After spending 8 years running focus groups with voters, the former Republican operative and Never-Trumper says she knows not only how voters think but why they vote the way they do.

Guest

Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of the center-right online publication The Bulwark. Host of the podcast “The Focus Group.” Author of the new book: “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.”

Book Excerpt

From HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT: One Voter at a Time by Sarah Longwell Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. Dozens of polls have shown a steady decline in President Trump’s approval ratings to where it stands today at about 37%, meaning more than 60% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing right now. That is one of the lowest approval ratings of any president just before a midterm election.

Leading up to the 2002 midterms, for example, President George W. Bush’s approval rating sat at 39%. Sarah Longwell is a conservative and the publisher of The Bulwark. She’s also been running focus groups of voters for years for her podcast, The Focus Group. And recently, Sarah’s noticed a strong pattern among people who voted for President Trump.

Here’s Ebyan from Texas.

EBYAN [TAPE]: So I voted for Trump in 2024 because he was promising America first and that he was gonna end, you know, foreign wars, and he was promising better economy, and it seems like all those promises have been broken. We’re in a huge war. Inflation is still high. Economy’s bad. People are getting laid off, and it seems the whole country is, like, unsettled.

So we were hoping for a change, but it’s, it seems like all of our money is going to these wars and nothing really for the American people.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: As another voter from North Carolina put it, Trump voters feel, quote, “duped.” But does that mean these voters have soured on the MAGA movement overall? Well, Sarah answers that question and more in her new book.

It’s called “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” and she joins us from Washington. Sarah Longwell, welcome back to On Point.

SARAH LONGWELL: Oh, hey, thanks for having me. It’s great to have you back.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to a few more of the voters you’ve been talking to recently. Here’s one who voted for President Biden, and then voted for, I should say, for President Trump in the last election and now regrets it.

VOTER [TAPE]: I think things are not going well at all. I think that the, uh, the economy is basically, is in shambles, and it’s gonna get a lot worse. Everything that’s going on with this war that we cannot win.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s another one who has soured on the president.

VOTER [TAPE]: Unless you are, like, a millionaire, just, like, regular everyday things that used to be very common are, like, near impossible to do, whether it be outings or just going to get something to eat, groceries. Like, I grocery shop every week, so, like, I know when prices are going down and up, and, like, I’m like, “He’s lying.” Like, nothing has cha- Okay, maybe the eggs, like, have gone down, but, like, that’s it. I’ve never paid $9 for ground beef before, ever. You know, like, even the good kind. So that is really, really crazy and getting very scary.

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, I feel her because I was just at the store the other day, and I was looking at New York strip, and I could not believe it was, like, 19.99 a pound. If there’s one truism in American politics, though, it’s that it’s the economy, stupid. How consistent are the voters that you’ve been talking to on this?

LONGWELL: Incredibly consistent. Maybe as consistent as on anything I’ve ever listened to over the eight years that I’ve been listening to voters multiple times a week. The level of depression that I hear from voters in terms of just feeling overwhelmed by the prices, because when people say it’s the economy, stupid, or it’s the affordability, you know, I think that especially, you mentioned you go to the grocery store, but there’s a lot of people in Congress, or who are elites, who do not feel the pain of this economy. But when I do a focus group, I always start it the same way. I say, “How do you think things are going in the country?” And right now everybody says, “Bad,” and then they immediately start talking about healthcare costs, food, grocery prices, gas prices, the costs of goods and services, and it’s not just one thing, right?

This is why she’s making the joke about the eggs because the idea that a single item that was, at some points, eggs were a stand-in for the economy. And so just because eggs are down, their point is prices are up everywhere, and they, they come together to form an overwhelming economic picture for people that is dismal.

And there’s sort of the depression about the prices, and then there’s anger about this war because the war is both a betrayal of a major campaign promise and also causing people real world negative consequences.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, we’ll get to the war in just a second, but I do wanna stick with prices because I think your point is an excellent one.

Not only are federal level elected officials somewhat removed, if not entirely removed, from that day-to-day reality, it is every day for average Americans. And when it bites deeper and deeper into already stretched paychecks it has to really sting. That, to put it lightly, when they hear the president then come out and say, “Affordability is a myth,” or, “Beef prices are going down,” or, “Gas is gonna be below $3 again in a week.

Just, just give me a week.” I mean, I was actually really struck with that voter who said, point-blank, “He’s lying.” Have you been, have you heard former Trump voters be willing to, to confront the lies as plainly before as they are now?

LONGWELL: No, and, and this is actually a really important point that I wanna emphasize.

The reason that Donald Trump got reelected is because voters were already deeply frustrated with the economy under Joe Biden.  And what they did was they looked back at the pre-COVID Trump economy, and people wanted that back. That was the main reason that independents and the double haters broke for Trump.

