Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast.

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark, and this is our final show before the election.

We're in the home stretch of this campaign, and I am getting the same questions from reporters and people

I run into and friends. They're saying, what can you tell me about your focus groups? Is there

any late movement? What can we learn? And the truth is, if the polls aren't moving very much,

there will be even fewer noticeable changes in the focus groups, at least not in sort of the

head-to-head vote tallies.

But that's not what focus groups are for. They're not going to tell you who is going to win,

but they can tell you why someone might win. So this week, we're going to walk through some of the

key reasons this election could go either way from what the key persuadable blocks I talked to have told us

over the last year or so. And we'll leave the movement detection to the pollsters. My guest today is

Ron Brownstein, senior editor at the Atlantic and one of the smartest people anywhere in American

politics. Never miss him. Ron, thanks for being here.

Hey, Sarah. This is the final, I mean, no pressure. No pressure. It's like being the last guest on Carson.

I really wanted it to be you because you're somebody I agree with the most in what you write.

And so I was excited to have you on. And you have a piece fresh off the

presses about one of the things that I think is the most interesting phenomenon of the current

election, which is the split between the Electoral College and the national popular vote

and how what we saw in 2016 and 2020 might be dwindling. Yeah. Okay. So explain how you see

the disconnect between the current

swing states, especially sort of the northern Rosbilt states, and places like New York, California,

Texas, and Florida that have been moving toward Trump. Yeah, first of all, great to be with you,

...