The New Yorker Radio Hour - Can Trump Voters Still Change Their Minds?

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

The political strategist Sarah Longwell has dedicated the last seven years to understanding why so many Republicans find Donald Trump irresistible, and how they might be persuaded to vote for someone else. Longwell is a lifelong Republican who became a leader of the Never Trump wing of the G.O.P., and her communications firm, Longwell Partners, has been running weekly focus groups including swing-state voters, undecided voters, and discontented Trump supporters. These are the people who might determine the winner of the 2024 election. “I think that Donald Trump has done more damage to himself with a lot of these people who held their nose and voted for him the second time; [after] January 6th, a lot of them are going to leave it blank,” Longwell told David Remnick. “At the end of the day, what this election will come down to is the Republicans who get there on Kamala Harris, and the ones who just refuse to get there on Trump.” Longwell publishes the political news site the Bulwark, and was also the first female national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents L.G.B.T.Q. conservatives. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's less than two months to go before the election, and everybody's in the prediction business. But maybe no one can read the room quite as well as political strategist Sarah Longwell. For years, Longwell has been running focus groups with voters who are going to be crucial come November. voters in swing states, undecided voters, discontented Trump supporters, and we'll hear from some of those people and what they've been telling Sarah Longwell.

Longwell herself is a Republican, raised in a deep red county in central Pennsylvania. But she saw the party change before her eyes in 2016, right at the time that her wife was about to give birth to their first child. The night her water broke, we sat down on the couch. We were, you know, I'm obsessively, watching all of the conventions and whatnot. And at the time, you know, I'm a Republican who just cannot believe this is happening,

cannot believe that Donald Trump won the Republican primary. It's July of 2016, the R&C, and Melania Trump is about to address the convention. And so we were sitting down to watch her speech. And then when my wife's water broke, we had to go to the hospital. And it was, we must have been sitting down. it wasn't like right before her speech because what I remember was getting to the hospital. And you know, you got all this time to kill then. You're kind of waiting for stuff to happen.

And I remember being like, could I just put the speech on in the room? And it was poorly received as a request. I see. And then it was, I remember. So then our first son was born and I was watching Trump's acceptance speech, the night he accepted the nomination with my newborn son. In your arms. In my arms.

I remember, you know, I like had it propped up on the iPad while I was holding him. And I just thought, I don't want you to grow up in this world. I don't know. It's not like overly dramatic. And then I made a vow that I, but I didn't think, like, I'm going to do something about this. But he was in contradiction to what your understanding of conservatism was. That's right. You know, and look, I had been, for like, quite some time that I'd been a gay republic.

And so I had been willing for a long time to overlook things that I didn't like about the Republican Party because not only were there sort of philosophically things that I did like about the Republican Party, but also I believed that there was an opportunity to make the Republican Party more modern and more welcoming. And I thought that the Republican Party, I had always seen it as a pro-immigration party. I had always seen it as a party that loved America and wanted people in America to thrive, right? That believed in the American dream, that wanted prosperity for everybody, that believed character counted, that thought that America, because it was a good place, had a unique leadership role to play in the world. And that was my worldview. And so Donald Trump's dark vision of America and his way of immediately othering people, like my favorite, thing. Like, we're a big, rich country. And the idea that, like, Reagan was very much like, the reason people want to come here is because we're so great. And so to hear Donald Trump,

the way he talked about America, was anathema to the way that I've heard any Republican talk about America in my lifetime. I would bet that a lot of our listeners, a lot of the New Yorker readers, have a pretty fixed idea of what Trump supporters are that might be different from yours. in other words, that you might have a different insight and quite frankly a deeper insight into why half the electorate or close to it remains ready to vote for Donald Trump at this late date. Nobody will like me saying this, but I'm going to use it as an example. If you look at Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., like a lot of these people who are now you think of as the MAGA movement on the far right, they started off as definitely.

