The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Why Republicans Won the Attention War

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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. Happy post-election day to all those who celebrate. We've been jumping around on this show lately. We have been showing you how people run media companies of all types and sizes, from Emily Sundberg and her Buzzy Substack to Mark Thompson and CNN. And today we've got an interesting hybrid.

The Bulwark is an anti-Trump, mission-driven, for-profit site that first relied on donations and is now powered by Substack revenue. It's on a $12 million a year run rate from Substack alone. But in the last couple of years, the bulwark has also exploded by turning on the cameras and finding new audiences on YouTube and in social media feeds. On to explain all this is Sarah Longwell, the site's co-founder and CEO.

She is also a practicing political operative. So in addition to talking about how to run a media site, I wanted to talk to her about how to run a political campaign and what kind of skills you need to succeed in the current climate. As we note in this conversation, we taped this one shortly before Tuesday's elections. Pretty sure all of this will be useful no matter what the results are. Okay, enough of me. Here's me and Sarah Longwell.

I'm here with Sarah Longwell. She is the co-founder and CEO of The Bulwark. Welcome, Sarah. Hey, Peter. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on. You run an unusual company. It's sort of a political advocacy company or group and a for profit media company. I want to talk to you about that. I also want to talk to you about. how media works in politics these days, because that's the other thing you do is you are still working in politics.

But let's start off with the Bulwark's origin story. I and I think many other people started listening to it a lot in the summer of 2024. But you guys have been around since, what, 2018? Is that right? Yeah, you're kidding. You only got to us from 2024? What were you doing before that? Well, I was a Pod Save America guy and I kind of figured I had enough politics in my life. Sure. I did not know I had an itch that needed to be scratched.

OK, and we're scratching it now. You are doing it for me now. Yes. OK, great. That's great news. Yeah. I mean, look, we have been around sometimes I think longer than people think, but we've changed over time. We've evolved. But in the early days. The bulwark actually came because the Weekly Standard, which was this sort of seminal conservative magazine that Bill Kristol had been the editor of and founder, you know.

It got unceremoniously. The plug was pulled on it for being insufficiently pro-Trump at a time when the conservative movement was deciding that it needed to make its peace with Trump. This is after Trump was elected in 2016. Yes, we're talking. So when the Weekly Standard went out of business and it shut they shut them down really quickly. It was like on Christmas Eve of, you know, 2018.

We popped up. Bill Kristol, who by that point I was working on sort of various political projects with, said, hey, can you find these people jobs? Like everybody just lost their job. And I was like, well, why don't we just make a run at. doing something real with the bulwark. And prior to this, your day job was working in Republican politics, research, communications.

So prior to 2016, it was. And actually, you know, you're right. I was still at a Republican firm at the time, although I was kind of freelancing and I was very focused on. how we saved the Republican Party from Trump. And in the early days of Trump,

That had a lot of buy in from other Republicans. There were just lots of Republicans who were also never Trump, who wanted to figure out how you get the party back to a non-Trump place. And so there were still donors. There was still appetite internally.

But that was sort of waning over time. Right. And the idea was you gather these people, you provide a space for them. And like Paz of America, which I mentioned earlier, was explicitly saying we want to be a political action group. We want to help. help mobilize people. In addition to entertaining and informing, we want to explicitly help Democrats win elections. Was that part of the motivation for you guys from the get-go or not as much?

No, I mean, it was this tussle of ideas. It was, hey, we were watching a lot of our friends, our former colleagues. to get on board with Trump. There had been this, if you go back, there's this seminal National Review cover that is just never Trump. It is like, why Trump? And it's all these essays from all of these people, Eric Erickson, all of these well-known conservatives. If you go back and look at that issue and look at the people who wrote.

