Democracy is a conversation. In the United States, and every other democracy, we’re continually talking with one another about what issues deserve our attention, what our nation stands for, and what we want from our government. Politicians, parties, and media organizations compete for attention by telling compelling stories. This marketplace of ideas offers citizens and voters a wide selection of storylines and solutions. But even when free speech is protected, that doesn’t mean everyone is equally skilled at crafting compelling narratives. In this conversation, taped in front of a live audience, Sarah Longwell joins host Alex Lovit to describe why pro-democracy advocates are losing the messaging war and what they can do to relate to the issues and values voters care about most. Sarah Longwell is the publisher of The Bulwark, which she cofounded in 2019, and a Charles F. Kettering Foundation senior fellow. She regularly conducts focus groups with voters across the political spectrum and hosts the podcast The Focus Group. This conversation was recorded live on June 8 during The Democracy Group’s annual convening at the University of Southern California’s Capital Campus in Washington, DC. https://substack.com/@sarahlongwell https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/how-to-eat-an-elephant-9781250464170/
Sarah Longwell:
This is the tough thing for the people in this room to grapple with, and I had to grapple with it, and now I think about things very differently. You want democracy to matter to Americans. You want the idea, I want the idea, that Trump has a 1776 slush fund to matter to Americans. I was doing focus groups and we asked about the slush fund and two people knew about it. It's not what people follow.
Alex Lovit:
If you're listening to this, you probably care about democracy, but what does that mean, and how much do American voters care about it? Sarah Longwell, my guest in this episode, has been thinking about those questions for a long time, and she hasn't just been thinking about what voters care about. She's been asking them, in focus groups she's been holding for years with voters across the country, and she says there's a dangerous gap between the people trying to save our democracy and the people living in it. That doesn't mean Americans don't care about democracy. We don't all understand or agree on what that word means, but Americans do care about the elements of democracy, like freedom and representative government, and they also care about gas prices, health insurance, and how much they're spending at the grocery store. Sarah thinks it's important for politicians to uphold democratic values, but she says that fighting for democracy today means learning how to speak the same language as American voters.
You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone, and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. Sarah Longwell is the founder and publisher of the news and opinion website The Bulwark. She hosts the Focus Group podcast and is the executive director of Defending Democracy Together. She's also a Kettering Foundation senior fellow. This episode was recorded live at the University of Southern California's capital campus in Washington DC as part of the annual convening of The Democracy Group, the podcast network that The Context is a part of. As you'll hear, Sarah thrives in front of a crowd and she had a lot to say. I hope you enjoy this as much as the audience did.
Hi, Sarah. How are you?
Sarah Longwell:
Hey, man.
Alex Lovit:
I have a few questions for you, and we'll work our way up to, how do we save democracy? I thought we could start with some questions about public opinion. That's something you know really well. You're doing all these focus groups. You've got your finger on the pulse, and so I wanted to start by polling the audience here and asking, raise your hand if you agree with the following statement. The Trump administration has authoritarian tendencies that are a threat to American democracy. Okay, so in the audience, I would say, maybe not unanimous, but 80, 90%. Sarah, you did not raise your hand. Do you not agree with the statement?
Sarah Longwell:
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, but what I was thinking of is that what you just conducted is a poll and what I do are focus groups, and so if what we were doing was what I do, I would ask each of you follow-ups to that question, but I would start by saying, "How do you think things are going in the country?" Just everybody shout it out.
Audience Member:
Awful.
Sarah Longwell:
You sound like all the focus groups I do. Across the political spectrum, doesn't matter. Did you want me to just rip, or do you have a question, there?
Alex Lovit:
Well, I did have a follow-up, here. How does this differ from your focus groups, and what should maybe people in this room know about how average Americans are thinking about these ideas of democracy and authoritarianism?
Sarah Longwell:
Yeah. I mean, the first one is that if you put a poll question out and you ask people, "How do you think about democracy?" Or if you said, "Do you think democracy's under threat?" Okay, you will get 70% of people, maybe two-thirds of the country, that'll say, "Yeah, I think that." That actually doesn't tell you that much, though, because half of that group thinks that democracy is under threat because the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and the other half think it's under threat because Donald Trump lied about the elections being stolen, and then they tried to overturn an election by siccing a mob on the Capitol. This I think is actually a pretty good window into voters, in that oftentimes they might all think something where it sounds like they agree with each other, but actually, the world that they're living in or the context that they're talking about is radically different.
I will say, on a question like, "How do you think things are going in the country?" The vast majority of people are aligned that things are not going well, and then it's really a matter of ... I like this question at the beginning of focus groups because it's one of the few times where you can organically figure out what is on people's minds without putting it there yourself. Right? If you say to somebody, "How do you think things are going in terms of democracy?" All right, well, now you've framed it up for them, but when I say, "How do you think things are going in the country?" Almost never does somebody begin their answer with, "It's bad because I feel like we're losing our democracy," or, "It's bad because I think the authoritarians are taking over."
