot of those people are coming in and explaining to Trump all of the long term benefits and how we have to compete with China. And that competitive instinct, I do think, is something that Trump gets into. But what's interesting about Trump is that for all the credit he gets for being a good communicator, he's not trying to have a conversation about this with the public at all. He's not trying to explain what the benefits might be or why long term. I mean, he throws a couple of things here, but mostly he just tells voters, stop caring about this. You know, affordability is a hoax. We're going to do data centers. They're great. The data centers, you want to pay a little bit of the right location. But if you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you're going to want a data center. If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don't approve data centers. You have your choice. And people give him credit for his instinct for understanding Americans. But people are extraordinarily anxious about what's coming because of AI. Is this technology going to replace me is something now that I hear all across these focus groups. And the way that Democrats, if Democrats come in and just say we're anti-data centers, we're just going to take the opposite role of Republicans. I think they will miss an opportunity to demonstrate that they can talk to the American people about a complicated thing that is changing in real time. And what voters really want is someone to take them through it. How should we feel about this? Well, the problem is, I will say this. I've talked to many Democrats, I've talked to Republicans about this, like people in office. One thing is none of them actually know how they feel about it. It is the hard thing about AI. The interesting thing about it is a political issue. It is unsettled. It's non-polarizing. I mean, the data center, if you look at the polling, it's not like Democrats oppose data centers and Republicans don't or Republicans do. And like, I don't think yet you see politicians who really know what to say on this and know how to take people through it because I don't think they do know what to say. And I don't think they know what through it even means because we're so in the first innings of it. This is why I'm so obsessed with finding a Democratic candidate in 2028 who is a good communicator. And by that, I don't mean somebody who knows all the answers and is like has a even a firmly held opinion on this. Americans will let you say, I don't know, but I'm working to figure it out. And I'm going to figure it out in a way that doesn't leave you behind. I'm not going to side against the American people on this. I'm going to figure out what is in the best interest. I am convinced that we are in a new moment of communication, which isn't just go on more podcasts, you know, be like Joe Rogan. It is that the American people are hungry to trust someone who is going to walk them through what is a incredibly complicated world now with a lot of things that are changing with an economy that they haven't seen before. And it's one of the reasons that I think people want younger candidates, too, because they feel like there's a new generation of problems that they don't understand that are coming fast. And they want people who live in that world, too. One of the things that voters, especially people under 40, say about the economy all the time is they're like, I would like a politician who understands that I'm not going to go get a job and then be at that job for the next 35 years. That's not the economy we're living in anymore. Like, will somebody talk to me about the world that we actually live in as it is? And that is why it's not that I think that Dems need better messaging around their issues. It's that I think people desperately want somebody who's going to level with them about the problems America's facing and is going to be open minded about the solutions. Who are the Democrats that the more Trump leaning voters in your focus groups actually like? Oh, I mean, John Ossoff right now couldn't have more juice with voters. And in fact, you know, when I do the focus groups in Georgia, even if people aren't voting for him, they want to talk about how he's clearly sort of winning people over. And a lot of that, too, is constituent services. Because constituent services are his bread and butter. All these Trump voters say, I call his office and they talk to me and somebody helps me out. Josh Shapiro, when I was doing focus groups in Pennsylvania, the first time he ran for governor, they all had stories about dealing with him and his office personally where he helped them. Josh Shapiro is about to win by unreal margins in the largest swing state in the country. and I think people should take a serious look at him. I think that Pete Buttigieg is doing something very interesting. He's walking into every red state and he's holding these big town halls and he's refusing to say that there's such thing as a permanent red state. You know, one of the things I like about Ossoff is obviously that is a redder state. He is around. This is why I'm so suspicious of California politicians who run for national offices. I think you have to be surrounded by the people who live in the swing states to have an instinct for what matters to sort of a median voter. If you've cultivated your political career in California, you simply don't have like a gut level instinct to be around like a Georgia swing voter or a Pennsylvania swing voter or a Michigan swing voter. And so I am looking at the politicians who both have that gut instinct. And so they come from these places. Their political careers were forged in these places. And then are they good at talking to people? And do they have a record of good governance? People want a candidate who feels like they care about them. And Donald Trump conned people into believing that he cared about them when he didn't. But people are so desperate for it that they were willing to be conned. We've talked a lot here about, you know, people voted for Trump and were maybe souring on him. But obviously, he maintains support from a huge number of his voters, from a lot of Republicans. So when you hear from the people who are still very pro-Trump, they voted for him in 2024 and they think he's doing a great job. They don't regret that vote at all. What is different in the picture they're seeing from what we've been talking about? The number one thing that people say to indicate that they're still appreciative of what Donald Trump is doing is that he has made it clear that there are two genders, that he is keeping biological men out of women's sports. They sort of are still deeply into a lot of the cultural fights, the places where they think that Democrats are weird or overly woke. They tend to be people who are so polarized and so deeply anti-Democrat that they simply sort of out of a tribal allegiance continue to support Trump and will sort of brook no dissent on that because, A, they're very dug in. Like, it is part of their personality. It is part of their identity. The Trump thing is like who they are, which is, again, why I'm a bit skeptical about the future of the Republican Party without Trump. But it is mostly on the cultural things, which leads me to my the thing that I am most curious about coming up in this election, something that I've been pretty obsessed with, which is vibes or turnout. then. If it's enthusiasm, vibes are turnout. Because Donald Trump turns out rural voters at Assad-like margins. And so what happens when he's no longer there to turn out these voters who were never part of the political process before but are Trump-only voters? So for Democrats, college-educated voters, those people are much more in tune with, they read everything, they read, they are closely following the election, and they show up to vote. Whereas a lot of these low information voters who turn out just for Donald Trump might not turn out in the midterms. But even more, you add on top of that people who are depressed about what Trump is doing, who don't like their Republican candidates. I think that is why you end up in wave territory. I think that is a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? Okay. So I just read Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, which I really loved. But my favorite book that I have read is this reissuance. This book had, I don't know if it had gone out of print, but it is by John Williams and it's called Stoner. So funny, that book has just been coming up in my field a lot. My understanding is that it had been out of print and like a new publisher picked it up and reissued it. It is the best piece of fiction that I have read in a long time. It's what I think fiction should be. It is a wonderful book. And then the third book, so, you know, I wrote a book of nonfiction. And so that meant I wanted to just surround myself with fiction. but the other one is Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which I had not read or I must have, I don't know if I had read it in high school or something, but I didn't remember it at all. And I just reread it or I read it for the first time. Unclear to me. So incredibly good. Those are my three. Sarah Longwell, thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you.