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Sarah Longwell is the publisher of The Bulwark, which she helped found in 2019. She regularly conducts focus groups with voters across the political spectrum and hosts the podcast “The Focus Group,” which is in its fifth season, and co-hosts “The Next Level” podcast and “The Secret Podcast.”
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sarah Longwell discuss which voter segments support Donald Trump, what might change their minds, and which potential candidates could help the Democratic Party stage a comeback.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: There's a million things to talk about in terms of what's actually happening. But one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is how people are responding. And you're one of those rare people who is super insightful about politics, but actually also takes time to talk to American voters. So I was very intrigued to hear how you think different segments of the American electorate are processing the very radical policies and fast changes of the first 100 or so days of the Trump administration.
Sarah Longwell: I do focus groups almost at scale now, meaning that I'll do three groups a week, four groups a week. And so I get to do kind of segments within segments of voters. There are the long-time Trump voters, right? The people who are dug in on the project of Trump and what he is doing. And for those people, you give them DOGE, you give them a trade war—they don't care if the market gets rocky, they are here for it. As far as they're concerned, Trump's executive orders, seeing ICE trucks in neighborhoods, all of it just reflects movement. Somebody is doing something.
Mounk: He's doing what he promised to do.
Longwell: Yeah, that's right. They're like, I signed up for this. This is what I said I wanted when I voted for this guy. This is Trump being Trump. And he told us he was going to do this. They're an interesting group in that it's not that they've bought into Trump's ideological project, but they are so bought in on Trump that if Trump says, I need you to do this, it's your patriotic duty, they’re going to suffer through the market loss and the supply chain disruption and everything else for the long-term gain.
One of the things that's so interesting to me, and how I know they're in for Trump and the project and not necessarily for ideological reasons, is that when you listen to people talk about why they're so into tariffs, some will say, I'm into tariffs because this is how we're going to pay off the debt, and then other people will tell you, this is a negotiating tactic. Trump is just trying to negotiate, just trying to get a better deal. Then a third group will tell you, Trump is trying to remake the American economy. We've got to bring manufacturing jobs back. Now, of course, all of those things do not exist together. He can't do all of those things. It's either a negotiating tactic or we're fundamentally remaking the American economy. So, depending on who they're listening to, they're just there to give you a reason why what Trump is doing is good.
Sometimes I’m asked, aren't regular voters worried about the chaos? But it doesn't read as chaos. If you're a dug-in Trump voter, it reads as the rest of the government is moving too slowly, it doesn't take risks—and here's Trump trying to make a difference. That group is pumped. They're actively excited by this. And the market going down isn't going to stop that excitement.
Mounk: If your starting point is—as I think it is for many Trump voters—that the establishment, the institutions, and the normal political class are just so fundamentally corrupt and dysfunctional, that none of it works, then then chaos is a sign that you're actually taking it on. You're not going to get rid of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system without some turbulence. So it's not surprising that from that vantage point, they're saying, yes, this is what he promised.
Longwell: That's right. This “burn it all down” mentality is something that was initially attractive to people about Trump. There's another section of people who would talk about Trump's first term and say, yeah, he said he was going to do all the crazy stuff, but he didn't really do it. This group of people is disappointed by that. They're like, we’ve got to do this. We want mass deportations and we want to bring manufacturing back and we want to take on China. That's America first. That's MAGA. Those people are sort of hardcore.
Then there's this other group of voters that we hear a lot from, and those are still in the Trump voting group, and maybe they voted for Trump a bunch of times, or maybe they're new to voting for Trump, but for them, it was about the economy. It was about prices. Things were too expensive. I heard from this group of people constantly going into the election, and maybe they don't like Trump’s personality, but him being a businessman is important to them because they think under Joe Biden, everything got too expensive. I've been hurting since COVID and I'm looking for somebody to turn it around. That's where Trump is just a businessman. I think he'd do a better job.
Mounk: I wrote a piece about aspirational populism after Trump's election, which I think speaks a little bit to that segment of the population. Those are people who are upset about some of the shortcomings of the Biden economy, the high inflation and other things that really were a problem. I think that people often hear Democrats talk about higher minimum wages and other kinds of things that they feel are not sufficiently aspirational. They say, that's good, I’d have no problem with that, but I actually want to make it. I want the American Dream. I want to really become much more affluent. They saw Trump as promising that. Part of his businessman persona—even part of the partnership with Elon Musk and occupying Mars and so on—to them, all of that was an exciting promise of what the future might hold. Presumably, that segment of the electorate might also include some of those Latino and other voters who swung towards Trump. I'm sure there are some deeply ideologically-committed MAGA Latinos as well, but I would guess that a lot of the Latinos who voted for Trump fall into that category of people who weren't happy with the Biden economy, who wanted some disruption, who looked at Trump's business success and thought, he can help us live a similar kind of success story. How are they feeling? Presumably they're looking at things like the tariffs and the talk about a recession and other things with a good amount more concern than that segment of sort deep MAGA loyalists you were talking about earlier.