Now, there might be particular curated groups of Democrats who would talk like that, but the vast majority of voters say, "Bad, gas prices are too high, the cost of things in the grocery store is too high, I lost my health insurance, I lost my job, I'm worried about AI." They will name their anxieties upfront, and the average person's anxieties do not include democracy as a concept, which is why when I'm talking to legislators, I sort of reject the notion that there are magic words or exact framings, but the one place where I kind of ... Because, this is what consultants sell to candidates. "Just say freedom, just say innovation," and you're like, "Okay," but without the context of why you're saying that and without policies that reflect that over and over, the magic word thing is kind of meaningless, but I do encourage legislators to stop talking about democracy and to start talking about America, because democracy for voters is just the thing we do here. It's the air we breathe, it's the water we swim in, because if you ask people, "What does democracy mean to you?" They're going to say something specific. They're going to say voting. They're going to say free speech.
You go up a little bit, you might get some people say checks and balances. That one comes in decently, but they're not going to talk about how American democracy relates to other democracies across the world. I mean, like I said, there are college educated, and/or, especially if you do Democratic groups, you will often get above college. Then, you're in a different ... They read the last New Yorker article, they're reading The Atlantic, they're going to tell you things that sound normal to the people in this room, but the number one reason I started doing focus groups is because I had spent a ton of time in rooms like this at the conservative think tanks around DC or at Atlantic Council, or anything talking about education reform, and it doesn't matter because none of those things were what voters were talking about.
When Donald Trump got elected, I was like, "Okay, well, we've got to figure out how to primary Trump," because I was trying to save the Republican Party, and I started to do focus groups, because I was talking to different Republicans who were considering primarying Trump. This is 2018, but they all wanted to know, "Can I win? If I did this, could I not embarrass myself?" I flew to New Hampshire and I started doing focus groups, and I listened to the voters, and I flew back, and I was like, "Yeah, you can't run for president, there's no path here," because the voters wanted Trump.
Now, a lot of people will say voters wanted authoritarianism, or they feel like voters wanted authoritarianism, but voters don't want authoritarianism, and in fact, I would hazard ... In fact, I've done this, where we've asked voters, "Who would you consider an authoritarian?" If you're a Democrat, you'll say Trump, but if you're a Republican, you'll say Hillary Clinton or you'll say Joe Biden or you'll say Kamala Harris. Democracy is polarized the same way everything else is polarized, and so the reason I like doing the focus group so much is that it grounds you at the level where the American voters are really talking, and they're just not talking about the conversations we are having here, and that led me to realize ... The scales from my eyes moment, listening to these voters wasn't just, "Oh, we can't primary Trump." It was, "We're not even having conversations that relate to these people's lives."
There's no way for me to understand what is happening in politics. Lots of people do this. We're like, "Well, DC, we're a swamp, we're a bubble, whatever," but it is true that the more you are in DC sort of doing the thing of politics, the further you are getting from the people that are supposed to be served and governed by the decisions that you're making here, and I do think that that gap is real, and it took me sitting in front of voters day in and day out to realize how distant the way they talked was from the people I was surrounded by in kind of the think tank academic world, and people who read The Atlantic and The Weekly Standard.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so you're saying voters don't talk a lot about democracy, at least when you just ask them how the country's going, but you care a lot about democracy. You care enough that you've made some pretty significant career shifts. Is it just a translation problem?
Sarah Longwell:
Well, to say that they don't talk about democracy doesn't mean that they don't care about the tenets of democracy. They care that we have the right to vote. They care that we have the freedom of speech. The book that I'm writing, How to Eat an Elephant One Voter at a Time, is a book about persuasion and messaging, and I'll give you this as an example. If you think about the 2024 election, Kamala Harris was talking about democracy. Elon Musk and Donald Trump were talking about free speech. The specificity of the tenets of democracy are what voters are attached to. They are attached to the rule of law. They are attached to fairness and free speech and checks and balances, but they're not attached ... Democracy is something that could apply to any country. The American liberal democracy that we do here is what voters understand sort of in their bones, and so you have to talk with that specificity about it.
I think, yeah, look, I quit my job as a Republican. I was a senior vice president at a Republican communications firm. I was the board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, which is the LGBT Republican group. They would never put the QIA+ on there. I had been doing Republican stuff. I'd spent three years at a conservative think tank called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Got pretty famous recently, because that is where JD Vance likes to go to talk now about his post-liberal view of the world, which is not what we talked about when I was there, or not how we talked when I was there, because things are super different, but I did. I quit my job, I started my own company, and then I started The Bulwark, which is a media company that's about all pro-democracy stuff. I built Republican Voters Against Trump and Republicans for the Rule of Law, and they are all ...