They thought, “Maybe we can get that economy back. He’s a businessman. Okay, I don’t like him, but I’m gonna roll the dice on this ’cause I’m already feeling so pinched.” And now they’re two more years in, and he has failed on the promises because he went around Congress, he very much owns the tariffs and he very much owns the war in voters’ minds. Like, they know that he did these things. He cannot blame it on Joe Biden. And so I think, you know, it’s funny. There’s a contrast here where voters will forgive Trump for any number of insane things that he does personally or ways that he talks if the economy is good.

But if the economy is bad, then him, him obsessing about the ballroom, him obsessing about the arch, his slush fund that he was proposing voters would normally sort of wave that stuff away if they were doing okay. But they’re not, and so every time he does that now they say, “You are focused on the wrong things.”

And that is leading to people saying, “I’ve been duped. He’s lying. He’s not focusing on the right things.” And so there, I had one voter in the group said the funniest thing. She said, it was right after he promised $5,000 to every American if Republicans won. She said, “Oh, between the, the DOGE checks I was supposed to get and the tariff rebates and this $5,000, the dude owes me $22,200.”

“But I’m not counting on it.”

CHAKRABARTI: like how she’s keeping track. The woman has receipts. Keeping track. Absolutely. Well, I mean, there very much is a let them eat cake aspect to how the president has been talking about, you know, the struggles of American people. Let’s listen to a couple more of the folks that you talked to.

Here’s another regretful Trump voter.

VOTER [TAPE]: I feel a lot of us are really struggling, and we’re really looking toward our leaders for help. I don’t think he’s helping the people that need help right now. He’s helping his friends, the rich ones.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s yet another person.

VOTER [TAPE]: Inflation’s high. He’s supposed to help bring it down. It’s, I think, worse now than it was when Biden was president, between the gas going up real high and stuff and plus they talked about maybe giving a stimulus payment to help from inflation, and I don’t think that’s ever even going to happen.

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, I promise you we’ll get to the war in just a bit because it’s a big and important one.

But, you know, when I heard that woman say, “He’s just helping his friends,” that’s not just the economy being bad. I mean, that’s voters being very aware of, let’s be frank, how this is one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.

LONGWELL: Yeah, that’s right. And this is the point I was sort of making before which is I’m quite certain that if the economy was doing well for everybody, they would forgive a lot of the corrupt stuff. But the contrast of them doing, because they did it in the first term. I mean, I just watched people not care about a lot of things, as long as they felt like Trump was doing things for the economy and Trump was very good in his first term running around saying, like, “How’s your 401, buddy? You know, best economy for women, best economy for Black people.” He was always talking about the economy, and the economy was positive.  It was doing well for people. I heard that all the time in the groups.

And so all of the other stuff, the horrible way he talked to people, these voters, these sort of Trump voters, Republican voters, they didn’t care about that stuff. This time, because they are suffering, now the contrast of his corrupt friends, and it’s worse in the second term. I mean, let’s also be honest about that.

Yeah. It’s way worse with the Trump kids. And I don’t know if you saw this, but, you know, part of it is his entire team does the let them eat cake. Like, Dan Scavino tweeted this AI thing. It’s them popping champagne. They’re all at Mar-a-Lago partying. And that sort of wheels off corruption is now voters are paying attention to it because they see it in contrast to their own lives.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this is a really important point, then, because it automatically makes me skeptical that these voters are abandoning the MAGA movement. Because if for some reason or somehow the economy does turn around, what you’re saying is, well, then they’ll, they’ll forgive all the other excesses or failures of the movement.

LONGWELL: I mean, and again, it depends on which voters we’re talking about, but there is a reason that, and I think this is, this is part of why I wrote the book. This is part of, I think, what has been so damaging to America’s psyche, is that Trump tried to overturn an election. He lied about the results. There was an attack on police officers and the Capitol.

He was under indictment because he left, you know, America’s top secret documents in his bathroom. He has done enough horrible things, uh, for us to know now, as depressing as it is, that people still chose him over the Democrats, knowing all of those things full well. And I know from listening to voters that the reason that they did that was because of economic concerns.

And so you cannot make a pitch to people on democracy. And I know it frustrates people. This is one of the things that I really learned doing focus groups, is some things are just reality, and you sort of have to play it as it lies. You have to accept that this is how people are, and people care about their own material wellbeing and they care about their own safety. Like, these are the things that voters care about-

CHAKRABARTI: And why shouldn’t they? I mean- …

LONGWELL: And they trusted Trump more on this … yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. And so I think that sometimes people are like, “Well, why, why don’t they see the, you know, the existential threat to, let’s say, climate or, or to democracy?”