Democrats. Like they were just sort of, you know, RFK was a liberal. Donald Trump was a limousine, liberal from New York supporting the Clintons. Tulsi Gabbard was a Democratic congressperson. And there's always been a little bit of a U-shape in the electorate where one of the things that I thought was pretty interesting in 2020 is how many people who had been Bernie supporters, I would talk to them in focus groups, how many of them their second choice was Donald Trump. And that was because they saw Trump closer to sort of the economic populism that they were interested in, and also interested in something that I'm going to put in quotation marks here with my fingers and say, not a regular politician, which is a thing that I see now in voters who identify as Republicans now, but wouldn't have identified as

Republicans 10 years ago. And one of the things that I try to communicate to people about what I learn listening to voters all the time is how different a Republican who is 65 today who voted for Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, how much they are the ones who are politically realigning themselves out of the Republican Party because they are saying, I don't want to have anything to do with Donald Trump. On questions of politics or character? On questions of both. He's changed the Republican Party fundamentally what it stands for. It is no longer for free markets, the tariffs upon which is one of Donald Trump's sincerely held commitments are not part of a free market strategy of traditional conservatism, certainly on matters of character,

but also American leadership in the world. So one of the things that is cleaving the Republican Party in half right now is support for Ukraine. And Donald Trump really has done a very good job with a propaganda machine with that sort of right-wing infotainment ecosystem to convince people that their dollars are being given to somebody else. And so this is what I hear from voters over and over again, and the focus groups is we should take care of our own problems here. Let's talk about those focus groups. You've been conducting them now for the past seven years,

and you've done a lot of research around undecided voters, which are crucial, obviously, to what we're going to witness in early November. How is anyone still undecided at this point? Oh, well, you know, because many people are healthier than us, David. They're not obsessed with politics. They're not obsessed with politics. They got to feed their families and they got to go to jobs, sometimes two jobs. And they don't spend all their time thinking about what the candidates are doing.

And so they look up, they're going to vote and they look up and they say, okay, Trump, I don't really like him. But what is Kamala Harris going to do for me? Why would I affirmatively like her? That's one kind of undecided voter. Then there's sort of these undecided voters. I talked to a lot of these kinds of voters. We were talking about Joe Biden. It was the double haters.

They're a little less like that now. Now they mostly hate Trump and they're trying to figure out again if they like Kamala Harris enough to vote for her. And they're just the kinds of people who are the late breaking independence that often decide an election, which is which way to independence break right at the end.

That's those voters. And then there's the third kind of undecided voter that they don't talk about enough, which is, are you going to decide to vote? Like, are you going to decide to get off the couch and go do something. And that's a big category of undecided voter, which is like, are you sufficiently motivated to go do something about it? I'm speaking to you after a second assassination attempt on Trump. How did the first assassination attempt affect the way your focus groups receive timonist policies?

And how do you think this latest incident might affect things, if at all? You know, I don't think it's going to have that big of an impact. I actually was pretty surprised. I mean, assassination attempts historically create these real rally rounds. effects. We are so polarized at this point that I think that where it like changes things a little bit is it sort of shifts people's attention to Trump, but they, it doesn't have this lasting impact. And I look, when I talked to swing voters after the first assassination attempt, there was just a lot of like, you know, Trump has this really heated rhetoric or I don't know if they blamed Trump so much, but they did feel this sense that like he plays his role in

turning up the temperature. Some of them remembered Paul Pelosi and the way that Trump responded to the attack on Paul Pelosi. And I would say voters tend to just respond to these things more with sadness, sort of like they feel like the temperature is up really high in the country. People talk about civil worrying. We're on the brink of a civil war. But in terms of it shifting vote sentiment, I don't see any of that.

And also the memory now for any event, no matter how. big is so short. Yeah. We're like a nation of goldfish. We are. We really are. Well, what would have happened, do you suppose, in a focus group, if Vice President Harris had gotten up and in a ferocious voice had told the American people that in Ohio they're eating the cats and the dogs, that the migrants are eating the pets? What would have been the effect on her candidacy? It'd be over. And this is one of the things that's interesting about the durability of Donald Trump's campaign is the extent to which he plays by absolutely different political rules than any other candidate, not just Democrats, but any other candidate. Ron DeSantis, you know, Trump gets him with eating pudding with his fingers, and it's all over for him because Trump practices dominance politics.

