The NPR Politics Podcast - Why these swing voters give Trump a pass on the economy

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

NPR reporters observed focus groups of 12 North Carolina voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and President Donald Trump in 2024. We discuss what they say about President Trump, the economy, the Democratic Party and artificial intelligence.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ashley Lopez I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And today, one of my favorite pods every single month, we're checking in with swing voters. These are voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and then switched to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 and all year. Thanks to you and Mara, Ashley. Thanks to you both. We've been hearing from them from different battleground states. So, Ashley, this group of voters that were hearing from today is from North Carolina. What else can you tell us about them? Right. So seven of the voters who participated identified as independents, four said they were Republicans and one identified as a

Democrat. This group was maybe a little more conservative leaning compared to some of the other states we've covered. It's particularly in the Midwest. Not surprising. North Carolina's in the South, just a more conservative state. Although I should say the elector of North Carolina is pretty interesting. It's about if you look at just how people are registered, it's a state that's like, you know, a third independence, a third Republican and a third Democratic, but there is a considerable amount of Republican control. So anyways, and this was a group that these two focus groups were online, which is important, and they were put together, like these were conducted by messaging and market research firms in Gages and Sago, which works with NPR on the Swing Voter Project.

And we should say, what we always say every month, this is not a statistically significant sample. We're not doing a focus group to find out what people think. We have polls for that. We are doing the focus group to have them describe why they think that way and to get some insight into their thinking. But this is not statistically significant. There were only 12 people there. Okay. So, but to your point, Mara, polls have found that the president, President Trump is at his historically unpopular right now. What did this group, this small group of voters say about him?

Well, don't forget, these are all voters who voted for Biden, then Trump and 24. They don't like the war in Iran. They don't like the ballroom. They don't like the economy. They don't like a lot of things that are going on, but their support for Trump and their support for Republicans is very sticky. It's hard to see what would dislodge them at this point. Here's Steve. Steve is a self-described independent.

He's done a lot of what he said he was going to do, immigration, rule of law, doing things for the working families through his tax revisions and stuff like that, voting integrity. what he's done with NATO so far. And yeah, the Iran war has been tough, but he's playing the long game to get it in a place where we don't have to worry about them for a very long time. So see, he's still pretty much a Trump supporter or at least not willing to say he'd vote for a Democrat just to check or counter Trump. Yeah, and I should note that all the voters we're going to hear from today are going to be referred to by just their first name, which is what they agreed to when they agreed to participate. Tell me a little bit more about what they said about the war in Iran. I think that's really interesting that, I mean, this is an issue that President Trump campaigned on the idea that America was not going to be really involved in conflict the same way it had been in the previous decade or two decades. What else did these people say about the war?

You know, a lot of them are frustrated that Trump got in the war in the first place. I mean, we've heard this in every focus group now that at least some of the voters that have chimed in these focus groups have said, I voted for him under the understanding that he would not be. getting us into more foreign wars. And it is interesting, though, that a lot of the frustration about the economy, I heard some voters say they think we'll go away if the war goes away. Like, they don't think that this is static. They believe Trump when he says that this is temporary economic pain. You know, the interesting thing for me was the moderator pulled up a cut of Trump when he was asked about whether he takes into consideration people's financial situations when he's prosecuting the war. And he said, I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think

about anybody. I think about one thing. We can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. Now, Democrats are going to use that in their ads in the midterms. But we also heard the moderator, Rich Tao, asked the group whether they felt President Trump was out of touch with their own economic concerns. So now you're going to hear Rich, then Vicky, then Vivian. By a show of fingers, who thinks President Trump is out of touch with your economic concerns? concerns, all six of you. Vicki, tell me about that. Because he's laser focused on just the war. He's not thinking that $100 in groceries only gets me two bags of food. I'm like, feel it. I work two and a half jobs to take care

of my kids, you know, make sure we have food on the table. So most people now are working two and three jobs and I don't think they really know that. Vivian? He grew up rich. He's and Rich's whole life. He had no idea how much Thanksgiving dinner cost. You know, he's concerned with his ballroom. And a big part of this is that, I mean, we've heard this before, that voters think he's distracted by the war, like he's overly focused on this. This is something that Leslie said.