And I am like, “This just isn’t how voters are thinking about these issues.”  I listen to them and it’s not. They are thinking, “How much are things at the grocery store? Can my kid get a good job? Can I get a raise at my job?” And that is how they’re going through life. And that’s just the reality.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: And Sarah, since you did mention the Iran war a couple of times, let’s listen to some of the voters you’ve been talking to about that.

Here’s one Trump voter who strongly disapproves of what he’s doing.

VOTER [TAPE]: My main concern is the wars, war with Iran and everything, and I think it’s very saddening because in my opinion, I think actually there’s like, I mean, conspiracy theories here and there, but I think that, you know, realistically, Israel controls President Trump and a lot of the decisions that are made for Americans, and I think that’s a hard reality that people are slowly coming to realize.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s another voter.

VOTER [TAPE]: I mean, you hear that they’re close. How many times have you heard that? Yeah. And then yet Monday there was bombings. The description on that was like there were bombings so that, you know, the ceasefire could continue, and it’s like what in the world are you people trying to put out there to make us even try to rationalize what’s going on there?

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, talk to me about how voters are seeing the war.

LONGWELL: This is one of those issues where I’ve almost been surprised because, again, having listened to voters for so long, they’re not Trump voters, they usually justify his decisions. You know, they find a way to rationalize them. And the war because even, even with the tariffs, I heard a lot of people saying, “Well, I’m not sure if it’s working, but he is trying to get jobs back in the United States.” And so they were trying to find ways to sort of justify it. The war, they are mad. Like, actively angry. They think, and they, they’re following it because it is having negative consequences, and so they followed things like they know that he keeps saying it’s over and that we’ve won, and then there’s more bombings.

And so it is eroding. I mean, and you might, people might laugh and say, “I can’t believe he’d have credibility with his voters,” but he did have credibility with the voters, and it, it’s eroding every time he says, “We’ve won the war,” and then we keep bombing them. He also keeps changing the rationale for it.

Is it because we don’t want them to have nuclear weapons, or are we trying to open the Strait of Hormuz? Like, which is it? And also, they just know he said, JD Vance said. I mean, there was only a couple major campaign promises , and  they were, “I’m gonna lower prices. We’re not gonna get into stupid wars.”

Yeah. “And we’re gonna do a better job on immigration.” And on all of those things, but especially on the economy and on the stupid wars, people see him as doing the exact opposite of what he said he would. And this time around they also see it as, and then he’s enriching himself. And, and you hear a lot of people saying, the, the Israel point comes up a lot.

But so does so does the idea that Trump is using the war to get rich because they see all these ways that he’s enriching himself. And, you know, he talks about an arch that he’s going put in D.C. with drones in it. People are just starting to go, “What is happening here?” Yeah. And they also, one of the other things they say that to me is really interesting that a lot of them say they think he thought it was going to be like Venezuela, like a smash-and-grab job that we’re in and out fast.

The American public knows about quagmire wars. They understand the idea of getting into a war in the Middle East that we can’t get out of. There’s a lot of things where the, the nuances of them are pretty lost on the American people. This is not one of them. It is too deep in the American psyche, and so people are mad about it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You know, I think there’s something very important happening here that I wanna ask you about. I mean, first of all, your point about it depends on which voter you’re talking about regarding fealty to the MAGA movement, that’s an important one, because I don’t suppose that, uh, you know, people who are true believers of the movement are moving that far away from the president.

But of course, it wasn’t just the movement faithful that put him back in office, uh, in the last election, right? I mean, he won more than, more than 70 million votes from, uh, from Americans across the country. But what, what I feel is different this time is you’re talking about a level of understanding and knowledge of the gap between the president’s promises and what he’s delivering that I don’t feel was there last time, and which means that, I mean, where are these voters getting their their media from?

Because that’s interesting to me, because it seems like no matter where they’re getting it from, perhaps even, you know, Fox News, that the, the truth about the failures of the president are getting through. They’re sort of puncturing what was previously a hermetically sealed information bubble.

LONGWELL: Yeah, but here’s the difference, right? So if in the first term, people were satisfied with the economy. They felt like things were getting better. They personally were doing better. Then they were, you know, they could tap into sort of the, the, the circus of it all and feel like it was almost fun. Like, Trump brought a lot of people in that way.

This time, and this is the thing, so two things are happening. One, over on the right-wing media, you know, infotainment ecosystem, there’s a chart. And so I guess I have to describe it. This is radio. But imagine a, a ski slope going down. That is how the right-wing infotainment media system has stopped talking about Trump.