Yeah, but dominance is different from the crazy. I mean, when he gets up and gives a five-minute riff about whether he'd rather be electrocuted by the battery or eaten by sharks, it's just another day out on the trail. Right, but that's because his voters know what he's doing when he does that. These voters, the best thing I've ever, formulation I've ever heard is that they take him seriously, but not literally. And this is right. They will say, yeah, he's making a joke. And half the time, if you listen to his full windup about Hannibal. Lector. Now it's very self-referential. It's like, they'll tell you, I'm crazy for talking about the late-grade Hannibal Lecter. And it's all inside joke. I mean, let's go Brandon to so much of what he offers people is a sense of community, a sense of in-group. And part of being in the in-group is that you have your own language. But what's interesting about that, too, is that when Trump was on the debate stage, it's hard for somebody who is not part of the Fox News, right-wing infotainment media, sort of extended universe to know what he's talking about. You know, he's just like saying Laura this or Sean

and he's talking about Fox News hosts, you know, he lives in this both online right wing sphere that there's a lot of voters who are Republicans who live outside of for whom it is incomprehensible what this guy is talking about. But there is also a massive in-group. But with your focus groups, eating cats and dogs was not a hit. eating cats and dogs was not a hit in the focus groups with the swing voters. And this is typical with swing voters. They dislike Donald Trump's insanity. Like the swing voters are the people who are saying, somebody give me your tax policy or I want to know what you guys are going to do about health care. And frankly, this is where Donald Trump really loses people is that for his base,

it's all fun in games. And for the swing voters, it's a missed opportunity, right? They're like, why is he talking about these insane things? I want to hear about this. And the thing about swing voters is that they are center-right soft GOP voters who have been over the last eight years increasingly willing to vote for Democrats as they watch the Republican Party become less and less recognizable. I'm speaking with Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And I'm speaking today with Sarah Longwell. Longwell is the publisher of the bulwark, a political news site, and she's the executive director of Republican voters against Trump. The never-Trump wing of the party can seem like a tiny minority long exiled from any power in Washington. But Longwell's focus groups are telling her that the GOP is not at all a maga monolith.

Kamala Harris is actively pursuing centrist Republicans, and the result in November could come down to whether she can make at least some red counties a little more purple. I'll continue my conversation now with Sarah Longwell. Now, someone in a focus group from the day after the debate who'd voted for Trump in 16 and then for Biden in 2020 phrased the difference between the two debates like this. Trump felt like and was absolutely the aggressor in the first one. And Tomola was the aggressor last night. And I don't think he handled it very well. And I think that her objective of getting under his skin to kind of unveil what's really, you know, behind the curtain, I think she did a great job. And yeah, like I said, it was a reversal of

fortune. The tables had turned. Who was speaking and what was he getting at? What's it emblematic of? So we call them internally flippers, people who voted for Trump and then voted for Biden. and I think that he's articulating something that we, first of all, everybody in the group thought it was a route for Kamala Harris. And lots of people were using language like immediately. This is the morning after. And the only thing we'd screened for was that they were the kind of flippers that we talk about and that they were going to watch the debate.

And it wasn't close. And a lot of people now in these groups, so we were seeing a lot of backsliding in these groups. So people voted for Trump. They voted for Biden and then they were frustrated with Biden. And like I said, a lot of these people are temperamentally center right. And so we were seeing a lot of people in those types of groups say, I don't know, I kind of just hate both of them. I don't know what I'm going to do or going back to Trump. And Kamala Harris has been turning this around, this dynamic. And I think that the debate did a great job of giving her that opportunity to sort of alpha him. And I think part of that, too, we're going to see a big gender divide, maybe the biggest one we've ever seen in this election. And I think one of the ways, though, that she can win over men is by dominating just Donald Trump's space, that that is something that causes them to respect her and diminishes him in their eyes and I think brings them back. And a lot of people in the group

are also just saying things like turn the page, breath of fresh air. You know, she is doing something almost shockingly successfully, which is not being the incumbent, right, forcing Trump to be the incumbent so she can be the change candidate where we are election after election right now. Change candidates are the ones that are winning. Now, it was recently a letter that 200 Republicans who work for the former president, George W. Bush, as well as Romney and John McCain, they all signed supporting Kamala Harris. And that's in addition to the much publicized Cheney family Harris endorsement, which can cut both ways, I think, among some Democrats. One woman in one of your focus groups who lives in a swing state and voted for Trump in 16 and then Biden in 2020 found these endorsements. really effective. Here's what one of them had to say. I'm a Republican, a lifelong Republican, but do not align with what the Republican Party is today, particularly with Trump and really just the far right leaning push of the party. There's this part of me that longs for Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney,

John McCain, and I'm having a hard time seeing that part of the Republican Party. in America today and I want it. So it does speak to me that, you know, what I consider to be some more moderate middle of the road practical Republicans have come out and endorsed her. That's helpful to me to push me over to her side a little bit. Sarah, how prevalent is that view in the Republican electorate? Well, it's funny. Dick Cheney, that famous moderate. I let that pitch go. because what can you say? Look, it's true. I think that the Harris campaign learned some real lessons from the work in 2020 in terms of figuring out how to persuade some of these voters.