I come from a messaging and communications background, but I do think, and I hold this sincerely, I think that we are as a country under-reacting to Trump. I think that the damage that is being done right now is going to be very difficult to undo, and I'm talking about things ... You can rebuild an institution. It's not easy, but you can do it. We could rebuild the FBI, eventually. International trust, the brand of the United States of America as a country that you can rely on, who you can take seriously when they say they're going to do something, who's not going to act wantonly before we go bomb people, alienating our allies, these are not things that can be just put back together by a next administration. Right? We are now in a position where ... Sometimes people say this about The Bulwark. They're like, "Well, what are you guys going to do after Trump?" Like, what are you talking about? "Oh, is the conversation over?"
No, the amount of conversation that we're going to have to have, that relates to, how do you seek accountability when you've now watched an administration break the law like this? How do you structure a government that was basically on the honor system, was governed by a lot of norms, where some of which is going to have to be codified into law, how are you going to deal with the fact that voters really wanted Trump, or at least a lot of voters liked that Trump ignores Congress and just does stuff, because they're so desperate for action out of legislation? How are we going to build a country and a democracy that's more responsive to voters and what they want. Trump has raised a lot more questions for America than he has solved anything. Voters were asking for something different. So he is the barbaric yap of a country that wanted some different things. I don't think they've gotten those things that they've wanted, but the wanting is still there and we are going to have to figure out how to address that through Democratic means. I think about this all the time. In the book, I have a few solutions for how Democrats win sort of sustained electoral victories.
And I don't know that there's going to be will to do these things, but it's actually pretty simple. Voters say the same thing across the political spectrum. They want their elected officials to focus on their material wellbeing. And so if you're having a conversation about democracy and you're not talking to people about how much money they make, what kind of job they're going to have, how they're going to pay for health insurance, how they're going to put their kids through college, they're like, "What are you talking about? This doesn't matter to me. It is not the thing that keeps me up at night."
So one, focusing on the material concerns of the electorate and that's all kinds of things. That is education, that's healthcare, that is their gas prices, their grocery prices. It is thinking holistically, it's their jobs. That's the biggest thing. Whenever James Carville or anybody else says, "It's the economy, stupid." It's really the economy, stupid. That is what voters care about and you better be talking about that stuff all the time. The second thing is voters want to feel safe. And so when Democrats talk about defunding the police or not having a secure border, that is alienating to a whole bunch of Americans who feel unsafe at the idea that the border is open or that the police aren't going to be there to take their calls.
And so I cannot tell you how far away Democrats are from the average American who's like, "No, I would like police, please. I would like secure borders, please." However, they do not want ICE agents roaming the streets, shooting people or deporting citizens to foreign gulags. Trump has gone way too far on this and the voters don't like it. I hear this in the focus groups all the time. They say, "Well, he said he was just going to deport criminals, but these aren't criminals." Voters like the idea of criminals being deported. They don't like the idea of American citizens or people who haven't done anything wrong, or people who've been here for 20 years and even if their paperwork's not quite correct, come on. What are you going to go after that grandpa? That's how Americans feel.
They also really like immigrants. They like people coming here. They like the idea that America is a place that is welcoming to immigrants, but they have one caveat and they all say the same thing. They have to come the right way. Now interesting fact about Americans. They've never gone through the immigration system. They have no idea what it means to come the right way. They assume it's simple. I don't know. They're like, "Well, all my ancestors did it." And you're like, "Yeah, they just came over on a boat. Someone put a piece of paper in front of them and they walked away and maybe they got a shot in the arm." That's not what it's like now. It takes like 18 years and it's a ton of money. And do you think people would be running across the border with people shooting at them if we made it easy? They'd rather do that than the level of paperwork we're requiring.
And so comprehensive immigration reform, everybody just kind of is like, "Well, we can't do it, or they tried it." I think the will is there among Americans, if we could get legislators to try that again because it is the clearest thing where the extremes on both sides just are completely out of touch where the vast majority of Americans are. Okay. So material wellbeing, they got to feel safe. People can't access compassion when they feel under threat, which is why when Trump talks about immigration, he doesn't just talk about people coming illegally. He's formed a threat cluster altogether. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.
This is about making you feel like they're going to take my job and they're bringing the fentanyl, which by the way, fentanyl isn't really an immigration thing. It's coming through the ports. A lot of Chinese stuff. But Americans don't know this. And so they wrap it all into one big threat cluster that makes them feel unsafe, which means they can't access their compassion. It's the same way. Criminal justice reform, if they feel safe, they're like, yes, we should think about fewer ... We can release people after 10 years when they've paid their debts to society. If you're in a high crime environment like we've been through COVID, people get like this and they're like, no, no criminal justice reform. More cops, you say defund the police. What's wrong with you? Okay. So those are the two things, feeling safe, material wellbeing.