They’re much more focused now on the WNBA or that Clancy, uh, thing, or right now the Cornell. Like, they’re talking about different issues because Trump is not popular. They are used to going to bat for him. They are used to Trump creating content for them, and the right-wing, um, you know, listeners kind of sit in that media ecosystem where a bunch of people are there to tell you, “Here’s all the ways that Trump is so great.”

They can’t do that right now. And so when I think about 2026 and people talk about a blue wave, what, what I think about is all of the people, because they are experiencing negative personal consequences in their own lives, that right-wing infotainment media ecosystem cannot puncture. Right? Like, they can’t tell them that what is happening in their lives isn’t happening.

And this is the other thing I really think is happening right now. This is a personal theory of mine, but I’m going see if it bears out when the election happens. If you are the kind of person who’s like a Trump boat parade person in Florida, you own a boat, you own an RV, you had been doing well, you are probably upset about the economy, but it’s not killing you, right?

You can still sustain a downturn like the one we’re experiencing. If you are one of the rural voters, if you are a rural Trump voter, which is where he puts up his crazy numbers that other Republicans are like, “Where did all these voters come from? We didn’t even know they existed.”

Trump turns them out in droves. Those are the people who are experiencing the consequences of the downturn in the economy, of the affordability being so high, of their Medicaid going away. And these are the places where the data centers are coming in and going into these rural communities.

And so my personal theory is actually Trump will probably continue to hold on with a lot of the people who sort of intellectually bought into the MAGA movement and thought it was fun to own the libs. But for the people who thought, “Man, Trump is gonna be different. He’s not going to be like a regular politician. He’s gonna make my life better.” Then those are the people he has failed. And I think that depressed voters lead to depressed turnout. And so if I had to, you know, make a hunch, it would be that these rural voters turn out in much lower numbers than is typical for Trump or in the Trump era.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So such an important point, because of course, I mean, the way that politics and, uh, economics works in the United States, the voters that you were just talking about, rural voters who were already having, living struggling lives, right? There’s been just a 40-year decline in many of these communities with the loss of manufacturing, et cetera.

Like it or not, the president’s policies have actually made their lives significantly worse than, um, than as you said, the, the boat parade, uh, uh, Trump voters. But that makes me wonder, though, is your big takeaway then that Democrats should just talk about the economy more? I mean, aren’t they already doing that?

LONGWELL: So no, not just talk about the economy So what they’re doing is, and I don’t wanna lump everybody together, but it is not enough to just say, right now, I mean, I guess they can in the context of 2026, they can go on offense by being, “Trump is making your life worse.” But a big part of my book is about messaging.

Yes. And there’s a two-step to messaging, and I want what I was talking about before, where the contrast is what is getting to people, I think contrast is always very important. So Democrats need to be able to say, “Look at what Trump is doing and why it is bad and how it is hurting you, and here’s our plan.”

“Here’s what we are focused on.” And I think that a lot of times they do the first one. Like, there’s been kind of a, a way in the Trump era where to win elections, you just be against Trump, and you be against the Republicans, against Trump, and that is A, it’s only getting you halfway, and it’s the reason why Democrats haven’t been able to hold a sustained advantage in the Trump era, despite a lot of frustration with Trump over different things, is that people don’t look at Democrats and see something better on offer.

And I was going berserk about this going into the 2024 election, because the voters not only thought Joe Biden was too old, which they did, but they also, it was also a stand-in for he’s too old to do anything about these problems that are facing us. And when Kamala Harris sort of didn’t distinguish herself from that, didn’t throw herself into.

You can’t just say affordability. You can’t just be like, “And I’m gonna do…” Trump even does a much better job of this, the no tax on tips. Like, he does a few things that are sticky, and he talks about them relentlessly. And I do think Democrats in, I think they have a generational opportunity right now to go on offense against MAGA, against the Trump legacy, because Trump in, in, in our, my best case scenario, he’s down in the 20s.

People, he got us into an unpopular war. Prices are out of control. MAGA has been a failure. Democrats have to offer something. They have to offer something. They have to say, “You can come here. We’re a safe place to come.” And the way that they do that is by saying, “Here’s how we’re gonna improve education.”

Because everything is a material interest. Everything is an economic issue. Here is what we’re gonna do about education. Here’s what we’re gonna do about healthcare. Here is what we’re gonna do in this new economy that is coming. I mean, the level of anxiety about AI right now is off the charts.

Have a plan. Have something that you’re gonna do about it. You’ve got to lower energy costs. Like, this is, these are the things that the voters are talking about, and the disconnect between what voters talk about and what their elected officials talk about,  I think there’s a real gap there. And that’s what, that’s where you can close the gap.