I'm glad, you know, I'm glad he's concerned about the nuclear weapon, but what about people needing to put food on the table and get to their jobs and be able to stay in the hospital? for example. I mean, he's just focused on one thing. I'm still a little bit confused by listening to these people the way they talk about him, but then what you're saying is that the support form from these people is also sticky. Can you guys square this? Well, one reason is they still do see him as a strong leader.

Even when asked about his tweeting, whether that was credible, even people who said it was incredible, said, well, he's just doing it to scare Iran or he's doing it to show strength. And it reminded me of when Trump first started running, there was a saying that his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. And I think that's part of this. He managed to make a very strong bond, a kind of mind meld, with especially red state, rural, non-college voters, that he was going to stand up for them, that they'd been looked down upon by elites, They'd been ignored. They were the forgotten people.

And he still has a strong bond with them, even though they disagree with almost every single one of his policies. So I asked Rich Tao about this. And he said that actually, like, the stickiest thing about Trump is his image. He's been in the public eye for a really long time. And he's been seen as like a kind of a bully, but also as a good businessman. That seems to be like really resilient despite what's going on in the economy. And voters who sort of, like, especially with low propensity voters, they sort of come in and out of watching the news. That changes a lot. But their image of Trump seems to be a thing that is pretty long lasting.

Well, to your point about coming in and out of the news, I thought it was interesting to me, this idea that this focus group was played the clip that we were just talking about President Trump talking about thinking about American's financial situations. Is that something they had come into contact when he first said it? I feel like we talked about it as a very notable moment. did you get the sense that that had broken through to these people before this focus group? There are a couple of people who brought it up sort of in passing when they were asked about how they felt about Trump. I think in each group there were two groups of six and at least one person in each group brought it up. But I did get to observe in real time. People react to it for the first time.

And, you know, even someone we heard from Steve, he was someone who seems to be mostly okay with the job the president's doing. He was rolling his eyes and shaking his head. This is not a popular thing to hear from him. Like this, I mean, Democrats are taking notes of the kind of things that voters do not like to hear from Trump. It is him sort of waving off their economic concerns. Or telling them that the economy is great when they don't feel it is. That's always the kiss of death for presidents. Joe Biden did the exact same thing.

Everything's great. Well, that's insulting to voters who are having a hard time paying their bills. But again, like the fact that Trump does what he says is something that they still believe about him. actually Vicki, who was, we heard from just talking about right now about how she's having to work two and a half jobs. Like things are hard for her. She says the way I perceive Trump, though, is that he is a strong leader. If he says he's going to do something, he does it, period. Whether you like it or not, he does it. That's why I feel like he's a strong president. Well, you know what's shocking about that is we could come up chapter and verse with examples of where the opposite is true.

That's what I was going to say. If you think about the campaign, isn't it the opposite? One of the reasons his approval rating is so low is because he didn't do the things he said he was going to do. He didn't bring prices down. He didn't bring more manufacturing to the U.S., all these things. Or with Iran, he said he was going to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and he didn't do that. But it is amazing how much slack voters do cut him. You know, they come up with a lot of explanations. Oh, he was just threatening. He just wanted to scare them. Or he was letting off steam. Some of his tweets are just he's angry. So they take it. Take them seriously, but not literally. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break and more on how all of us is going to play out in the midterms right after this. And we're back. So we've been talking about how these swing voters, these voters who voted for Biden in 2020, Trump in 2024, now feel about the job the president's doing.