How all the reasons why Donald Trump was so dangerous, at least two thirds of them are all in pro-Trumpers now. And so. I think that as is the vice president, as is the vice president who is also a part of our never Trumpers. I mean, we have dwindled a significant amount, but there that there was a period right while that happened. We often talk about it as just like. the era of the body snatchers. And so we were basically, yeah, so we were kind of having an internal debate at the time.

that I would say is no longer part of what is happening. So why did you decide to become a for-profit subscription-based business? Well, number one, there was a bunch of tools that were coming online that were allowing for that to happen. But the original skin... of The Bulwark was this sort of aggregator. And once it became a bunch of voices that were talking more about politics, there was just a need. You just sort of have to flip over. And so sort of before we were...

doing a business. We were just doing an internal conversation with conservatives about conservatism. But as it evolved into something that was more political, we felt like we needed a different type of vehicle to carry it forward. So sketch out what the business looks like today. A year ago, you told Semaphore you were going to do $5 million in 2024. Oh, did I say that?

One of you did. Yeah. We crushed that. Yeah. So so where are you at? Are you profitable today? And where does the money come from between subscriptions and YouTube and. Yeah, well, you've named basically the two. Yeah, I mean, again, so in the very beginning, we were sort of early on. pushing the subscription model. And then, you know, Substack obviously made that very easy to do. But in the early days, we still had a pretty small...

Substack following. The thing that made the biggest difference was when almost it was only a couple of years ago when we decided to turn the cameras on. And we were just a little bit early on this. Because you've been doing newsletters, you were podcasting. We were doing newsletters. We were doing podcasting. We had really put a lot of effort into our subscription business on Substack, but we were not profitable. We were still losing money.

And sorry, that's just where the investors came in. It was later. And we were we were running a deficit and we were looking for just not a lot of investment. We have not taken. much money at this point, but it was just enough to help offset the fact that we were still like most media companies, we were losing money. Over time, though, when we decided, hey, let's.

We're already making the content. And there is more resistance internally. There's a reason lots of people don't do it. You know this. You are not. You have not yet turned the camera on. Why is that? Every day I have this conversation. So check back with me in a bit.

You don't want to comb your hair. You know, you don't want to have to deal with. I don't have a lot of hair left. There's a bunch of reasons. You know, I'm running a very, very, very small media business owned and operated by me. So there's costs and there's also just operational stuff. I have to think about and I have to think about what it gets me.

Yeah. So you tell me, you tell me the benefits of video. These were the things that we considered. Like we had gone through the pandemic and we had nice steady growth sort of during the pandemic. But we would do our podcasts, you know, JVL and I do them a lot. We were in our pajamas. drinking coffee. He was always in a tank top that showed a lot of skin.

You know, we were just like, oh, if we turn the cameras on, we're going to especially me. I was like, I'm going to have to put up makeup. I'm going to have to blow dry my hair. This is a nightmare. And so we were all a little resistant to it. But we had a guy internally. His name's Barry. He's one of our sort of.

producer video guys was like, you guys got to do the YouTube, got to turn it on. And the other thing we saw is how much the main pod, the Bulwark podcast, which is our flagship podcast, if you just put the raw audio on YouTube. It was also doing pretty big numbers. And so we just said, you know what? Let's make a real push into YouTube. Everybody's turning their cameras on. Do your best on the visuals, but it doesn't have to be fancy. Like, just...

The audience knows what they're looking at. The audience knows what they're looking at. And I can't tell you the shift that it made in visibility. like literal visibility, but also just the scale of visibility. It opened us up to an entirely new audience, the audience on YouTube that consumes political content of which. It is massive. I think we were pretty surprised to find out how many people not even young people, but older people, how much they were starting to transition away from watching.

traditional news on their televisions and watching YouTube on TV and so the YouTube thing just changed everything it changed how visible we were it opened us up to an entirely new audience it allowed us to basically create like a whole other mode of content. And so now we have... And then, of course, the advertising. So there's advertising on YouTube, there's advertising on the podcasts, and then there's the subscriptions to...

Everything. And like as we've been growing, Substack's been growing, too. And so there was an earlier period where the video stuff needed to be on YouTube. But now you can do video stuff on Substack, too. And so our goal has always been to try and meet people where they are. Is the bulk of the money still coming from Substack subscriptions, and do you think that's going to stay the same? It keeps going up. Like, we've got a good line that goes up and to the right.