You can’t just say affordability. You’ve got to talk about those issues specifically.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean, I feel like you’re actually putting it lightly, Sarah. It’s not just a gap. Sometimes I feel like it’s a Grand Canyon-sized chasm. Yeah. Uh, I mean, because look, you say the gen- the Democrats have a generational opportunity here given all the things that you’ve been hearing from voters and just the reality of American life, but the question is, will they take it?

I feel like the people who are standing. So there’s the American people on one side of this, uh, chasm of perception, and political operatives on the other side of the chasm, and also the donor class and the very online advocacy class because, like it or not, those centers of gravity are still pulling at the Democratic Party, as they have in previous elections.

I mean, let’s listen to one of the voters that you talked to who’s a Democratic voter and she told you her problems with the Democratic Party right now.

VOTER [TAPE]: Like, honestly, the focus is so, so on that. It’s not on what’s happening here, and a lot of how the far left Dems are decision-making has everything just to do with, like, Israel and Palestine and not what’s happening here.

Okay, so that’s one criticism, that the party is too focused especially on Israel and Palestine. Here’s another Democratic voter with a similar view.

VOTER [TAPE]: I don’t think that for the left it was a good decision that, you know, to make that the hill you wanna die on is, you know, trans rights, you know? I mean, it’s 0.1% of the population, and, you know to choose that as the signature issue.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Sarah, I would argue that the focus on trans rights has fallen away from a lot of Democratic campaigns right now, but the Israel-Palestine issue is as hot as it’s ever been, and that’s, again, I think, the chasm.

Because the Democratic base absolutely, and younger voters are saying, at least online, that they care a lot about the Israel-Palestine issue. But that’s not going to  create that bridge to the critical mass of voters that Democrats need to pull them away from President Trump.

LONGWELL: Yeah, this is exactly right. And I, my, my fear for Democrats is that they end up sort of falling into a different trap here, instead of, again, talking about economic issues, like they figured out, Democrats are figuring out a couple things that I talk about in the book. One is they seem to understand that they have to talk about a border that is closed, that Americans want that, and that that’s just an argument that Democrats have lost, and that they need to be proactive about saying, “I’ll keep you safe.

We’re gonna have a, a closed border.” Voters want that overwhelmingly, including independents and Democrats. It’s been a real weakness for Democrats. Then also on the trans issues, I feel like Democrats got the message that and I think that Democrats can have a wide variety of positions on this.

And I think that they should continue to operate with a lot of, you know, people’s human dignity at the core, but also they should talk about it almost never. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus to understand that it is not an issue that affects most people, and that people want you to talk about the issues that affect everybody.

And this is my overall pitch, is if you’re a trans person, you’ve still got to fill up your, your car with gas. If you are any demographic, right, you care about the economy. And that Democrats, if they want to win back not just working class voters, but bring more people together, they should be focused on the things that everybody cares about.

Because the thing that I hear from voters on trans issues is not that they’re anti-trans, but that they don’t understand why Democrats talk about it so much relative to the other issues. And so it is a question of emphasis. And this, this Palestine-Israel thing is similar, where it becomes this enormous issue in a primary, Democratic primary, and then you get to the general, and people really only wanna talk about affordability.

That’s what voters want to hear. Yeah. “What are you going to do for us here?”

CHAKRABARTI: I’ve got to ask you a question, because you said, “If they wanna win.” Yeah. Right? I mean, that is a central point here. I mean, of course, I would say most people running for office actually do wanna win, but the question is for the the party as a whole.

CHAKRABARTI: Because this gets back to something you said earlier about how do voters fundamentally think. And I do believe that, again, the people who are in the political elite, who run campaigns, et cetera. It’s hard to say this, because it seems so ridiculous, but I think they fundamentally misunderstand how people, how voters think, right?

They’re willing to push their candidates into, let’s call, talk about the advocacy class, into declaring views on these very, very marginal issues, right? And ultimately, that can backfire because, I mean, speaking of trans rights, the bigger question is, well, if you really wanna protect trans rights, maybe get people into office who are more likely to do that.

And in order to do that, you have to talk about it a little less. A painful irony, but actually true. And yet I don’t think that people running campaigns necessarily have that strong of a understanding of how voters are thinking.

LONGWELL: They don’t, and this is, this is a huge problem. Like, there’s just a huge disconnect, uh, both between the activist class, uh, and the average voters that you need to win over.

And, the average voters you need to win over are thinking about their safety, and they are thinking about their material wellbeing. And these activists are thinking about all of the sort of social issues or social justice issues, and it is not what the American people are focused on.

And I wrote this book because I basically wanted to say, “The authoritarians are inside the gate.” Yeah. The Republicans are straight-up mercenaries. Do you want to win, or do you wanna be right? And I, as somebody who would like to protect American liberal democracy from this authoritarian-attempted takeover, need Democrats to put on their armor and go win because winners make policy, losers go home.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s a young voter who’s basically fed up with American politics.