And they know that having, you know, validators is going to be really important. And so they put Adam Kinsinger right up in the prime time, right before Harris spoke, a former Republican congressman. she, Kamala Harris, has been active in asking these people to join the coalition, saying there's room for you in this coalition. And I think that it didn't go unnoticed by voters in our focus groups that she said that she had the 200 Republicans. Like it does matter to them. And it also matters I've found with sort of soft Democrats who are just kind of looking up being like, okay, what's the lay of the land here? Or these independent voters, I'm like, wait a minute. Dick Cheney isn't going to vote for Donald Trump?

Mike Pence won't endorse his old boss. Those are signals to all kinds of voters who have all kinds of issues that Donald Trump is unacceptable. Now, you've said that gender is a key dividing line in this election. So specifically on the question of abortion, it seems that the debate itself elicited very strong responses from people all over the political spectrum, including this man from one of your focus groups who voted for Trump in 2020. and had a lot to say about Vance, J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, and his stance on abortion in particular. It really came apparent that Trump and him are not even on the same wavelength when they talked about abortion last night.

And I'm going like, okay, seriously, this is the guy that's out stumping for you. You guys should talk. I mean, abortion, I mean, regardless of what your stance is, if you believe any of these polls, they're a same. saying 65% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in some type of form. But for some reason, these politicians think, oh, we are going to ignore all that. And I'm going like, how does that work? We're the people you're supposed to represent.

And they're not representing us. And J.D. Vance is a wacko. So for this guy, it sounds like J.D. Vance is outflanking Donald Trump on the wacko front. A little understood key to Donald Trump's success is because that voters believe him to be a cultural moderate. Back in 2016, he was waving a rainbow flag. At one point, he famously told Caitlin Jenner, she could use whatever bathroom she wanted. And voters do not think he is super pro-life.

In fact, the thing you hear from voters in the focus groups when you bring up abortion and Trump, people be like, I don't know, he's probably paid for an abortion or two. And so nobody thinks that he's a person of sexual morality. And as a result, he codes to them as a social moderate. And J.D. Vance ended up being, again, they chose J.D. Vance when they thought that Joe Biden was going to be the nominee. And they were just trying to kind of run up the numbers with men. He is now an absolute albatross around their neck with women. And he has re-raised the salience of Donald Trump's misogyny at a time when for the first time,

since Donald Trump's been on a ballot, there is an issue that women have to be able to trust him on. You can't say locker room talk when it comes to. And so what that gentleman's referring to is the fact that Donald Trump's been like a slippery fish, right? He's like nail and jello to a wall when you talk to him about abortion, unlike J.D. Vance, who's been very straightforward. And Trump is now struggling to maintain that like non-position in the face of people wanting to know what his position is. There's been a consistent perception among a lot of voters that Trump is better for the economy. Based on the recent time Sienna poll gave us that indication, but I'm not sure that impression will hold after the debate. Let's listen to another clip from one of your focus groups with a woman who voted for Trump in 2020. After watching the debate last night, it just really solidified the arrogance and the lack of planning.

and he's just going in the wrong direction. He's not worried about the middle class, which most of us are in. So, you know, the tax breaks for the corporations, the trickle-down effect, I don't think, I don't believe in it. I think he needs to do more direct for the middle class. And he doesn't even said, you know, last night, you know, well, I'll have, I'm not president yet. so I don't have a plan yet. Well, you know, how can I have any confidence in you if you just want to go in there to boost your ego? I just, he's not my guy anymore.

Wow. He clearly is listening very carefully to debate and drawing very careful conclusions, no matter what her past as a voter, has been. Yeah, well, this is where Kamala Harris is doing sort of an unbelievable feat of not being the incumbent and not having to own Joe Biden's economy. Because a lot of the backsliding from voters like this and where Biden was not doing well with women is because a lot of them are primary shoppers. And these voters in the focus groups, they can tell you exactly how much eggs cost.