Third thing, this is the one that gets tougher, especially in highly educated rooms of elites, which is the American people really want everyone to stop using pronouns to stop ... they do say just sort of like woke DEI, blah, blah. We know that those are buzzwords, but the voters talk about them a lot and it's more about a statement of prioritization. The frustration with the voters is that they're like I don't care if gay people get married. I want trans people like A-okay, whatever you want to do. But do we have to talk about it all the time because we have this problems over here with the economy. And I do think this is hard, especially for a lot of people who are drawn into politics over social issues, which is especially a lot of young people.
It's hard for them to hear that the voters are not saying, "I'm mad about these things," especially sort of the swinger voters. On the right, the trans stuff is just the new gay marriage thing, right? It's the new thing to sort of terrify your grandmother. People and the folks used to be like, "Do you know the kids are using litter boxes in schools because they identify as cats?" And you're just like, "Yeah, that's not a real thing that's happening." But they've leveled up somewhere. Someone told them it was like in a chain email with 17,000 things below it. And so there's some of that, but mostly it's this sort of confusing alien, what is a they/them? Why are we talking about this? They/them is confused with trans, is confused with sports, whose rights are confused with the sports. And for an average person from West Virginia, they're just like, "I don't want any of that."
And even for a Democrat or a swing voter, I hear a lot of, I just remember this woman from Atlanta, her story was something, but her husband had died of COVID, and she was Black, and she was now married to a woman, and she was like, "I am here in the gay Mecca, but the trans stuff is too much." And I remember listening to her and thinking like, "When you've lost this woman, you're in tough territory." And I'll give you the corollary right now for Republicans. It's about the contrast. When the American people want you focused on their material wellbeing and you're focused on a ballroom or an arch, it's not that Americans are like, "I care that much about the arch." They don't. They don't live here. It's not that annoying to them. They don't care if Trump's name's on the Kennedy Center, but they do care that he's focused on that instead of focused on lowering their grocery prices and dealing with their material wellbeing.
And so it's the same thing with a lot of the other stuff where they're like, "This feels like not a priority for my life, so why do we talk about it so much?" And so it's those three things. Now, there's the Israel-Palestine of it all, which is sort of a newer issue that I do deal with in the book, but has kind of come on fast here at the end. But think about something like AI. AI goes right to this. Why do voters dislike the gerontocracy? Why do they think our legislators are too old? In part because they think the issues that they're worried about right now, they're like, "What is the crypto thing that's happening? Is AI going to take my job? Is it going to take my kids' job? Are robots going to rule the world?" They want legislators who are focused on those things and those anxieties and when they're focused on these other things that feel like they apply to a very limited number of people, voters are bothered by that.
But I mean, the problem is what I just laid out for you, focus on people's material wellbeing, keep them safe, which means immigration and police and then deprioritize some of the social stuff. It doesn't sound exactly like what Democrats talk about, but there's ways to get at this without sounding like Republicans. Just start from the idea that we should have a secure border and then talk about how we're going to make sure that we find a way to know who's in the country, but that we welcome immigrants here. We want more immigrants here. Our economy needs it. It's better for you, the American. You could do that. I think that people have decided that Americans just hate immigrants and I don't think that's right. Some do, and I do think this is where you get into Trump's base that is immovable and also, and this is a key part, also is there almost entirely for Trump.
And this is where a lot of the opportunity lies. Trump spent the last 10 years teaching Republican voters to hate the Republican Party and love him. It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to exist in a post-Trump environment. They don't know who they are without him because it is a cult of personality now. The MAGA establishment is just people who are like, "I don't know whatever Trump says, we're doing." It's like tariffs, does that fly in the face of conservative economic policy for the last hundred years? Yes. Okay, we're going to do it. Was character the most important thing that we all cared about? Did we talk about it all the time? Were a thousand books written about it? Yes. Do we care about character anymore? No, not really.
Do we like Russia now? Maybe we like Russia now. Do we like them more than our Democratic allies in Ukraine? Probably. The Republican Party doesn't have a thesis anymore. It used to. It used to have a very clear thesis. Limited government, free markets, American leadership in the world, and it was never for me but some social traditional family values stuff. But that was what it was. Who is it going to be in a post-Trump world? And this is where Democrats have the opportunity to sort of reinvent themselves and pull in a majority of people if they could just push a little bit in on the, "I understand you need to be safe. I understand we've got to focus on your material wellbeing. You want jobs, you want health insurance that's inexpensive. You don't know how to afford childcare."
And to do that without becoming sloppilists is a bit of an issue. I'm not super confident in Democrats right now that they're going to get there, but I do think that is the test. That is the way that you build the biggest, broadest electoral coalition at a time when the Republican Party hopefully ends up in the wilderness because it has no idea who it is. I'm sorry, did you have another question?
Alex Lovit:
No, that's great. Well, so you have a lot of advice about messaging, what stories should be told, what issues should be focused on, what values should be focused on. A lot of that advice is for the Democratic Party, it sounds like. Who else do you hope would take your advice?