On Substack, we're doing, well, right now we're at like 12 and a half of ARR just on Substack. And then we don't have, we're not matching that on advertising yet, but. we're doing a lot of advertising. So without giving you our total number, because actually I would tell you, because I don't care, people keep advising me not to set these targets. If you're going to keep blowing by them, why not?

That's what I say. Two questions about video and advertising. So I've heard that you need massive scale on YouTube to actually make money. They take a big cut. And even then, because they're taking that big cut. And it's, by the way, it's still the best deal in video. because no one else is giving you anything, that it's just not that much money. You couldn't do a standalone business based on that. And then the other question related to that is,

You guys are in politics. I keep hearing that politics is a tough ask for advertisers. So how are you navigating that? There's two separate things in there. One is on YouTube, how much... money can you make on the advertising side and like the truth is they do take a big chunk of it that being said if you're at sufficient scale it is still very meaningful what you can make on it that's one piece um the second piece

Yes, it is true that advertisers stay away from politics because it is, you know, it's a sticky, troublesome thing, especially when you have podcasters who could say anything. They could they could call the president a name and rain hellfire down. You know, you just you don't know which way it could go. My counter to that. And this is where I think things are going long term.

When you have a sticky audience like we do, when you have a community that has a vibe to it, like a group of people who have come together and... They hang out together all the time and they're a growing community. Advertisers are just going to want those people. It's politically diverse. They are highly educated. They are high income. Not always, but lots of people. And I just...

More and more what I'm seeing is people trying to figure out, well, is there a show? You know, like, for example, I have the Focus Group podcast, which of our offerings across the bulwark is one of the... It's nerdier, more straightforward. It's literally about the focus groups. It's literally listening to voters. It's doing analysis. It's not like I do when I'm on with Tim and JBL and I'm, you know.

being like a hard partisan in some way. And so like that's a place for people to put their toe in the water. And that's sort of how it's the conversations are starting to go. I guess what I was trying to get at with the YouTube stuff is, do you think running a political YouTube... business can be a standalone business or is this always going to be sort of an augment to your core business and reaching more people on YouTube is good because they eventually become Substack subscribers? Yeah. So.

Actually, that last part, no. So sometimes you see the move from YouTube to Substack once we've sort of hammered them enough. And if there are people who they're like, oh, I see you guys on YouTube, but I'm also on Substack, they'll be like, that's how they'll engage. with us to get a subscription and go deeper. I actually think the bigger challenge for us is that one of the reasons we've been successful is that we made a choice to make each platform a delivery mechanism.

to reach new audience. So we want to meet people where they are on YouTube and let them subscribe to us on YouTube if that's what we want to do. For people who are newsletters, consumers, and readers, we want them to subscribe to us on Substack. For people who are pod... We want them to be able to subscribe to us on Apple and become subscribers there. I think the bigger challenge, because each of these places does allow you to do that, right? Each of these platforms has a good mechanism.

The question is, how do you tie it all together? Like at some point, how does it become? Because I would say the biggest piece of. critical feedback that we get is like, oh, we love you guys so much and I found you here. Like, I'm not on Substack. And like, but then I, so I became a subscriber on Substack, but I don't know how that translates to my YouTube subscription. And so like the messiness of that over time.

That is our central problem to solve. But I do think the thing that you're asking... It's a problem, but it's also a feature, right? It's a feature, that's right. Like the fact that you've got a million of these ways to reach people, they're not going to see everything, they're not going to know where everything is, but they also reach people.