Longwell: That's exactly right. Especially for younger voters, for black men—but also black voters overall who moved toward Trump, and for Hispanic and Latino voters—you're exactly right. That is a big part of the group that we saw move in places like New Jersey; for them it was aspirational. On the left's culture stuff, they tend not to have been bent out of shape about it as much as they just roll their eyes and say, no, I want this exciting vision of the future. Democrats would say, we’ve got to wage war against billionaires, and these voters say, I think billionaires are cool. How do I become a billionaire? But it doesn't have to be about becoming a billionaire. It can be, how can I afford a cooler apartment, or have things be a little bit easier?
For a lot of these voters, it's not that they're so into Trump, they just want somebody who's going to give an aspirational vision. The thing is—and again, here I'm gonna do a segment of a segment—there are some of those voters who are very like, fingers crossed, I don't know, I'm not seeing it yet, but I'm still hopeful and I like some of what Elon Musk is doing. But a lot of this depends on where you fall on the income spectrum. Because if you have some latitude, you're hoping, you're really looking forward. You can say, yeah, I'm gonna give it some time. They say, Rome wasn't built in a day, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. They kind of give Trump a little bit of the benefit of the doubt: I don't really know if the tariffs are gonna work, I don't really know, but I'm still hopeful, fingers crossed.
But then there's another segment that is super cost-sensitive. They do not have the financial latitude to give Trump a lot of grace. They say, this guy said he was gonna lower grocery prices and he’s not lowering grocery prices. Usually when people talk like this, they give you very concrete examples. They'll say, I just went in and got my gas changed. It was $10 more expensive. Things are actually worse than they were under Biden. They're not getting better. Those people have no patience because they don't care about Trump as Trump. For them, it is just, you said you were gonna lower my prices. You are not lowering my prices.
Mounk: In a way, there's something optimistic about that population segment. I was thinking about this when I had Jason Furman on the podcast recently, who was very, very critical of “Liberation Day” and Trump's tariffs, but who also wrote about the failure of the Biden administration's economic policies. He seemed quite convinced that the fact that prices increased really did have an impact on voting behavior, that perhaps in some ways voting behavior is a little bit more rational than political scientists and economists had believed for a long time—they believed that, actually, voters don't really rationally track what happens in the economy and they don't rationally track the extent to which the president is responsible for something like that. But my understanding from that conversation was that no, actually, perhaps to a great extent, they've realized that if you have economic policies that lead to high inflation, they're going to punish you for it. And if that's true about the Biden economy, that might be true about Trump.
So if Trump actually decides—in whatever is left of the pause on these extremely high tariffs—that he does want to use that as an opportunity to climb down and to pretend to have struck some grand deal—and in the end actually manages to avert the worst damage to the economy—then some of those voters might come back to Trump. But if he goes through with it and we end up in a recession or we end up with sky-high tariffs that really impact the price of everything, those voters are going to be gone.
Longwell: That's right. This is where I get frustrated when people are like, well, voters think this and voters think that, or Dem voters think this and Trump voters think that. Actually, there's real segmentation in these groups. And some of these swingier groups, they're not particularly ideological. They are just price-sensitive. Of course, Democrats for a long time have talked about income inequality. I understood that for a long time as a political observer. But listening to voters all the time, you can hear the difference for somebody for whom $10 makes a meaningful difference.
I think this is what Democrats struggled with. Joe Biden's macro economy was improving relative to the rest of the world. So a lot of people sort of like us—and academics and journalists—were sitting there being like, why aren't voters happier with this economy? But it’s because if you're on the lower end of the income scale, inflation is high and it's not going down. Stuff's more expensive and that's hard on people and it just doesn't resolve itself quickly. Those voters were absolutely part of Trump's coalition in electing him. They're not sitting around being like, boy, I think I made a mistake or I wish I'd voted for Kamala Harris. What happens with those people is that, whenever they get the chance to register again how they feel, they're just gonna vote for the person who's saying, I'm gonna lower your costs. Because for them, that’s everything.
Mounk: How big a segment of swing voters is this group we’ve been talking about, and what other kinds of swing voters are there and how are they responding to the situation?
Longwell: Here's the most interesting thing about the polling numbers around Trump, which is that Trump's overall approval rating is slightly higher now than his approval on the economy. Now, that always used to be reversed. He always had a higher approval rating on his handling of the economy. That was his big thing, because pre-COVID, even people who didn't like Trump thought he was doing a pretty good job handling the economy. For a lot of people who voted for him this time around, even people who had gone to Biden and then come back to Trump, it was nostalgia for that sort of 2019 economy that brought them back.