Sarah Longwell:
Oh, well, I mean, I'd love if Republicans did, but I'm not holding my breath on that. I mean, look, in the book I talk about the Pro-Democracy Coalition and I basically say ... Because when I was starting out in this space, I had been a Republican my whole life and so it wasn't just easy for me to be like, "Hey, Democrats, you want to hang out now?" So there's a democracy space, and they were eager to have Republicans be part of the democracy space. Everybody was like, "Well, let's have a third party." And I was like, "We got enough for a fun party, but we don't have enough for a political party. They're not enough of us."
And this is where the book that I wrote, I do not argue from preference because if I argued from preference, I would be like, "All voters should be socially liberal and fiscally responsible." And everybody's like, "Yeah, we want the reverse of that. We'd like us to be fiscally profligate and socially moderate." And I'm like, "All right, well, we're going in a different direction for me." But I basically in doing a lot of the third party research to see if we could mount a third party or whatever, you can't, you can't.
The thing about the political parties that I learned through this whole process is they are insufficiently strong. They are weak enough that they can be hijacked by people who are not part of the party. Trump can hijack the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders came very close to taking over the Democratic Party, and the parties are moving more than in those directions. On the other hand, the parties are too strong to just disrupt. You can't just have a third party. You do end up in spoiler territory just about everywhere you go. It's everybody's favorite place to go. Well, aren't there more independents than there are any other political affiliation? Yeah, you sit down a focus group of eight independents. You get eight different political positions. They are not one moderate coalition. Some of them are independents because they think the party should be more left. Some think the party should be more right. Some are more centrist. Mostly though, they're just a weird salad of nonlinear thoughts and preferences, which is much more common. Or they're just not joiners. They're just like, "Both parties suck," pox on both their houses.
But you need political parties as an organizing tool, so you're stuck. This is one of the things that was really hard for me to come to terms with this, especially when you're younger, you're like, "Nah man, we can reimagine this whole thing." And you really try to break it and you go, "This is a very durable system." And so you say, "Okay." So when I write about the Pro-Democracy Coalition, I do write about it in terms of the Democrats being the organizing vehicle for that.
And I am hopeful that Democrats want to be the organizing vehicle of the Pro-Democracy Coalition. Lately, I have become a little bit concerned, because there is a real insurgence on the far left of the Hassan Piker wing of the left. And these are people who would not endorse Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the same. They'll treat Israel the same. They'll treat the Israel-Palestine issue the same. It's tough. It's tough. And they're putting up candidates now. That's where our boy, Graham Platner, came from, and he might lose that Senate seat. Anyway, the point is, I mostly think of the Democratic Party as the coalition, but to get the big broad coalition, to deliver those sustained electoral defeats, you are taking sort of those left-leaning independents, and then a lot of these swing voters who, I'll just run through a number of them, Hispanics, young people, the double haters, the red pilled.
Red pills are your Joe Rogans and Elon Musks. They used to be Democrats, and now because of the woke stuff, this is what they would say, these aren't my words, these are theirs, they've been pushed into the more right-wing ecosystem where they complain about woke stuff. There's a bunch of swing groups, some of which can be clawed back. You're already seeing it. Young voters abandoning Trump at a very high rate. One of the things about young voters that was crazy is, during the 2024 election we resurfaced and put on TikTok the Access Hollywood tape. And all it was, was a bunch of kids on TikTok being like, "I can't believe he said that." This is brand new information, because if you think about 10 years of Trump, think about your 12-year-old is 22 now, and Donald Trump has been their entire life, and they do not see him as an aberration.
They see him as politics as they've grown up in it. And so you can see how a bunch of those people, especially young people are like, "Well, this guy is more fun than the other one. And Joe Biden is so old and Kamala Harris seems eugh. And so Trump, he seems funny." And they drink, and he talks about Arnold Palmer's special parts or whatever on stage. You don't even know what I'm talking about right now, but this is the thing that happened where he just started talking about Arnold Palmer's manhood for no reason. Nobody's talking. Remember he was just on stage and he swayed for 20 minutes, and who competes with that in a normal political environment? How are we supposed to have a normal conversation? So you are hoping you can pull in some of those center right folks, a lot of these swing voters and do a root and branch operation in the post-Trump environment.
But I will say this, it is not enough to win in 2026, and it is not enough to win in 2028, but I will say it is necessary to do both those things. It is necessary, but insufficient to changing the long-term trajectory of the country. And so to answer what I think was a question a million years ago about why democracy is fundamentally important to me is, I do think... And people are obviously over the "most important election of our lifetime." It's not that I think everyone is just the most important of our lifetime. It's that I think we're teetering and have been into something that could get unrecoverable if we're not able to shift the moment. And so for me, I think that the most important thing that we can do is ensure that Donald Trump's second term is a failure, is perceived to be a failure by the American people.