And so in some ways, there's some part of you that's like, well, we just to be tolerant of the fact that if you're going to meet everybody where they are, it's going to be messy. And I think we've had that patience and that tolerance for this since one of the reasons we've grown so much is we kind of haven't put our eggs in one basket, in part because there's one. lesson that I learned watching a lot of new media companies come up maybe like 10 years before us.

is when they were really dependent on Facebook or they were really dependent on one platform. They got annihilated, right? They make one change and everything's done. And so I don't want to be reliant. on any of the platforms i don't want people to say oh you're a substat company or oh you're a youtube company nope

Nope, we're the Bulwark, a media company, and we distribute in all these places because we want to find you wherever you are so you can get our content. But at some point, I would also like us to be big enough that there's a central way that people can be like, here's where I get.

all my Bulwark content layered together and I can find everything clearly and all my subscriptions match up. You are a for-profit media company. Are you profitable today? We are. Oh, yeah. Good for you. Excellent. You are also a mission driven company. Do those things ever come in conflict? And if they do, how do you how do you weigh the two impulses? I don't know about so much.

conflict as you do have to balance them as interests. So we are mission first, though. But here's here's the number one way that it comes into tension is if we wanted to make a lot more money. we would paywall everything. If, I mean, if you look at most of the people who are kind of in our genre of stuff, they paywall tons of things. The Daily Wire.

paywalls, tons of things. And their model is give people a taste or give people even half. And then at some point, throw up the paywall. We do that on... A couple of products. There's the secret podcast I do with JBL. There's JBL's Triad, his daily newsletter. The vast majority of our content we give away for free. And so that's about because for us, influence matters.

And that influence only comes from people being able to access you. And so we basically, our appeal to people to become subscribers is not like... here, get this piece of content you desperately need. It's, hey, we're trying to build something that is mission-oriented. And so if you...

become a subscriber, it's less about what you get and more about riding with us, being part of our community, helping us build and get bigger, helping us reach more people who are getting the free content, which is most of it. And people see that. They see that trade. cool. And so your most popular content you want to be free and your nichiest content is the stuff you're most likely to pay. Well, is that sort of how you think about it? Yeah. Although, I mean, I will say JBL's newsletter.

is a big driver for subscribers because he writes, like 2,000 words every day. They are routinely excellent, if not sometimes overly grim and despairing. But he has, he is, I think, the... I don't want to say his content is niche because that would be unfair. The secret pod, which he and I do together, that is niche. I mean, that is for our community. He and I sit there and we wrestle openly with ideas. We fight. We try to pull things.

apart. And even that, though, you can get the first half of for free. And then the paywall drops. And so we're just not paywalling all that much because you cannot save democracy from behind a paywall. And that is a big part of what we're trying to do. We'll be right back with The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell. But first, a word from a sponsor. Hi, this is Bella Freud.

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So prior to starting the billwork, like we said, you were in politics, dealt with media a lot. You're still doing that. I'm curious about how you view sort of state of the art right now when it comes to media and politics. Who's doing a good job? Who's not?

What are people doing right? What are they routinely getting wrong? Because I'm an idiot, we're recording this on Monday, November 3rd. You guys will hear this podcast on the 5th after Tuesday's election. So we're just going to have to imagine how some of these races turn out. But who's doing a good job right now? Well, if you mean which politicians are doing... Politicians or parties, you tell me. Yeah. Who do you look at and go, they're crushing it?

Well, I don't look at the Democratic Party and think that. And that's not going to come as a surprise to anybody. I think that there is. And I think it's one of the things that's interesting is because I worked. on Republican communications. And now I work by default, basically, because I'm trying to beat back Trump and people like him. I basically have been, you know, sort of welcomed into more democratic.

side, I've gotten to see things from both perspectives. And what I can tell you is one of the biggest differences is that Republicans are straight up mercenaries and they understand how to be everywhere. all at once, talking about everything, everywhere, all at once. It's a movie I didn't like, but is a calm strategy that I endorse and live by. And so to the extent that Democrats and look, there's been a lot of discourse about this post-election. I think everybody agrees.

that Kamala Harris's play it safe strategy, not be out in the media, not be doing every single podcast was a big part of the detriment. But here's the thing that's changed. People are used to now. engaging with anyone through the screens of their phones in a way that that person is being more or less exactly who they are. And as a result, the stiffness of a politician. comes through people read it now they can see the practice nature the number one thing i hear in focus groups when they say

It's when I know that they dislike a politician is they'll say, I don't know, that person sounds like a regular politician. He sounds like a regular politician. That means and people throw around the word authenticity, but like. They just mean like, I don't trust that person. I don't think they're giving it to me straight. I want to hear somebody talk to me straight. And I think that if you turn the camera off and this person kept talking, they would say exactly the same thing, which is why.