I think that if Trump's overall approval rating starts to come into line with his approval on the economy, and his approval on the economy continues to drop, this is where it starts to get really into the sour spot for Trump. His superpower has always been convincing people that he is this businessman. It is central to the mythology of Trump and why people believe in him when they feel economically pinched. If things continue to get worse, if we go into a recession, this would take a knife to that central mythology, which I think hurts Trump.
But here are the people who I think abandoned him. Right now, the drop is actually coming from the people for whom he said, I will lower grocery prices on day one, which he has not. Because people also—and you hear this in the focus groups—don't think he's focusing enough on the economy. They're kind of like, DOGE? Whatever. Are you doing something about grocery prices? Those people are the first to go, I think. Because they're not your typical swing voters in that they have some kind of ideological makeup. They're swinging in the sense of, who's doing something for me, for my immediate needs? That's who I'm gonna vote for.
Mounk: Those are also economically-based voters, but ones that have a little bit of a longer time horizon. They're willing to give them a little bit more grace for a while, but if in a year or two or three, they haven't seen their personal situation improve and they don't think that things have looked up for the market economy as a whole, they're gonna be off the boat.
Longwell: That's exactly right. Again, it goes back to the stratification of people's personal economic circumstances—how much elasticity and room do you have to take a little risk? For people who have no room, they're out on Trump immediately. They're like, he's not lowering grocery prices on day one.
Mounk: It's interesting that you always talk about grocery prices and not about stocks. How important do you think the stock market is? There's one striking stat I've seen—I think Harry Enten for CNN shared this—that around 61% of Americans have some exposure to the stock market. So you might think that the stock market is incredibly important. Now, probably for a lot of people, whatever they get from stocks is much less than what they get from employment, and that exposure to the stock market is maybe $10,000 in an IRA that they hope to be able to use to retire 30 years from now, but it's quite distant in their minds. In these focus groups, do people worry about the stock market, or do they worry much more about the things we've been talking about, which is the grocery prices, the labor market, how much salary they're going to be able to command and whatever else they do and so on?
Longwell: The reason I keep talking about grocery prices is because voters keep talking about grocery prices. I cannot tell you the number of people who will tell me specifically how much an item costs—people use eggs as a stand-in, but people will tell you about the price of milk, they will tell you about the price of bread—or they will tell you about their overall grocery bill and how much it has increased. Again, for people who are really price-sensitive, they have a lot of kids, they're thinking about how to stretch a dollar, that's a real segment of the population and they know exactly how much things cost.
Now the next group, which has just a little more latitude and flexibility, they care about the markets. They'll talk more about the markets and they don't like the volatility, but they're the ones too who are like, yeah, this isn't great. They have their fingers crossed. They'll say, I'm nervous about tariffs. Now these voters, the ones who have a little more latitude, live in an economy where they'll say, OK, I was about to buy a new car, but now I'm nervous about buying a new car because I think it's going to go up too much. They'll talk about the price of things. A lot of them will also say things like, I work in x industry and it impacts us in the following ways. And so they're kind of in a wait and see deal, is this gonna hurt me?
Let's talk about sort of the more college-educated suburban types who've been moving away from Trump. A lot of them have politically realigned into Democrats. But then there's like this other cohort that's pretty swingy that has been traditional Republican all their lives. They've made peace with Donald Trump a little bit, but they're open to voting for Democrats, especially if you give them a Republican candidate like Herschel Walker or a Kari Lake. That's who we think of as a sort of suburban woman swing voter.
Mounk: Is this kind of country club Republican-ish territory or are talking about something else? These are people who definitely would have voted for George W. Bush, definitely would have voted, perhaps, for John McCain in 2008, would have been very comfortable with Mitt Romney, and then sort of faced this choice when Trump first came onto the political landscape: He doesn't talk like the people we like and identify with. We don't like that he beats up on politicians that we actually might have liked, and in various ways we are kind of nervous about him, but also we've never really voted for Democrats and we have some ideological differences from Democrats. And so they're cross-pressured in this kind of way.
Longwell: I could call these “Wall Street Journal editorial page Republicans”—people who dislike Donald Trump actively and they will tell you they dislike him, but their attitude is, but Democrats are worse, and they have stories about Democrats being worse in all kinds of ways. Maybe it's the woke stuff, maybe it's other cultural issues. Sometimes you'll hear voters like this, and they don't have to be country club members. They can just be upper-middle-class or middle class. These are the people who will say, yeah, Trump's crazy, but Democrats don't even know what a woman is. But if you give them a Herschel Walker and a pretty normal Democrat locally, then these are the types of people who will vote for a Democrat for governor in their state. They tend to be cultural moderates, so they don't like the super woke stuff, but they also think gay marriage is fine. They tend to be more pro-choice. This is a swingier group, too, which I think is an interesting group to think about in the long term, because they still think the Republican Party might come back. They still think Donald Trump might be a bit of an aberration. And they’re surrounded by other Republicans who kind of reinforce that.