So I talk about something, started calling it the Bush-line. I got made fun of, so I'm going to call it the W-line. But George W. Bush left office at 32%. I graduated from college in 2002, and it was the year between 9/11 and when we went into Iraq. When I graduated from college, George W. Bush's approval rating was 76%, because we were in the post 9/11 environment, he was throwing out pitches at the Yankee game. America still rallied behind its leaders during times of crisis, and America was unified. But by the time he left office in 2008, he was at 32%. We were in a protracted war, and we were in an economic... We were going into a recession. The bottom was falling out, right? That sounds familiar.
And so if you can get Trump, I think, below that 32%, and he's down to his core base who, by the way, many of whom arrived in politics for Donald Trump specifically. They were not involved before Donald Trump got here. And I don't know that they'll stay involved after he is gone, because there's just not a lot of people who have the kind of... I mean, Donald Trump, I just made a video about this. The Apprentice ran for 14 seasons, 17 seasons if you count Celebrity Apprentice and the ones where he gave it to Arnold Schwarzenegger for a little bit. He gave it to Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he was going to run for president. 14 years he's in people's living rooms, playing the act of a carefully curated businessman. Why do voters all the time... You know why they voted for Trump in 2024? Because they were like, "I think he'll do better things for the economy, because he's a businessman." The economy was good before COVID hit. Okay. So those people had this deep para-social relationship with him. Feel like they know him. He's omnipresent in the culture.
You think JD Vance has that kind of relationship with voters? No. The Republican voters, they're like, "Eh, JD Vance." Some people are like, "Eh, he's probably the guy," but they're not enthusiastic. You know who these sound... The voters sound about JD Vance the exact same way they vote. They sounded about Ron DeSantis where they were like, "He seems good, but he's a regular politician." And man, once they tell you that you're a regular politician, you're cooked with Republicans, because they want a podcaster in chief. They want to be entertained. Not all of them, but a significant part are there for the Red Solo Cup vibes fun that Trump provides them, making boring politics a spectacle.
And it's funny, because a lot of those same people are the ones right now who are like, "Why is my gas prices so high? Why hasn't Trump lowered costs on groceries?" And so if you want to be mad at those voters, you can, but I will tell you, they're barely connecting it for themselves. There's a very strong psychological push to be able to be like, "This isn't my fault. This is Joe Biden's fault." That's why Donald Trump knows to blame it on Joe Biden, because he knows the voters will get there, because otherwise they'd have to take some personal responsibility, and that's very uncomfy, and Republicans don't believe in personal responsibility anymore, where we once did.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so I actually had a question here about why is 32 the magic number, because I've heard you say this before, and you just answered it for me. I do want to ask about the pace of change, because you've actually had an influence. The last time you were on the show you said you're paying attention to Trump's approval rating, and now I check it every day. It was 39 at the place I looked today. You were involved in a campaign for gay and lesbian rights that is often told as a success story, that enormous shift in public opinion in the span of just 30 years. What can I realistically expect in terms of the pace of public opinion change?
Sarah Longwell:
There's that line about falling asleep or falling in love, I'm not sure, maybe both, where it's slowly at first and then all at once. I do think when it ends for Trump, it'll be something like that where... He is very lucky in that we've somehow managed to stave off an economic catastrophe. I mean, the stock market feels entirely untethered to reality. We know it's being propped up by these big AI IPOs and these valuations. And so the tech industry is masking the broad vulnerabilities underneath. And so I think as long as Trump is able to point to that gas prices, they leveled off here. If this war continues, I don't know, has anybody checked lately? Are we at peace or are we at war? But at some point it becomes untenable, and I think that the bottom will drop out.
But if we go into a recession, you will see those numbers move faster. But the fact that we have not moved into a recession yet, I think is part of the reason we stay there. I was doing focus groups the other day, and this is the tough thing for the people in this room to grapple with. And I had to grapple with it and now I think about things very differently. You want democracy to matter to Americans. You want the idea. I want the idea that Trump has a 1,776 slush fund, which started out as $10 billion that he, sitting on one side of the table, said, "I am owed $10 billion, because somebody leaked my tax returns." And then on the other side of the table is the guy who runs DOJ, was like, "Yeah, man, you deserve $10 billion." Billion. Did I say billion with a B? Billion.
And then he was like, "No, no," me negotiating with myself, "I'm going to lower it to 1.776 billion. And also, you could never prosecute me or my family for anything that happens ever again on our taxes or with the IRS." And you're like, "How is that the sol for how you say you were wronged?" I was doing focus groups, and we asked about the slush fund, and two people knew about it. It's not what people follow. And I know, I know you want it to be. And so the Democrats have two choices; they can either learn how to do narrative dominance the way that Trump and Republicans have learned to do narrative dominance. They can learn to do offense where they talk about this stuff with as much vigor and intensity and repetition as Republicans did about Hunter Biden's laptop. But I think Democrats get so... I got called one day by The Atlantic, and I had just been at something with a bunch of Democrats, lovely people.