VOTER [TAPE]: I’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’m not gonna vote ever again. I don’t wanna be a part of it, and I know a lot of people like to argue, “Well, you can’t complain if you’re not gonna be a part of it,” but I believe that it means nothing to partake in these politics.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s another young voter who considers himself a moderate.

VOTER [TAPE]: I think it’s just odd to, like, identify or lean completely with one party’s, all their views or all their, um, all their opinions and decisions. Socially, like, with immigration, I’m all for… I think, you know, for sure the border should be secure, but I think it should be, there should be, like, a easier pathway to citizenship, you know? And then on the other side, like, I’m pro-Second Amendment. I love guns. I go shooting myself, but I do think there should be maybe some more restrictions or maybe it is, in my opinion, a bit too easy to get a gun.

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, I just wanna step away from the book for a moment and say thank you to you for having The Focus Group podcast because let’s be honest, we in the media here we talk about the American voter or Trump voters or Democratic voters as if they’re some sort of, like, abstracted chimera that we can apply, like, any label to.

But fundamentally, we’re talking about human beings, right? We’re talking about our fellow Americans who have a total diversity of opinion on a variety of things, right?

No, very few people are straight ticket voters. Well, that, that’s not a good example, but very few people feel exactly the same way on every single issue, right?

And to hear the, the human emotional diversity of how people are thinking about their lives and the future of this nation is really sobering, and it gets to, a story that you tell in the book about what maybe political operatives today fundamentally do not understand about, about people. It’s a story that you tell,  about your professional mentor Rick Berman, who passed down to you.

Can you tell us that story?

LONGWELL: I wrote a whole chapter on Rick. Okay. But, so I’m not sure exactly which story it is-

CHAKRABARTI: Well, it’s the one where he dates it’s the one with the three women interviewed for a job. Yeah.

LONGWELL: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll tell it. Yeah. I’ll tell it, but I’m just gonna trigger warning for the listeners that this is, you might have feelings about this story. It’s from a different era, let’s put it that way. It is from a different era. So I came up under this guy, Rick Berman, who was sort of, like a Nick Naylor type, if you’re familiar with “Thank You for Smoking.” We didn’t actually do tobacco when I was there, but I was like a young libertarian-ish McCain person, and I always found sort of the nanny state-ish left to be like, that was something in my 20s that I found, like, “Oh, those are good people to, to argue with.” Rick argued with those people. And he was Trumpian a little bit. Like, he was a funny, charismatic, enormously tall guy. And one of the stories, though, he used to tell, but he was a communications savant.

He just really understood how you communicated with people and how you did persuasion. And he would tell this story about three executives who were out on the golf course, and one guy’s telling his other buddies about hiring a secretary. And he says… And so they’re asking questions. He says, like, “Oh, one’s good at typing.

One’s good at filing,” whatever. And he’s telling them all their various attributes, and at the end, one of the guys says, “Okay. Well, which one did you hire?” And he said, “Oh, the one with the biggest .” Now, listen, I understand that he would, I mean, he would get thrown out of places now. But he did used to tell this story in these, like, executive spaces.

And there’s two things about this. There’s, there’s a reason I put it in the book. One is, just by doing it, you right now, listener, are having a reaction. This is what creates sticky brain burn moments. You might be mad, you might be laughing, and you might be appalled, but you are listening right now.

You are locked in. And that flash of emotion is something Trump does all the time to us, right? He captures us by saying something incendiary that grabs hold of us. But the bigger point of Rick’s story is people make animalistic, non-rational decisions all the time. And, and in fact, it is our, it is our basic instinct.

And I carry this around with me all the time because I think it is so, so true. The idea that we think, or people in the media think, or I thought before I started listening to voters all the time, that the way political scientists sort of slice people up and create moderates versus progressives versus far.

This is not how people think. It is not how you can, it’s not how people are really categorized. They got all kinds of weird salad of opinions. They’re non-linear. The number of times I have listened to people, it is the funniest thing. Voters in the focus groups, when you say, you know, “How are things going in the country?”

A lot of times people bring up how divided we are, and they lament the deep divisions with real sincerity. And that same person five minutes later is like, “Everything is these libtards’ faults.” And, you know, and, and it’s just people are both wonderful and also a real pain. Yeah. But, like, they are the people that make up our democracy.

I got caught off guard by Trump, like, really, like a lot of people. And I wanted to never feel like that again, like I didn’t understand why people were doing things. And look, I’m not saying that people don’t have awful qualities. There is a lot of racism. There is a lot of sexism.