You and I were talking right before the show and you were asking, what do we mean when Tim Miller or one of us say like, oh, we were talking about this in the green room? You're like, what green room? You guys are all sitting behind computers. And it's like, oh, well, we get to talking.

And we're like, oh, this is what we want to say on the show. Quick, start the show. And so we tend to reference, oh, we were just having this conversation in the green room. But part of it is the conversations that JVL, Tim and I have when we are all alone and no one's listening are exactly the same conversations we have. When we are on camera and people can tell that. And I think that is the future, because as technology progresses and we see lots more AI slop and everything else.

people are going to be like, what do I know is true? What feels honest? What feels like something I can relate to? And I think that parasocial relationship with people that you feel like you can trust who are being real with you is going to become more and more of the... coin of the realm. Go ahead. And do you think Republicans are inherently or have become better at this than Democrats? Or is it a handful of Democrats, a handful like Trump? No, they're better. They're better. And here's why.

Because I was with them when this happened. The big grievance among those of us on the right for decades was that we were locked out of mainstream media, that the media and the university. They were dominated culturally by the left. Even people who, you know, sort of got it in terms of what it meant to be a conservative were still doing it in a kind of anthropological.

study kind of way. Like, yes, conservatives exist. Let's look at the species of conservative because they were different from the dominant politics of the people who ran most mainstream media. So what did the right do? They went and built their own media ecosystem, first with Fox News. And then as the technology progressed, now there's like this like then they built their own other cable channels, One American News Network. And a lot of that served to push Republicans to the right. and

But like they were just there first, like because they felt shut out from the dominant thing, they built an alternative media ecosystem. And so like they had the tools and the infrastructure way earlier than the Democrats who basically did. and still do there. Look, if you're a Democrat, you read The New York Times and you read a lot. You read the newspaper. You watch not necessarily MSNBC, but maybe you watch ABC, CBS, NBC. And.

But you're talking about the delivery apparatus, not the mode and tone of how you appear, right? Like generally, I mean, until recently, if I watched a Republican politician on Fox News, they looked like and sounded like a politician with a blazer and they were stiff as well.

What am I missing here? Well, now it's sort of the Donald Trump effect of him tweeting. And at first, right, everybody's like, you can't do that. He's just tweeting out policy. Why? He's got to stop. And instead, now everybody else is like, oh, no, I'm going to tweet out my policy. Oh, I'm going to. And so they, I think, because they were close to Trump and because they embraced him as opposed to rejected him, they also embraced his communication style, which is why when.

Gavin Newsom does his like performance art as though he's Trump. Everyone knows that's fake. Everyone knows it's a parody because Democrats don't talk like that. But Donald Trump talks like that. And obviously lots of other Republicans. don't do exactly what Trump does. And in fact, it's not really working for people when they try to be just like Trump. But the broader notion and like J.D. Vance is a good example of somebody who has a totally different communication style from Trump.

But it's like... Still in the he's like he's a shit poster on the Internet. He engages with people, right? Goes back and forth, has fights with them. He goes on every single podcast that exists. He sits there. He talks about his life openly. When people said they felt like they did. didn't trust or know Kamala Harris, it's because you need to be able to sit for three hours and let people be like, I want the real measure of you. I don't you can't I won't absorb you in soundbites.