It was an event, but they were knitting at this thing. They were sitting there, knitting as an arts and crafts. I was like, "What are you guys doing?" I'm like, "What is this, kindergarten?" So I get back to my desk and Mark Leibovich was calling me and he was like, "Hey, Ken Martin is making everybody go back to the office." And I was like, "It's about time." And he was like, "Well, they're threatening to revolt over going back to the office." And I lost my mind. I was like, "You know what? This is the problem. Democrats are not built for when the fascists come. You got to put on pants and go back to the office. You don't get a four-day work week." And what would you do if your life depended on it? If Democrats were right that democracy is at stake, the very thing that we do here in this country, if it is at stake, you'd behave differently, would you not? You'd be hair on fire every day.
And they're like, "Well, we don't have any power." I'm like, "You got a microphone, you can hold a press conference, you can freak..." I am constantly in the mode of wanting to grab people by the pells and be like, talk about it all the time every day. Donald Trump wakes up in the middle of the night, I don't know what he does, but he bleeds 500 times, and then goes back to bed and he falls asleep in the cabinet meeting the next day. But can we bring that level of intensity to our communications? Not that we should write really long Truth Social posts, but we should be trying to make the American public understand the things we understand about what he's doing, because they don't. This was the biggest thing I learned doing focus groups, was how little information was reaching them and how disconnected it was from what we were talking about here.
The first time I remember I was in Columbus, Ohio, and it was three days after Donald Trump had stood on the stage with Vladimir Putin, and sided against America's intelligence community. Donald Trump was getting so much flack here in town from Republicans who were freaking out. Paul Ryan went and gave a speech. All the Republicans, it's like 80 years of American foreign policy up in smoke. Republicans are just beside themselves. Donald Trump lied. Remember he reimagined what he said. He was like, "I didn't say, 'I don't know why he would be lying.' I said, 'I don't know why he wouldn't be lying.'"
And he was forced, not to walk it back or apologize because he doesn't do that, but he was forced to lie about what he'd actually said because people here were so freaked out by it. I walked into this focus group in Columbus, Ohio of disapproving Trump voters, voters who had voted for him, but thought he was doing a bad job. And I was like, "This is the thing that's going to push him over the edge." And I was like, "What do you guys think about Trump's meeting with Putin?" And everyone was like, "I have no idea what you're talking about. Trump, you met with Putin?"
And it was like, we explained it to them and they were like, "Yeah, I don't know. He's got to meet with world leaders." And that was, to me, just before you decide you hate or think they are stupid, you're fellow Americans, just know that the vast majority of them are living their lives, raising their kids, thinking about the problems in their own lives and they do not care that Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin. They're not paying attention. And when you understand the gap between what you read when you consume the Bulwark or the Atlantic and we're very agitated all the time, they are not.
And now it's true, they have built a lot of rationalizing up when you do get them the information. But I think if we had thought about our communications with voters early on, like January 6th is another one, we just assumed January 6th, that would put an end to him. But the Republicans decided, "No, we're going to tell a story." And the story's going to be first, it was Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Then it was like, but what about Black Lives Matter? How come they didn't get punished, but the January 6th people did? And then it go, year by year. And now it is not only was it good and righteous what we did, but we need to pardon all the January 6th people who are unfairly persecuted and we should give them money from my slush fund.
Think about how far we've moved. Now part of that is because they are playing an asymmetric informational warfare game where they push that narrative and we sit around assuming like, "No, the election wasn't stolen. No, of course January 6th was terrible." And we just assume people will think that, but the right is always pushing the narrative further. And until we get in that game and that is what the book is about. And sorry, you asked about gay marriage. You did, right?
Alex Lovit:
I did, yes.
Sarah Longwell:
So I came up in the gay marriage movement and I did Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry. We brought the case at Log Cabin Republicans. It was Log Cabin Republicans against the United States government over repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, because we had a bunch of gay soldiers who were part of our group. And so I came out of that world and the thing about that time is persuasion worked. I talked to Christians and Republicans in Texas and everybody sort of came out and you watched people who'd been like, "I think that's gross," to being like, "I don't care." Or, "I thought it was bad, but then my neighbor or my niece or whatever."
And I watched us go in the time, so I graduated from college in 2002, I left my job at the Conservative Think Tank because I had to work as the young coms person. I had to work on Rick Santorum's book, It Takes A Family. That was hard for me. And so I quit and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to go join whatever gay Republican stuff is out there." But in 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage. In 2013, the year I got gay married was right after the Supreme Court overturned DOMA and that's five to 13, eight years.