These are the ones who I sort of wonder about long term. Take Virginia. I think there's probably a lot of these kinds of voters in Virginia. Abigail Spanberger versus Winsome Earle-Sears is going to be the 2025 gubernatorial race in Virginia. I think Abigail Spanberger will clean up with this type of voter over Winsome Earle-Sears, who's a very Trumpy Republican.
Mounk: How are those voters feeling? I’d guess that those voters were very put off by parts of what the Biden administration did, certainly by the overall cultural drift of the last 10 years. They probably felt, we need something to put a stop to this. And they hoped that Trump would turn out to be a relatively conventional Republican despite his rhetoric. Now, my guess would be that they've been looking at the first hundred days of his administration, they may be nervous about the tariffs, they may be nervous about the economy—but they also presumably are nervous about him seemingly wanting not just to course correct the universities, but to destroy the universities. Not just to course correct on some of the woke stuff, but to sort of impose an anti-woke agenda with a force of a coercive state of a federal government in a quite extreme way. I would guess that that is making them nervous, or am I guessing wrong?
Longwell: You're right. I don't want to just name publications, but I kind of put them in buckets like, this is the Free Press crowd. I came into this, I voted for Trump because I was more worried about anti-Semitism on college campuses, or, I really don't like the cultural woke stuff, but they're looking at Trump, what he's doing on the economy, the saber rattling at Greenland and Canada, the level of disruption and chaos. They thought they were gonna get “first term Trump,” and they missed the part where Trump was not gonna be surrounded by normal, sensible Republicans who were gonna put guardrails around him. They’re slowly realizing that this is a lawless, crazy Trump.
I put the markets sort of in this category where the markets all were in the crowd of, I'm gonna focus on what Trump does, not what he says, because I don't really believe what he says. Because part of this crowd's MO is that they're so educated that they will tell themselves a story. They can convince themselves that Donald Trump isn't gonna do all the things he says he's gonna do. That's for the rubes, that's for these guys, but he's not gonna do any of that. He's a normal business guy. And those people are starting to be like, ooh, this is not good. I do not feel good about where this is headed. I still think they're a little bit in the “fingers crossed” stage. Maybe the market volatility will make him back off. That's like the Bill Ackmans who think they can flatter their way through it, or they think they can find carve outs or that this will work itself out in some way. But those people are nervous as well. I could see them being some of the ones to bolt eventually.
Mounk: How big a part of the electorate is this? Because on the one hand, some of the things you're saying makes me think that they're quite a small part of the electorate—the Wall Street Journal editorial audience, the Bill Ackmans of the world, the country club Republicans. On the other hand, of course, there are a lot of traditional Republicans. There are a lot of small-scale conservatives in the country that were the bread and butter of the old-style Republican Party. And that is a real social set of people in the country. So how should we think about sort of how electrically significant the segment of the electorate is?
Longwell: They are a small but decisive part of the margins that elect Trump, but more importantly, they have outsized influence because these are the people who control things in a lot of ways. These are small business owners. These are people who are looked up to in their respective fields or in the organizations they participate in or the towns that they live in. These are people who are considered sort of local thought leaders. That's why I think people still look at National Review or the Free Press and they'll say, OK, we all get that Trump is bad, but like the libs are worse. That gives them sort of a permission to say, OK, we're gonna go ahead and go with Trump. Right now they all think that they're smart enough and they're used to controlling things enough that they're like, well, we can nudge him in the right direction. We have agency here. If we flatter him, if we push him, if we explain why this is bad, we can make a difference. But also if Trump doesn't listen to them and does behave irrationally and they start to turn on him, they can have an enormous influence over the vibes of how a broader section of the electorate views Trump.
Mounk: Very interesting. You think that although they haven't yet turned on Trump, they're getting nervous. They might get there. And this is one of the mechanisms that will be involved in getting Trump from 45% approval to 40 or 35% approval, if this segment really loses faith in him.
Longwell: This is the segment that you could think of as the people who—the days that the markets were crashing, right after Trump released his insane tariff regime that was filled with errors and didn't make any sense—these are the people who are like, this doesn't make any sense. Why are they doing it this way? Now, of course, they're also the ones who, when he does the 90-day pause, say, well, he's listening to people, he's backing off. And so I think you see this. This is like reflected in the markets by people being like, is he going to behave rationally or is he going to behave irrationally? And they're not sure.
Mounk: Very interesting. All right, so we're starting to get into the swing voters. What are some of the other segments of swing voters you've been looking at?
Longwell: Then you've got sort of what I would call “red-pilled Democrats.” This could be a reflection of Joe Rogan, even of Elon Musk—people who had traditionally been Democrats who have more socially liberal views, but they are mad at Democrats and they have kind of found themselves in a weird heterodox relationship with Republicans. That kind of group can sometimes be Trumpier than the old school Republicans. A lot of them aren’t Republicans in any ideological way, but like I said, they are red-pilled. They are people who are like, Democrats reject me, I'm in a hot war with them, and I'm gonna align with the right. Even people like Batya Ungar-Sargon, who's out there being like, I'm a communist MAGA person.