So does this just become something where just naturally politics just moves to this and both parties and everyone will end up doing this because it's the mode and it's the it's the path of success. And so everyone from now on will end up being comfortable on podcast or.

this sort of wave and then we overreact to it and then we move on to something else? Can I say that the answer is a little bit of both, I bet? Because on some level, I do think Democrats, Democrats have tried to solve this problem. by making more videos and everybody who looks at them is like those are cringe like these do not work um

And so Democrats, I think, still have a ways to go. And this goes to a deeper problem that the Democrats are experiencing on the communications front, which is they have to know what they believe. Like whether you dislike. The Republicans know what they believe. Donald Trump tells them.

what it is that they believe. And so they are like, OK, well, whatever Donald Trump says, now I'm going to go out and I'm going to defend that and I'm going to do it and I'm going to be chill about it. I'm going to talk normally and people it's going to be accessible. Donald Trump has the has the language skills of like a fifth grader. And as a result, he's very.

accessible to all people. Everybody understands them. Democrats have a long way to go before they figure out or at least start doing well the like, no, I can sit down and talk about anything. Like there's a couple of people who do it well. Pete Buttigieg does it well. Mom Donnie is doing it well right now. Like, and I'm not this is not an endorsement of people's policies, but like AOC does it well. In fact, oftentimes people with whom I disagree on policy the most.

are still some of the best communicators because they know exactly what they believe. There's a problem, I think, right now among the moderates. Where they tend to be a little like, well, what what does the research say? You know, we got Bernie Sanders, who's a million years old, who's very good on social media because he knows what he wants. He just knows what he believes. Like you ask him a question, the guy knows exactly what he wants to say. And I think that.

That is the Democrats' biggest challenge, is figuring out not what the right message is, but like, what do you believe deeply? Just say it. Say it like you would say it if you were at dinner.

During the 2024 election, I kept seeing polls listing what voters were concerned with. And broadly, you kept seeing the same thing over and over. Economy, economy, economy, cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. But so much of the discussion after the election in particular is about social issues and did this anti-trans ad sway voters. And if you watch the way the Republicans are conducting their communications now, there's very.

Little of it seems to be about the economy. What do you make of that gap? Or do you even see that gap? Oh, no, no, no, no. There's a gap. I think that the gap, though, is the reason that they're talking about the social issues post-election is that they understand that those issues hurt them. And it's true that. Which issues hurt them? Well, people get mad because I use their framing, but woke, DEI, the trans ad that Kamala Harris was in that was played over and over again, that taps into...

Like a wide frustration I hear from voters and not just voters on the right. That is like, what what is the people people people do not realize how new. the issue of trans people and sports, even though it's kind of been around for a while. If you go back... It also affects 10 people, right? Right. These are small issues. But, like, the problem was, is Democrats...

And I think this is what Democrats really struggle with is they need to be and want to be on offense on economic issues. Right. And and they want to be like, no, we're working for working class voters. But Republicans keep trapping them in a kind of. framing war where they're like, well, we're going to put you because the Republicans understand narrative dominance, they understand the attention economy. They're like, no, we're going to talk about the things that we know.

Americans care about and that where we have they have a better impression of our position than the Democrats position, which is why they talk about things like transports, immigration, crime. Like, that's why you hear them. And so until Democrats realize how to get those.

To basically moderate that. I don't think that the Democrats writ large have to be more moderate on everything. I do think there's a couple of places where it's less about moderation and more than being entirely out of step with where the vast majority of American people are. So I understand that people culturally feel like. really you know i saw kamala harris you know uh you know

presenting her genders and their pronouns, etc. I don't really like that. But again, they were telling pollsters, I care the most about the economy. Rent's too high. Groceries are too expensive. So should they have not pursued? that line of argument. Who, Democrats? No, of course they should have. I think you're asking two different things. So if you're asking why they talked about the social stuff after the election, I'm saying it's because they were...

trying to correct for it. Everybody's talking about it because they realize that was a weakness that hurt them, that the Republicans were on offense. That's why Democrats are talking about them. Are you making a different point? Well, I guess if voters were telling everyone the economy is killing us last year and I know that there's partisanship. And so now Republicans say the economy is better. But still.

Nationwide, the country said we don't like the economy. Economy hasn't changed in a meaningful way. No, Trump has his worst numbers on the economy that he's ever had. Right. So how do you come like if if I just how do you tackle that as a politician, whether you're Republican or a Democrat? I'll tell you how Democrats should tackle it, which is. Instead of saying things like human infrastructure.