I want to kind of turn the tables here and talk about how they feel about the Democratic Party. What can you tell me? Well, if Trump's positive attributes are really sticky to voters, I will say among these voters that the Democratic Party's negative images are pretty. sticky. When asked if they would support Democrats in order to, I guess, respond to the parts of Trump's agenda, mostly his economic policy that they're unhappy with, whether they would back Democrats, they said no. And here is what Vicki, Vivian, and April had to say. I used to be a Democrat. And so most of them is like, this is it. I'm right. I don't care what you say. They don't want to listen to anybody else's opinion. They don't want to take the time to learn.

believe they need to show a united front. I think they need to come together. I think everybody's going the own way. They don't know what to do. They're so upset of what the Republicans are doing, they don't think to come together. They serve to be stronger so they can, you know, outdo what the Republicans are doing.

When asked to give specific advice to Democrats, this came up a lot, which is like, you guys are fighting with each other too much. You're not fighting with the Republicans. You're too fractured. In fact, a follow-up question in the second group we had, you know, I had the moderator ask, like, do you think they're too fractured? And six out of six said yes. This is a perception of the Democratic Party that they are not united in a serious way that makes them not willing to back them in the face of Trump. You know, this really underlines to me one of the biggest problems or dynamics in the midterm elections. Because to win a majority in the House, a durable majority, Democrats are going to have to, flip some Republican districts. But they have to do more than just motivate their base to turn out

and convince some independence. They're going to have to flip some Republican voters like the ones in this focus group. And the problem is it's very, very hard to do that because we're so locked in. The partisanship is so strong. Stickiness is a big factor in our politics today. And what we know from the last two midterms is that 95% of Democratic-leaning voters voted for the Democratic candidate and 95% of the Republican-leaning voters voted for the Republican candidate. There are not a lot of flippers. But North Carolina is exactly the kind of state that Democrats have to do better in. And it's going to be hard. They're not that many districts. There's not that many voters that are truly swinging, that are truly up for grabs. Democrats need them to be swinging and instead,

they're sticky. I mean, I want to get specific here on North Carolina because I actually do think it's a really interesting state for a number of reasons. But the Senate race there, is one of the ones that we're really closely watching. It's supposed to be very competitive with a Democratic candidate who used to be the governor, Roy Cooper. Did Cooper come up at all in these focus groups? Or I guess what I'm trying to get at is do these voters negative feelings about the Democratic Party more broadly extend to a candidate like Cooper, who is considered pretty popular there? There's generally an exemption for governors. Governors are treated a little different.

They're local. They're not. And now, of course, all our politics are becoming nationalized. but in general, governors get a different kind of look. And that's why you see Republican governors in a state like Vermont or Democratic governor in a state like North Carolina. So he has had a track record. He's done things that they know about.

It's their own state. And what I'm always waiting for in every focus group, which is at the end, the moderator shows a picture of whatever is the local official running. Generally, it's for Senate or for governor. And I'm sorry to say that a very large number of our focus group people do. do not know and cannot recognize their own governor or senator. But in the case of Roy Cooper, there were people who did know who he was and what he had done, and even though they were our leaning independence or Republicans, they liked him.

So governor's races are different. Senate races are much more nationalized. Governors' races are different. And that's why Democrats feel that they have a chance with Roy Cooper. He's running against Michael Watley, who was an RNC functionary, who no one could recognize. But what Trump is hoping is that just having an R next to his name is enough in a state like North Carolina. And what Roy Cooper is hoping is there's a long tradition of people looking at governor's races in a less partisan way. A lot of these are low propensity voters.

And the thing they seem to know about Roy Cooper is that he was a popular governor, which is really good messaging to stake ahead of an election. Now, we are still months away. I don't get the sense that a lot of these voters are voting in primaries, although that was not asked. like I'm you know like we mentioned no one seemed to know what Michael Watley looked like what we heard a lot from these voters too is that you know I don't know how much this is true you know when they when they get down to it but a lot of these voters say that they don't look at party they say they try to look at the individuals it's also part of the reason they say they don't want to commit to Democrats even if they're upset with the way Trump is handling the economy is because they're like look give me a good individual like whether they're a Democrat or not actually it was a was asked if, you know, if you don't like Democrats, does the fact that Roy Cooper is a Democrat hurt your vote affect anything? They said no. A lot of them said no. Let me ask about one more thing that was brought up, which is this idea of democratic infighting it. There's like not enough togetherness within the Democratic Party. It's interesting to me because it is kind of true in