They can tell you exactly how much the price of milk has increased over the course of inflation. I think this is something people who do not live paycheck to paycheck, don't understand about a lot of these voters who care a great deal on maybe not just like each individual little policy, they want to know somebody cares about them. They want to know somebody is like looking out for them. And Kamala Harris is really pushing the middle class. And this is where Joe Biden was struggling a lot. He was so desperate to defend his record that he kept looking backwards and telling people like, well, we've done this and we've done this. She's able to just make a clean

break and say, looking forward, you're the people I'm focused on. And he's focused on giving tax cuts to the rich. And that, I think, is a rich vein for a lot of these. And that, I think, is a sort of non-college working-class voters who just want to know. And there's a lot of Obama-Trump voters back in 2016. We talked a lot about this group, and they are white working-class voters. They don't hate gay marriage. They're pretty secular. They are pro-choice. But they care about the price of eggs. And they care about the price of gas. That affects them every single day. And they want to know that the politician they're electing cares about them and cares about those things. Sarah, it's amazing to me the degree to which Project 2025, which I thought initially was an obsession,

of Washington journalists really came to be known maybe because it's got a cool name, Project 2025, but it could be Trump's undoing. An older man from a swing state who's also a veteran and voted for Trump in 16 and then Biden in 2020 expressed to one of your focus groups

a very real concern about how Trump handled that issue, Project 2025, in the debate. Let's take a listen to that. Trump is the number of. any knowledge with 50 of his closest advisors being involved in that project, how could he stand in front of America to lie like that? And that, to me, is a blatant misrepresentation of his knowledge or involvement in Project 2025.

And to me, as I think one of the ladies already said, people trying to direct in a white Christian nationalist format as to how the rest of our country is going to live. I'm not Christian, but I am American. But will I live under something like that? No. Have we renewed our passports? Absolutely. And something like that may force my family out of this country.

Wow. Wow. Tell me more about that guy. You know, that guy is funny. We've had that guy more than once. He's got three daughters. And those daughters have been on him. And he will now tell you he's gone.

He's just somebody who is super pro-choice. He's like a girl dad, an old man girl dad who's been a lifelong Republican. And he voted for Trump in 16. That's right. And so a lot of these voters that you see who are these flippers, because they were tribally Republicans. They sort of took it. And they hated Hillary Clinton.

Hating Hillary Clinton was like a thing that lives inside Republicans and couldn't get there for her. What's the difference between Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris? What's the critical difference that separates them for the voters that you're listening to? Oh, Kamala Harris is brand new to them and they'd been hating the Clintons for a decade. I mean, the extent to which when I started doing focus groups and I was sort of retrospectively asking people, actually, and there's two things people said that I think are really interesting. One was, I didn't vote for Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.

The second thing was they all thought, I didn't think he would win. so I just like took a flyer on him. I thought maybe he'd be a disruptor. I thought maybe he'd be something new, but like I didn't really think he would win, which actually I will say, Kamala Harris, the race being close in the polling, not the worst thing in the world.

I think that if she had a five, six point lead and people thought it was a fait accompli that would diminish enthusiasm for people who are like just turning out to stop Donald Trump. So, Sierra, in closing, I think you owe it to your loyal listeners who are having a heart attack over this election.

I think you sense the tension all over the place. Yeah. You got a prediction to make? Yeah, I think Kamala Harris is going to win. And I'm not super skittish about making that prediction because, A, for me, it's as much a manifestation. I mean, I need Kamala Harris to win. I need it for the future of the country.

I think in order to get back to having two healthy political parties, you have to deliver sustained electoral defeats to Trump. and the candidates like him. But that's a desire, not a prediction. No, but my prediction is, here's the thing. I listen to these voters all the time. And it sort of comes down to this. I think Kamala Harris went a long way to solving the enthusiasm gap.

And in fact, she may be edging slightly on the enthusiasm now. I think that Donald Trump has done more damage to himself with a lot of these people who held their nose and voted for him the second time with January 6th. Then a lot of them are going to leave it blank. At the end of the day, what this election will come down to, is the Republicans who get there on Kamala Harris and the ones who just refuse to get there on Trump. And when you add those up, it will be narrow but real margins in those critical swing states. Sarah Longwell, thanks so much.

Thank you. Sarah Longwell runs Longwell Partners, a communications firm. She's executive director of Republican voters against Trump and publisher of the political site, The Bullwork. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.