There’s also a lot of decency. There’s also a lot of humans taking care of each other. And a lot of them are, one of the things that I remember the first time I heard it, I was like, “What is this person talking about?” They would say Well, I’m pro-life, but I believe in a woman’s right to choose.

And I was like, “What are you talking about? Those are not, those, you’re on, those are two separate things. You can’t be…” Then I heard it over and over and over again, and it’s why I like qualitative more than I like quantitative in polling, because you get at the inherent contradictions. That person is saying, “I am pro-life. I would never have an abortion, but I don’t think they should change the law.” And that is important to understand about people, that complexity. Because, and it’s why politicians have to stop just looking at polling, and they need to talk to people like the human beings that they are. Politicians should show their own complexities because they have them.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I’ve got to say, that statement that the voter told you is not inherently contradictory, right? When you think about it. That’s true, yeah. It is not. When you think about it. But, but as, but as you said, if, when it’s filtered through polling numbers and political data and the campaign strategy, it becomes presumed to be an inherently contradictory point of view.

There’s something so, so important that you’re getting to here. And first of all, I have to say, anyone who thinks, oh, it’s those other folks who are operating on their lizard brain, is deluded. We are all human beings. All of us become sort of neurological fundamentalists, whether we like it or not.

That’s how I’m gonna put it, right? Because I, I think this is, again, another mistake of the political class, to presume that, well, you know, it’s just those voters over there who are responding emotionally to Trump. And if I make an argument that’s cool and logical and it shows how, well, if we change the tax structure to X, Y, and Z it’ll benefit more people, that that will convince them.

Well, that’s just not true, because all of us, all of us need to feel they, we need to feel empathy from others. We’re triggered by our own fears, our angers, and this is a hill that I will die on. I think one of the, the most brilliant political tactics of Donald Trump all the way from 11 years ago, was the fact that he talked openly, whether or not it was true, he talked openly about loving people.

He would say that all the time, right? Like, like, he might even say it in a joking way, like, “I love the poorly educated,” or, but he would say, like, “We love you, forgotten Americans.” I don’t actually recall a political figure before 2015 saying that word to people as often as he did.

LONGWELL: Yeah, you know, I think about 2016 a lot and Hillary Clinton’s slogan, “I’m with her.”

Politics should never be like that. Politics should be, “I’m with you.” Yeah. I, the politician, am with you. And you know what? It’s funny you know, you use the term love. I do a lot of this where, where Democrats will have me come speak or, or, you know, they’ll ask me my opinion on something. And they’re like, “What do you think about this issue?”

And I will put my hands on them physically and I will be like, “What do you think? What do you believe? What is, what matters to you?” And, and this is the, the new media environment that we live in. Voters want to feel like they know you for real. They stare at people’s faces all day long.

There’s a reason everything is on video now. It’s because people crave that sort of parasocial relationship, which goes to a much bigger issue around loneliness and connection. But they want to have a parasocial relationship, and they felt like Donald Trump told them the truth. They would say, this is another one of those contradictions, “Yeah, I know he lies, but I feel like he’s being honest with me.”

And what they mean is they felt like he was leveling with them about politics, and they wanna remove the artifice. They want the artifice removed from the media. They want the artifice removed from their politicians. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be unprofessional. It doesn’t mean that you have to be cringe and put on sunglasses and do TikToks if you’re a congressperson.

You don’t have to do any of that. But you do have to talk to people like they’re adults and real, and like you’re a real person. This was major deficiency of Kamala Harris, is voters were just like, “I don’t know who she is or what she stands for.” They didn’t get her. They didn’t feel like they understood what she meant.

And this is where there is a, this is the disconnect among the elites who say, “Oh, she was too moderate,” or, “Oh, she was too progressive.” I’m like, “Well, that’s not what I hear from voters.” They don’t have any sense of her ideological calibration, in part because she took a lot of different issues over the course of her public life.

They just felt like, “I don’t know her. I don’t know what she, I don’t know what her whole deal is.” With Trump, at least they felt like they knew what they were getting, whether they liked it or didn’t. They felt like they understood it. And so I’m just sort of begging for more humanity in politics, more, more willingness to say I don’t know, more willingness to say I’m working through it, an ability to, to say on the trans issue, to talk about it with empathy, but also say, “But I’m not gonna focus on this, guys, because I’m gonna really focus on…They can focus on it if they’re so obsessed with it. I am focused on helping you because I care about you. I got into politics because I care about you.” Like, to me, that is leadership.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I mean, that got to, that gets straight to that ad from the last Trump campaign about Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.