comparison to the Republican Party, which kind of has Trump at the top seemingly making a lot of the calls and everyone kind of in lockstep behind Trump. But a lot of criticism in 2024 was the fact that Kamala Harris just kind of, there was no primary. She just kind of got on the ticket and ran for president. The alternative to that would be a primary where people are kind of going after each other. And I guess I just wonder how the Democratic Party is supposed to figure out a way forward without that level of quote unquote infighting that seems unpopular with voters. Well, can we make a distinction here? What happens in a primary is not infighting. It's a spirited debate to let the voters of that single party decide who they want is their standard bearer. and what they want the program and agenda to be. Now, the infighting that we are seeing among Democrats now is Schumer versus AOC or Bernie versus, you know, more conservative moderate Democrats. That's what they see. And that's because the Democrats haven't been able to coalesce around a message. But this is what they tell me when I talk to Democrats.

They don't need to do that right now. In a midterm, it's a referendum on the incumbent party and the president, but they will need a positive agenda that they unite. around before 2028. Yeah. Part of the problem that Democrats face is that they don't really have a leader. The reason you see Republicans in lockstep with Trump is because Trump has a lot of power. He has like the bully pulpit. He has, he's been able to get rid of most of his enemies in the party now.

Goodbye Thomas Massey. Goodbye all those Indiana Republicans who didn't vote for redistricting. Good by Bill Cassidy. It has been a sweep in the primaries right now because the party has a leader. Who's the Democratic leader? It's hard to say. We're in primaries right now. So the left versus the center of the Democratic Party is like in stark contrast right now.

But really what is going to win elections is if both are true. If like both kind of candidates have the D next to their name, as Mara saying. Like Democrats cannot win by just going to their left flank. They're going to need to convince them independence and Republicans in some states. Let me ask about one more thing that came up in this focus group. And it's come up in previous focus groups as well. But I'm curious to hear what these voters thought about it, artificial intelligence, which is a big. topic. No, I like that. I like that you're excited. I'm excited to talk about AI too. So what did these

what are these voters say about it? I am super interested in this. This is a pretty new concern. It's a big concern. It's a bipartisan concern. Many of these voters had never even heard of data centers, but they knew that AI was going to cost them or their kids jobs. And they were played a clip of a commencement speaker at a college talking about AI. And every time she brought it up, there were a lot of booze. And here's Barrett, independent, and here's what he said about AI. We've got an entire generation of kids that have been told since they were in third grade, learn computer science, learn how to code. You can write your own ticket in this world.

And now they're graduating. And it's like, eh, never mind. We got AI now. We don't need you. There's a lot of fear in the electorate about the AI Jobs Apocalypse. And it was started by the CEOs of these AI companies saying they're, was going to be mass unemployment, 20% in the next five years. Half of all the white collar entry-level white-collar jobs would be gone. We don't know if that's actually going to happen

or not, but people are worried about it. And it's a big opportunity for both parties, particularly Democrats, who could be the party that understands voters' concerns about AI and has a program to protect them from the job losses from AI. And a majority of these voters, almost all, I think it was 11 out of 12, said that they want the government to intervene on this. They want to see policy. They want to see the Trump administration. They want to even see global leaders do something about this. In times of economic precarity, which is what we're in now, generally voters are more open to government activism and assistance. And that is the big opening that Democrats tell me they have because Democrats are the party that says the government should help you. And they feel that

Republicans are the party, at least for the moment, in the Trump Republican Party, Republicans are the people who wants to help billionaires. Yeah. And I feel like if a group of voters is in lockstep on being concerned about an issue. This could end up being a real issue during the midterms that we're going to hear campaigns, campaign ads talk a lot about. Yeah, and we're going to be following up on this. This is new. We're going to be asking about AI in every future focus. Yeah. And let's not lose sight of the fact that there's a ton of money from AI flooding campaigns right now. That is like a big part of campaign finance right now. All right. Let's leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political course book. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.