This is actually reflective of something that I think as I listen to people. We've talked a lot about political realignment—and there is a lot of political realignment going on—but it's not just political realignment. This idea that there is a far right, a far left, a center right, a center left, and a center, it just kind of isn't true anymore. The electorate now is just a big weird salad of people and policy beliefs. Some of this was happening already. Some of it is due to Trump and the way he hijacked the Republican Party. People are always asking me, are you still a Republican? I'm like, well, I still believe in limited government free markets and American leadership in the world. So no, because the current Republican Party reflects none of that. Actually like a weird segment of sort of moderate Democrats now reflect that.
Joe Rogan is somebody who was a Bernie guy, and liked Bernie’s burn it all down feeling. These types have all migrated to Trump now. I hear this from these people all the time. And some of them are now the hardest core MAGA types. This is more like the horseshoe theory of politics as opposed to a linear spectrum. Although I think sometimes we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to make sense of an electorate that doesn't try to make sense of itself. But you do have people who are very Trumpy and will say, I loved Bernie, but really what they mean is, stuff's not working and I want radical change. They're not thinking that hard about the individual policies that make them up. This is where people ask me, are you a centrist? or how do we make the country more centrist? How do we rebuild the American center? It's funny because it's less a set of policies that come together to form a center. There's a temperamental center.
Mounk: That makes sense. I mean, I have a higher opinion of Bernie than I do of Trump, though I certainly disagree with Bernie on many very important things. But the basic narrative is, you're being exploited, America doesn't work, the political establishment is corrupt, and we need very radical change to do something about that. And if that involves upsetting some people and burning some stuff down and, to some extent, portraying yourself as a martyr, then that's great. You can have an ideological analysis of those two political figures or an analysis of how they would govern, et cetera, in which case they look very, very different. But when you look at it as sort of a figure who allows you to project that anger, and that desire for some kind of radical attempt to start from scratch, then it's not that hard to see why they would appeal to the same kind of person.
Longwell: There's a lot of voters I listen to who talk about Trump and they say, well, I think he transcends politics. They feel like he himself is not as much of a political figure, but I could see a lot of those voters liking somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They would find her authentic, they would find her radical, they would find her energetic and they would see no contradiction in liking Trump and AOC.
Mounk: Is there not an important difference between Bernie in 2016 and AOC today, which is that Bernie emphasized the economy rather than identity? In that sense, he had a kind of slightly folksy, commonsense way of talking. He didn't use a lot of big words, for example. Whereas AOC, though she's obviously very media savvy and quite charismatic, is just much more steeped in that kind of identitarian language, in a way that both, I think, would put some people off because they might feel, I'm not sure that she's really fighting for me, but also I think is linguistically in a different register. They might think, well, I don't know, she uses these terms that I've never heard and she might look down on me if I somehow use the wrong word and so I'm not quite sure that she actually would be fighting for my interests.
Longwell: I think AOC is a fascinating figure in part because she is young enough that she can still define herself in a certain way. She’s not yet run on a national stage in a way that I think she is boxed in. And I think some of this depends on how she thinks about positioning herself. Because she can be the bartender, she can be the waitress AOC who understands regular people and talks like a regular person. Or she can be the younger version that's talking like a graduate student or like somebody with a college education, which can turn people off. And she can still talk about being exploited and all of these things. I do think that if AOC listened to Bernie a lot and took Bernie's economic populism and just wrapped it in a younger, more energetic kind of package and talked a lot about working people, I think AOC could go a long way.
Mounk: I'm somewhat sympathetic to that point of view. I can see how, when you look at the transformation of someone like Nancy Pelosi over time, she went from being a quite radical San Francisco Democrat to a kind of moderate Democratic figure over the course of many years. AOC obviously entered Congress at such a young age that she has a lot of time to reinvent herself. When you look at national polls, she's quite unpopular today. I think she is quite marked because she became so famous so quickly. But she probably does have time to evolve, but that would require her to be the sort of person who's able and willing to do both of those things. I guess I have considerable doubts about both parts of that. I have qualms about whether she's willing to do that because she has come of age in a political movement that is very big on political purity. Though she is, I think, visibly annoyed with the fact that despite all of her attempts, some of that movement now thinks that she's not pure enough. And so there could be a kind of oppositional dynamic where she says, screw you people, I'm never going to be pure enough for you anyway, so I'm going to go off to do my own thing.
But I haven't yet seen any indication that she's really liberating herself in those kinds of ways. But there is also a question about whether she genuinely is that thing. I mean, I think Bernie Sanders grew up, I believe, reasonably poor. His upbringing, steeped in an economic left, has in some ways a very odd political biography being in Burlington, Vermont and so on. But he's been banging on about those things for decades. I mean, you look at a speech that he held as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, and it sounds exactly like what he was talking about in 2016. And part of that authenticity, of course, was what made up his appeal.