Go out and start telling people you've got a plan to hire a million new community cops, a million new nurses, a million new teachers. We're going to give people jobs and we are going to rebuild the infrastructure in this country that has been crumbling. We're going to stop having culture wars in our classrooms.

We are going to focus on making sure that we teach the next generation of young people how to assess problems, how we can be more competitive against China. Like have a big, bold vision that includes. work, how people work, how people get paid more, how we rebuild the society of people who help everybody else get through and build a better country. I mean, just get yourself out of the old. I mean, listen to Democrats talk about the economy.

It's like they can't hold more than one thing in their head. Kamala Harris said, I'm going to build more houses now. Granted, that was going to take a long time, and I'm not sure it would work. I realize now what you're asking. And I've been pretty frustrated, actually, with this stream of questioning where, and this isn't about you exactly, but there's a lot of people who say, well, didn't Kamala Harris do this? I just want to laugh so hard and be like.

In 107 days, what, she completely recast herself? Like, they think that that little, just because she did that messaging right then and it didn't work in persuading the vast majority or like a plurality of voters. Like she only lost by what, 1.7 million actual like general election voters. But.

When you look at that, you think, well, she tried that messaging and it didn't work. No, she didn't. We don't people. Nobody heard that messaging. Nobody just nobody over. Do you know how long it takes to form an opinion on something to go deep? People, what they knew about. Kamala Harris was that they thought she was too close to Joe Biden, that Joe Biden was too old, that she was there watching him deceive the country about his age. This is something humans understand or in a way where.

If she just comes out and says, no, we're going to build houses, that wasn't enough to win people over. It wasn't enough time. They think she's a San Francisco progressive. People who think that just because somebody grabbed... What I think is a winning messaging formula overall and tried to do it for the last hundred days after the disastrous nature of the Biden candidacy and that she was going to be able to turn it around. That's.

You can't. And I don't think it's an indictment of the idea of running as a moderate. I just think the voters didn't buy that she was a moderate. We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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The last thing I want to talk to you about is the focus group work you do. You've been doing it a long time. It's not the only stuff you do. You do other research, but you really lean into it. Like you said, you've got a whole show dedicated to it.

It seems in some ways counterintuitive in a world where Facebook and Google print money because using really hard data, they're able to present people who want to buy things with people who want to sell things. And they're really good at matching that. And that's just.

clinical. What is what is gathering a group of humans in a room and talking to them tell you and what can you do with that information? I mean, I started doing the focus groups because I was a Republican who didn't understand why other Republicans. Liked Donald Trump. And so for me, a lot of it and I wanted to figure out if there was a way we could primary him, if there was an appetite for something different. And but it was this like jolting experience to go listen, not in the.

Not in the think tank world that I sat in and talked about education policy and our debt sustainability. It was like listening to just regular voters say. They basically it's just cheat code for understanding politics. They will tell you all the answers. Like I was like, well, why? Why did you vote for Donald Trump? And it was like, oh, I really hated Hillary Clinton. I thought I'd give him a chance. Oh, I watched The Apprentice.

And had for a long time. And so a lot of times people look at polling. Here, I'll give you an example. I'll give you a real world example right now today, something that I know from listening to voters. There is a bunch of new polling coming out because, as you said, we're going into an election on Tuesday.

And there's not just polling about Virginia and New Jersey. There's polling coming out everywhere about Donald Trump's approval ratings and the generic ballot. And a bunch of them have the Democrats.

now are ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot. So people, they're just saying, you know, who do you want to be in charge now? And more people are saying Democrats. I'd rather have generic. If you had a generic Democrat, would you vote for them over a generic Republican? So the Democrats are at least in one of them five. points up, but they are ahead in almost all of them. So that's a good trend line for Democrats. But then you dig one layer deeper and they ask the question, you know,

What is the favorability, unfavorability of the Democratic Party? And what is the favorability, favorability, unfavorability of the Republican Party? And the Republicans are performing much better than Democrats. So why, if the generic ballot is 5% more, are the Republicans 20 points ahead in perception of their party?