I mean it was kind of brilliant in a bunch of different ways, both good and not so good. But Sarah, we’ve got about five minutes left here, and so here’s what I wanna ask you. You still identify your, yourself as a conservative, but you have written extensively, and also in the new book, “How to Eat an Elephant,” that you wanna consign the MAGA movement to the ash heap of history.

And in order to do that, not just for any specific narrow political point of view, but for the future of America, not democracy in general, but this country. And in order to do that, you’ve been saying for a while that, as you said earlier in the show, Democrats have to win. So bottom line for you is, of, of the question is,  how can they do that?

What are your top three piece of advice you’re giving to candidates?

LONGWELL: Yeah, let me just say quickly that me as a conservative, like, my conservatism is rooted in a love of American liberal democracy. I love pluralism. I love the freedom of speech. I love the rule of law, and that’s sort of what, how I was brought up as a conservative. What conservatism has been bastardized into by Trump and the MAGA movement, like, I might still subscribe to many of the same loves that I had but I am eyes wide open about the fact that there is no conservative movement that I would ever be a part of. So, I just want to say that clearly because sometimes-

CHAKRABARTI: I’m glad you did-

LONGWELL: -people don’t get it.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I was gonna ask you if it, if conservatism even exists recognizably. But you just answered it.

LONGWELL: No, it doesn’t. And so,  people are like, “Are you a Democrat?” I think people, again, they really need to classify you in a specific way, and the way that I answer that is I have always loved American liberal democracy.

I find it to be magical, like a revelation, and I want to defend it. And so I will defend it with anybody else who wants to defend it, and the, the Democratic Party right now is the only vehicle. We live in a two-party political system. It is the vehicle for the pro-democracy movement, and that contains multitudes.

It has to be a big tent.  I will hit you with my biggest pieces of advice. I’ve done it, a number of it, throughout this conversation. People are gonna use the word authenticity like a buzzword the same way they use affordability. I want you to think about what it means to be a real human being to connect with the voters, to talk to the voters, to care about the voters.

Democrats have a generational opportunity now that Trump has so betrayed these white working-class voters. And the median voter in a general election is a white male who’s 55 years old, and he doesn’t have a college degree. Democrats need to hold that person in their minds and think, “Can I reach that guy?”

Now, lots of them you can’t, but I will say this. This level of betrayal from Donald Trump, he brought all these new people into the party. I’m not sure they come along for JD Vance or Marco Rubio or whoever comes after. Interesting. And so that, it is, there is an opportunity. Democrats have an opportunity to, to get another look from white working-class voters who have abandoned them, and actually build a new multiracial working-class coalition.

It is the biggest coalition that can exist in America. So my biggest piece of advice, and it goes back to talking about the economy, material wellbeing, and safety, is build a big working-class multiracial- coalition. Like, that’s the coalition you need to win and be durable. The second thing is, and this goes to the personal safety, Democrats have to be clear that they care about crime and they care about the border.

That does not mean deporting the guy who has lived here for 20 years. This is again where d- Democrats can lead, not hide from this issue by saying, “We are gonna approach this issue with compassion and also with some realism.” Like, doesn’t even make sense to deport somebody who’s been living here and paying taxes for 20 years.

Let’s figure out a path to citizenship. People will say, “Well, we had this conversation, you know, 15 years ago and it didn’t go anywhere.” We are in a new place. People need to give up on the idea or let go of the idea that the world doesn’t change. It changes, and people are ready for different conversations.

I’ll tell you another one. It just is an idea whose time has come. Voters on both sides of the aisle are much more interested in some universal form of healthcare coverage. But that kind of has to be held in tension with the idea that we have to have a closed border. Like, there is a grand bargain there to strike with Americans.

So, the border, that’s the other one, and then they have to deprioritize some of these social issues. Like, it’s not that you don’t talk about them. It’s not that you don’t maintain your commitment to human dignity and compassion, but that cannot be what you talk about all the time because it is alienating to so many people.

And, like, stop with the pronouns. Like, just stop that kind of stuff. It’s like speaking a language that a lot of voters then say, “Well, that’s not a place for me. They’re not speaking my language.”

CHAKRABARTI: Do you think this can happen, though? We’ve got 30 seconds, left, Sarah. I mean, I feel, I’m feeling your fire right now.

Do you think this can happen?

LONGWELL: Yes, of course, I think it can happen, or I wouldn’t have written the book, and I wouldn’t be desperately out here, you know, begging Democrats to, to not listen to me. This is not a book about Sarah Longwell’s preferred politics. If it is, we’d be talking about the national debt and education reform.

This is a book about what I have listened to voters over eight years, what they’ve told me. These are the things they want, and if Democrats could just give it to them, listen to American voters, that’s democracy, they can win. Looking forward to the day where we can get back to talking about the national debt and education reform.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.