AOC went to a pretty affluent high school. She was an undergraduate at Boston University. It was not the most elite university in the country, but certainly a very good school. Yes, she worked as a bartender for a while, while being very active in the DSA politics of New York City. And then at a very early age she went into Congress. Despite all of her political talents, I don't know how authentically she can speak to that kind of working-class economic populism rather than markers of that more identitarian, elite discourse.
Longwell: Let me just give you an example—Kyrsten Sinema is somebody who went full spectrum. Kyrsten Sinema was a queer, radical person who got so far to the center that the Democrats basically got rid of her. I think that it was both too much too fast, and, I think, wrong for the moment. Here's what I think happened. I was always interested in Kyrsten Sinema's political evolution in that I think it was born of the true experience of trying to find common ground with Republicans. Now, it came at a time when people were not that interested in finding common ground with Republicans, and so that was no good.
I’ve watched AOC. And look, AOC is not for me. I'm looking for a centrist Democrat who focuses on the economy and figures out how to leave a lot of the cultural stuff behind. But I also recognize, as I listen to voters, the desperation for somebody that they feel connected to and—this is the most important thing—who does not sound like a regular politician. There is something about AOC and her ability to communicate with people that is lightyears ahead of just about every other Democrat. There's a reason she's drawing these enormous crowds out there with Bernie right now.
I just did a bunch of focus groups with Democrats where we separated them into two groups, groups of Democrats who wanted the party to be more moderate and groups of Democrats who wanted the party to be more progressive, and listened to both. It turns out that, in this moment, the appetite for being more moderate or more progressive was much more muted than simply being more aggressive. What voters want on the Democratic side is somebody who's going to fight Trump. I think that this fighting can easily become a stand-in for, I can fight Trump and that shows you that I can fight for you, which is what people want, and is one of the things people like about Trump, this idea that he fights for them. Look, I'm not wild about the fact that we've gotten to a place in our politics where wanting somebody to fight is the dominant factor, but man, is it the thing that I hear over and over again.
One last point about swing voters is that what it means right now to be a swingy-ish voter has to do with a segment of voters that we call often low information. What I mean by low information is that they do not watch the news at night, they're not like, what is the latest twist and turn about the Supreme Court and how it's ruling on the Abrego Garcia case? They're not tapped into politics that much. However, they are awash in information. Low information does not mean that they don't have information. They might be really interested in fitness and they might be really interested in other cultural things, TV, movies, whatever. Because all of that is now infused with politics, they’re still getting political information.
So there's this swingy type of voter that I think probably voted for Democrats before now, and fitness or even wellness is a really easy link. This is where you get the relationship between MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again, RFK-type Democrats who are now very much red-pilled. This is now a swingier part of the electorate where they're saying, I want red dye number three out and I want to eat organic and I don't like people telling me that I have to have a vaccine. These people aren’t Republican on policy by any stretch of the imagination—they might have been more on the left, but vibe-wise, culture-wise, red pill-wise, they are now voting for Trump. I think who those people vote for in the future is entirely up for grabs because they are not ideological.
Mounk: How are they processing what's happening with Trump so far? Are they sort of tuned out and they haven't really moved particularly? Are they seeing signs of things that they like?
Longwell: There's things that worry them, but they're still at the fingers crossed stage. They're like waiting to see, I don't know, are we going to get red dye number whatever out of all of our food? Also, to be clear, here's where they become sort of apathetic when Trump's in charge, because a lot of what red pills them is opposition to modern Democratic culture. So right now they're kind of like, I don't know, I'm in wait-and-see mode, because they're not ready to say, yeah, let's move on from him. Let's do something different. But they're also like, I don't know, this doesn't seem great. I think that there's a fair amount of this doesn't seem great going on with the voters, but not what I think Democrats wish was happening, which is massive regret for voting for Trump. There's a lot of people saying, this is not great. There's not a lot of people being like, boy, I wish I'd voted for Kamala Harris.
Mounk: I'm going to use the fact that you just said the word Democrats to make an elegant bridge back to that topic. So you were saying that there's no logical debate about whether people want Democrats to moderate or whether they want Democrats to become more progressive. And that is obviously an important debate, particularly in sort of high information, left of center circles. There's a lot of competing position papers trying to persuade rank and file Democrats that in order to win the midterms, in order to be competitive in 2028, they have to do A or B or C. You're saying that what you're actually seeing from voters is something that's less ideological and just, Trump is doing terrible things, we just want champions who are going to stand up for us against Trump.
Longwell: Yes, that’s broadly right. I wondered whether people would see what Cory Booker did, making his 25 hour speech on the floor, as performative nonsense that doesn't really get you anywhere or whether they would like it. And Democrats were pumped about Cory Booker. Cory Booker and AOC are not the same, but you heard the same level of enthusiasm for people who were going to go out there and do something.