We went from like 40% approval rating with places like California putting ballot initiatives to block gay marriage to the Supreme Court overturning it and everybody getting however many gay marriages they wanted to get. And now the gay marriage has been pretty durable around 74%, even though it's getting a little shaky right now because of the social wars. But you're not going to scare me about them overturning gay marriage. I don't know if you saw this. There was a tweet by one of the more pernicious, disgusting Republican congressmen the other day. It was Andy Biggs or Randy Fine. Who was it?
Speaker 1:
Andy Ogles.
Sarah Longwell:
Andy Ogles. Thank you. And it was like, "Gay people have no place in the United States of America." And even Ted Cruz was like, "Would you shut up and delete that? What are you doing?" But that persuasion movement is both what raised me, but also what gave me a really durable belief that people can change their minds. They call me the optimist over where I am, but I'm not an optimist in the sense that things will turn out okay. I'm an optimist because I think we have agency.
And so when I talk, it is always with the eye toward, we're not doing enough. We are under-reacting to this moment. We are not fighting hard enough. We are not communicating enough. The thing is, right now there's a very stupid fight going on on the left about Kamala Harris and people are like, she lost. So I hosted one of these things between Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney. So it was like me, Kamala, and Liz on the stage and she did three of those that day. And the far left is decided that the reason that Kamala Harris lost is because she appeared that one day with Liz Cheney and that is absurd. But there's this fight going on about whether the Democratic Party needs to be more moderate or more progressive.
And I just like reject that frame entirely. I do think the Republic or the Democratic Party needs to be more aggressive and I think it needs to be able to build a big broad coalition, but that doesn't just mean center right. It means the far left too. And that's a little hard for me because those guys do not like me. They don't like the sort of old Republican types who are now kind of trying to hijack their party or being part of their party. Every coalition that has ever won anything, revolutionary war, civil rights, whatever, every single coalition has required extremely uncomfortable bedfellows, people you do not want in the bed and that's the only way you do it.
I have my red lines, your mileage may vary. I won't do people who use violent rhetoric, which I think many on the far left do. Not everybody agrees with me on that. I do think though to preserve democracy, one of the reasons I get frustrated with people use violent rhetoric is I just see what a powder keg America is. When you listen to the voters, it's funny because they do lament our deep political divisions. They'll say, in the opening thing, how do you think things are going in the country? They'll be like, "We hate each other too much. We're so mad at each other. It's terrible."
And then 10 minutes later in the conversation we'll be like, "Do you know what those libtards did with X?" And you're like, "Okay." I mean, they can hold these contradictions. And so trying to solve politics in some linear fashion doesn't exist in the way that people's brains work, which is why leadership matters a great deal for what comes next. And I'm very excited for both the Republican and the Democratic primaries. I think we're going to see that the Republican Party has fractured into two separate wings. The MAGA establishment, which is your Marco Rubio's, your Mike Johnson's. And then it's got your America Firsters, and those are your Tucker Carlsons, your Marjorie Taylor Green. I don't know. You've got more Candace Owens, whatever.
And they all have Trump disappointment syndrome. I have Trump arrangement syndrome, which is TDS. They have Trump disappointment syndrome, which means they feel like Trump has taken his eye off the ball of America First. And so I think the America First wing is going to challenge the MAGA establishment and I think that's going to be an interesting dynamic to watch and I think it's going to be tough to hold that coalition together. JD Vance thought he could do it, but he is kind of like falling into the sour spot between the two.
On the Democratic side, every Democrat you can name is about to run for president, all of them. And you're going to see the sort of far left, the Ro Khannas that are trying to pitch an entirely new style of politics. And honestly, there's some stuff in there I really like. They do want to talk more normally. But you also end up with some really unvetted, tough cases like they have right now with Graham Platner. You're also going to see maybe some like John Ossoff, Pete Buttigieg who code more centrists but are running as reformers. And I think that's very interesting. That would be my lane. I would pitch that. I would say be a Pete Buttigieg, be a John Ossoff and run as a reformer and say like, "We're going to change the country from what it was. We're not going back. Never say we're going back, but I've got an idea for how we go forward."
You better be able to tell that story and tell it in a compelling way, because that is what Americans want right now. They want a vision for where we're going, not just what we're for. People like to say that. Don't just say what you're against, say what you're for. Okay. People sort of want something bigger than that. They want a real pitch about how you view American democracy. And that's why I think in these democracy rooms we should be thinking all the time about how do you in the... America has reinvented itself a lot of times.
I was never a student of history, but in these moments I have become much more interested in history because I'm interested in how people got out of the really bleak moments that were American inflection points. And the answer is always they built uncomfortable coalitions and they sort of reaffirmed the initial values of America but in new ways. And I think somebody's got to be able to put up a big, bold vision for that. And I do think there's going to be some candidates who can do it.
Alex Lovit:
Well, I'd promised we'd get to how to save democracy and I think you just got there. Sarah Longwell, thank you for joining me.
Sarah Longwell:
All right. Thank you guys.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine O'Lary, and Darla Minich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter.
If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
Speaker 2:
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