What ‘Never Trumper’ Sarah Longwell Learned From Voters

Sarah Longwell says listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics — yet few people actually do it. That’s why she has spent the past eight years conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters across the political spectrum. A former Republican political strategist and founder of the media company The Bulwark, Longwell lays out a playbook to fight back and win in her new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.” We talk with Longwell about what she has learned from voters across the political spectrum, how Democrats can seize the moment and what it will take to defeat the MAGA movement.

Guests:

• Sarah Longwell, publisher, The Bulwark; host, The Focus Group podcast; author, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time”

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Donald Trump is back in the White House, but Sarah Longwell has spent the last decade talking to the voters who helped put him there. Longwell is a Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics, is about what she learned from voters, candidates, and the Republican Party during the Trump era.

Sarah Longwell joins us now. Sarah, welcome to Forum.

Sarah Longwell: Thank you so much for having me.

Mina Kim: So let’s start with the voters. You’ve been talking to Trump voters for years now. What have you learned about what motivates them?

Sarah Longwell: You know, I think one of the things that I have learned is that we have a tendency to think that people vote on issues. And voters do care about issues, but they care much more about how they feel about the candidates and what those candidates represent.

And Trump is really good at making people feel like he understands them, that he sees them, that he’s fighting for them. And so when you talk to voters who support him, they often don’t talk about specific policies. They talk about how they feel about him.

They’ll say things like, “He’s authentic,” or, “He tells it like it is,” or, “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.” And those are really powerful things for people who feel like the political system has ignored them or looked down on them.

Mina Kim: But you’ve also heard voters criticize Trump. So what is it that keeps them with him?

Sarah Longwell: There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is that they don’t trust Democrats. And I think this is something Democrats really struggle to understand.

A lot of Trump voters will tell you that they don’t like everything about Trump. They may think he’s too chaotic. They may think he’s mean. They may think he’s a bad person. But they think that the alternative is worse.

And that’s really important. You don’t have to love a candidate to vote for them. You just have to believe that they’re better than the other person.

And Republicans have spent a lot of time over the last several years convincing their voters that Democrats are not just wrong on policy, but that they’re dangerous. That they’re coming for their way of life, that they’re coming for their children, that they’re coming for their communities.

And when people believe that, it makes it very hard to persuade them to vote for a Democrat.

Mina Kim: You helped launch Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020. What were you hearing from Republican voters then?

Sarah Longwell: There was a really significant group of Republicans who were deeply uncomfortable with Trump. And I think one of the things that surprised me was how many of them were willing to vote for Joe Biden.

We talked to thousands and thousands of Republican voters, and what we heard over and over again was that they didn’t want to leave the Republican Party. They didn’t want to become Democrats. They wanted Republicans to nominate somebody else.

And they were worried about what Trump was doing to the country, but they were also worried about what Trump was doing to the Republican Party.

Mina Kim: And yet Trump won in 2024.

Sarah Longwell: He did. And I think one of the lessons for me is that you cannot simply assume that because people have concerns about Trump, those concerns will eventually cause them to leave him.

There were a lot of voters who had concerns about Trump in 2020 who came back to him in 2024. Some of them thought the Biden years had been disappointing. Some of them thought the economy wasn’t working for them. Some of them were angry about immigration.

And Trump was able to capitalize on those frustrations.

Mina Kim: You write in your book about spending years trying to understand voters by sitting in focus groups and listening to them talk. What does that tell you that polling doesn’t?

Sarah Longwell: I love polling. Polling is incredibly important. But when you sit in a room with eight or ten people for two hours and you let them talk, you hear things that you would never hear in a poll.

You can ask a voter, “What’s your number-one issue?” And they’ll tell you one thing. But then you listen to them for two hours and you realize that what they’re actually worried about is something else.

You also hear the stories people tell themselves about why they believe what they believe. And that’s incredibly important.

Because if you’re trying to persuade somebody, you need to understand not just their position, but how they got there.

Mina Kim: You’ve said that one of the biggest mistakes Democrats make is trying to persuade voters by giving them more information. Why doesn’t that work?

Sarah Longwell: Because people aren’t computers. You don’t just put more information into their heads and expect them to make a different decision.

People make decisions based on emotion, identity, experience, trust. And then they use facts to support the conclusions they’ve already reached.

So if you want to persuade somebody, the first question is: Do they trust you?

If they don’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how many facts you have.

And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Democrats right now. There are a lot of voters who simply don’t trust Democrats to understand their lives.

Mina Kim: Is that fixable?

Sarah Longwell: I think it is. But it takes a long time.

And one of the things that frustrates me is that political parties tend to think in election cycles. They want to know, what can we do between now and November? But trust doesn’t work that way.

If you want people to believe that you understand them, you have to actually spend time with them. You have to show up. You have to listen to them when you’re not asking for their vote.

And you have to be willing to hear things that you don’t like.

Mina Kim: You spent much of your career as a Republican strategist. When did you realize that you no longer recognized the party?

Sarah Longwell: I think it happened gradually.

There wasn’t one moment where I woke up and said, “Oh, I’m not a Republican anymore.” It was more like watching the party change year after year.

I worked in Republican politics because I believed in conservative ideas. I believed in limited government. I believed in free markets. I believed in institutions. I believed in the importance of American leadership in the world.

And then Trump came along, and suddenly a lot of those things were negotiable if they got in the way of loyalty to him.

That was very hard for me.

Mina Kim: You write about loyalty a lot. Why is loyalty so important in today’s Republican Party?

Sarah Longwell: Because Trump has made loyalty the organizing principle of the party.

It’s not really about ideology anymore. It’s about whether you are with him or against him.

And you see that with politicians. Somebody can have a long record of voting for conservative policies, but if they criticize Trump, they can become a pariah overnight.

And conversely, somebody can have positions that would have been completely unacceptable to Republicans ten years ago, but if they are loyal to Trump, they’re welcomed into the party.

Mina Kim: Does that mean ideology doesn’t matter anymore?

Sarah Longwell: I think ideology matters less than it used to.

There are still people who care deeply about policy. But for a lot of voters, the Republican Party has become much more of an identity than a set of policy commitments.

And that’s true of both parties, frankly. But Trump has taken it to another level.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Sarah Longwell, Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book is Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics.

If you’d like to join the conversation, you can email us at [email protected]. You can also call us at 866-733-6786.

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