Senator Chris Van Hollen is not somebody who is a household name. He's not somebody Democrats were that interested in. But they want to see people who are going to stand on principle. Right now, at this moment, they don't care which principle. Just stand up to what Trump is doing, because they see it as entirely lawless. They're tired of getting run over by Republicans. They want people who can win and they want people who are going to fight. I think they're becoming increasingly—and I think Republicans did this too—policy agnostic and much more focused on who's going to take swings for my value set, even if their value set isn't like a linear set of policies. It's something a little more ineffable than that.
That's what you hear from Democrats, which I think is interesting because I, of course, am invested in the should Democrats be more moderate or should they be more progressive debate. I would like them to be more moderate. I think they should be more moderate in order to win. However, it's funny that you hear annoyance from voters, like you hear moderates being annoyed because we've gone too far left. We're being too progressive. You'll really get a lot of people talking about the trans stuff or that DEI has gone too far. But then the progressives are annoyed with the moderates too.
This is where I think AOC comes in. One of the reasons I've been thinking about her so much is that she's filling a vacuum that voters are desperate for someone to fill. I'm nervous about that because what you don't want is for the face of the pushback against Trump to be so progressive that actually it continues to turn off all the moderate voters that they need to win to build a sufficient governing coalition or a winning political coalition.
Mounk: This is where I guess I'm trying to parse my feelings about the very interesting facts that you present to us. Because of course, Democrats have shrunk as a coalition. The people who we're talking about as Democrats in these focus groups are now a clear minority of the electorate. In order to win, we certainly need to mobilize these people, but also to add a lot of those swing voter groups that we were talking about earlier. Now I think in principle, the instinct that these Democratic voters have is the correct one, which is to say, Donald Trump is doing things that are very concerning. What we need to do is to stop him from doing those things. We need to stop him from destroying the American and the global economy. We need to stop him from expanding executive power in ways that go clearly against the Constitution. And what we want is just some life in the damn Democratic Party. We want to see some people take the fight to him. I think that's a perfectly reasonable and appropriate sentiment under these political circumstances.
Now, in the best kind of scenario, that might allow us to sideline some of the more extreme and ideological ideas and positions that have come to characterize the Democratic Party. Rather than talking about all of these things, we can focus on the bad things Trump is doing, and that can be a way to sidestep them. There would be a good way for that to happen. And perhaps it might allow a more moderate Democrat like Abigail Spanberger to rise to the front of the opposition to Trump and perhaps become the nominee in 2028.
Of course, the danger is very much in the other direction, which is to say that Democrats will never actually deal with some of the positions which the people in these focus groups may be able to ignore and say, well, I don't love our party stance on gender reassignment surgeries for 13 year olds, but I'm much more focused on Trump. Because Democrats are not going to deal with some of those positions, it's going to make it easy for a lot of the swing voters to say, no, the Democrats haven't learned, they're not willing to course correct on that. I’m worried that some of the politicians within the Democratic coalition that might be best suited, in part because they generally have some political talents, to sort of turn themselves into the most visible spokespeople of resistance are ones that also are quite ideologically committed to the kind of policy positions, to the kind of cultural language that is going to continue to put those swing voters off.
So I worry when I hear you or Nate Silver say that AOC is this very talented politician who has a very real chance of getting the 2028 Democratic Party nomination. I worry when I hear Tim Walz say in a televised town hall, the real problem is that we haven't explained DEI and wokeness and all of these policies to people and we actually have to double down on our support of those things, because while respondents in these Democratic focus groups may not be so concerned about those things, I just don't think that’s likely to be enough to build a broad coalition that actually beats Republicans in 2028.
Longwell: You and me both, but here's the deal. First of all, the good news is that honestly, I think if Pete Buttigieg—with all his technocratic whatever, and his not-super-progressiveness—just got out there and was swinging every day at Trump, he would rise to the top. What I would like to see is more of the people who are sort of moderates on policy become more aggressive in their opposition to Trump. Instead, you're getting a really perverse political instinct by Gretchen Whitmer or by Gavin Newsom. They're doing things like, well, I'm going to go work with Trump. Or, I'm going to sit down with Charlie Kirk. Or, I'm going to explain why the far left is wrong about a couple things like trans sports—and I'm going to do it with Charlie Kirk.
Instead of fighting, they're giving cover to the worst instincts and worst players of the opposition, and that is no good—both from a voter standpoint and from a how do you win? standpoint. Gavin Newsom has had a catastrophic six months ever since the wildfire and going all the way to the Charlie Kirk podcast. I think he is doing the exact wrong thing at this moment. I think that Gretchen Whitmer, what she did in the Oval Office—not just covering her face, but going there, period, putting up the thing about tariffs at a time when Trump was imploding—those political instincts are going to get people nowhere. I think the opportunity is for somebody who has more moderate positions to become an aggressive fighter against Trump. Otherwise, progressives who are more temperamentally suited to being outraged about everything will fill the vacuum.