Well, I can answer that from listening to the voters, which is that the people who are skeptical of the Democratic Party now are Democrats. Democrats are so mad at the Democratic Party for being. unable or unwilling to take on Trump in a meaningful way. And over time you're going to see the numbers for Democrats probably go up a little bit because they haven't caved on the shutdown yet. And that's the kind of thing that voters are saying.

I want to see more of that. I want to see Democrats fight. So in this instance, is focus group telling you something before you see it in polls? Is it telling you something that a poll can't uncover? And do the two ever conflict? Is this someone in your focus groups are telling you X, but the polling data says Y? Yeah, that does happen. I think it's more that if polling can tell you the what.

focus groups can tell you the why. You know, they can tell you what people are thinking. Like, what do they focus on? They focus on immigration. And the focus groups can tell you, like, Why do they focus on this? So I could tell you that one of the reasons Donald Trump has been so successful on the immigration, on the issue of immigration, is it's not just immigration. Immigration for Americans who care about it. And that goes including like.

Democrats, certainly swing voters, is that they tie immigration to drugs like fentanyl, even though it's actually not something really that comes across the other border. Terrorism. crime, all of these. And then also the idea of like America first, which is not a slogan. It's a...

declaration of prioritization and people saying, why would somebody else get something that I should be getting? Which is, again, people are like, oh, they bust people into my city and they got a hotel room and they got, you know. $5,000 card. I didn't get that, and I'm an American citizen. It taps into, it sort of collapses the space between the issue of crime, drugs, immigration, terrorism, and it plugs into people's fear centers.

Because people can access their compassion centers for immigrants, but not until their safety needs are met. And so when people feel under threat, they can't access the compassion that is sort of need to have this sort of like, yes, people should come here. And if they're going to be killed in their their home. And they should become, you know, so like that's a good example of where I feel like you just get a much deeper, richer picture.

What was the hardest thing for you to hear in a focus group or the most surprising thing where you're like, well, obviously the world works this way. People see the world this way. And your focus group said, nope, you got it wrong. Well, I mean, the hardest thing is listening to people talk about why a woman shouldn't be president. That one always stresses me out. You get a lot of dudes being like, well, what if she's on the reg? Like, can you trust it?

Women don't say that? Well, women definitely say they don't necessarily think a woman should be president. They usually don't say it's because of their periods. But they might say things like, I think they're too emotional. And so I think some of that stuff can be, this is a contrast where. You want people to be their most authentic, like you want them to tell you the truth. And but, you know, what people believe.

is when they start saying racist, sexist, homophobic things or in any way dumping on any particular group of people. And like, that's always, that's never that fun to listen to, but it is. illustrative. It's also like, oh, I've hit the vein. We're now in truth time. This is what we hear. In terms of the most shocking thing, I will say...

The amount of contradiction you get from voters, even in a very short span of time, can be disorienting. So, for example, I remember the first time I heard a woman say, well. I'm pro-life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose. And I was like, what is that? And then I heard it all the time. Like everybody said it, all these people. And it was basically, you know, what they're saying is I personally am pro-life. I come from, but I don't want them to change this law.

And that was a shocking revelation because when you get polling, they're just like, they present things in binary ways, right? Pro-life, pro-choice. And you're like, actually, people are much more complicated than that.

And sometimes people use, we'll say complicated, they mean the voters don't understand what they're talking about. But in this case, it seems quite clear, right? They don't want to have an abortion. They don't think you should have it. They also don't think the government should prevent you from having it or something like that.

And there's a lot of those types of big picture contradictions that I think our political discussions really flatten in ways that keep people, they have people making the wrong strategic choices.

Sarah Longwell, I guess we're going to end this conversation on abortion, which is not where I thought we'd go, but it's been a great conversation. Great conversation. Thanks for having me. Thank you for your time. You can find Sarah on The Bulwark and all of the many platforms The Bulwark exist on. Can't miss me. Thanks again.

Thanks again to Sarah Longwell. I really liked that one. Thanks to our advertisers. Thanks to my excellent producer, Charlotte Silver. And thanks to you guys. See you next week.