Mounk: So one point is that ideally it would be somebody who is relatively moderate on policy issues and who can course correct on some of the big issues that have tanked Democrats in the past—but who does so not by sitting down with Charlie Kirk on a podcast. Instead, by being very present in the media explaining why it is that we should be very concerned about what Trump is doing without letting themselves be defined in this extremely culturally progressive way. If somebody like Pete Buttigieg were to be much more present in the media at the moment, he might be the kind of figure that you have in mind.
Another question for us is about style. And here I think that we're in danger of running two quite different things together. One is how principled, how vociferous, how present in the media is your opposition to some of the things that Trump is doing? The other is what kind of tone do you take? And I've been fascinated by the sort of energy around people like Jasmine Crockett, who very explicitly wanted to defy the Obama-era idea of when they go low, we go high, saying, no, when they go low, we go lower. Calling, for example, the governor of Texas, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels,” and these other sort of very personalized insults against Republicans.
I presume that there's a way to take the fight to Trump in a way that doesn't go down the “dark woke” stylistic avenue. That there's another way, perhaps much more like what Cory Booker did on the floor of the Senate, in which you had perfect decorum. I didn't watch all 25 hours of it, but I didn't see any clips of him swearing or doing anything untoward.
Longwell: I've always felt like this about Trump, which is the idea of, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you, like as you're fighting the monster, be very careful not to become the monster. I think Democrats run a real risk of that. Part of the problem right now is that people are desperate for messengers, they're desperate for people to be out there. But you basically have the people with the worst message being the only ones willing to be messengers right now. And so that's when I say there's an opportunity. A lot of the people that I'm talking about who are temperamental moderates, they find themselves struggling to balance their temperamental moderation with taking the fight to Trump.
It is a perfect time to do that. It is a perfect time for Elissa Slotkin to be somebody who goes hard at Trump, and uses it as an expression of her moderation, an expression of her normalcy, to talk about how abnormal and how extreme Donald Trump is and how normal she is by example not to match extremism with extremism, but to say, you can fight hard. This is where I think politicians are ill-suited, honestly at this moment, and voters think they are too. They're not in the mood for regular politicians. But when you ask people in the groups who they're interested in, a lot of people say AOC, a lot of people say Mark Cuban. And it’s their idea of Mark Cuban—they don't know Mark Cuban that well, they don't know what his policies are. They know that he too is famous, he too is a business person, he too has been out there being critical of Trump and it seems like he can talk to people normally. And like that's what they want.
The Democrats have had the exact wrong instinct, both politically, they do not go out and message. They do not go out and argue and put out ideas and run aggressively. And their failure to do so means that they don't get the reps in. They don't get the scrutiny. They don't get the opportunity to fail. This was one of Kamala Harris’ major, major problems. And if Joe Biden had been forced to be out there all the time, everybody would have known. Now granted, I mean, I knew and voters knew how infirm he was, how not up for the moment he was. The voters had been telling me for years, the guy's too old. I think he's sick. I'm sure he's sick. He has dementia. This was not Republicans, it was Democrats. Okay. And for some reason, elites couldn't get their heads around this very simple prospect.
If he wants to do this, Mark Cuban should be out there every day. Then you have the added benefit not only of being a good messenger and of raising your profile but also you're getting better all the time and that's why you've got to go everywhere. You don't have to just build your own safe media ecosystem, but also to go into the right wing media ecosystem and go fight with them to sharpen your skills. I'm tired of us having to sit here and pick apart somebody's political instincts when their political instincts should be on full display. They should be giving us a full meal of who they are to pick apart. And that is actually how you're going to win now in this environment.
Mounk: That's very interesting. Just go out in all of the media environments. And of course, I know there's been this attempt by a lot of Democrats and sort of progressive groups and foundations and so on to reshape the media ecosystem because they're really worried that places like Joe Rogan now have quite firmly swung behind Trump. And so they are saying we need a democratic Joe Rogan. I heard you use a good line about this recently. Who was the democratic Joe Rogan in the past, Sarah?
Longwell: Joe Rogan! Joe Rogan was the Democrats’ Joe Rogan. And Elon Musk. If you look at Trump, Musk, Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., if you go back 10 years, then all of them were Democrats, all of them. Like so many of our major political figures, they were Democrats. They weren't Republicans. The shift has been enormous. The upending of the political structure has been enormous. Democrats are still dealing with the political environment like everything's just like normal and linear and whatever. No, it's not. And you know what? I'm tired of all of us having to sit around and say, well, what should the message be? And what about this politician or that? The person should show themselves. They should show themselves because they are driven by passion, and have a view of the world and they know how to speak to it authentically and so they'll go to everybody. Leaders show themselves.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sarah Longwell discuss what’s missing from the Democratic Party, who could be the next Democratic presidential candidate—and what might happen at the Republican primaries in 2028. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
