S6 Ep18: Sarah’s First Focus Groups

The Focus Group Podcast

The Bulwark

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sarah started doing focus groups in 2018 and 2019 hoping to save the Republican Party from Trump—by finding a primary challenger who wouldn’t embarrass themselves. Instead, she discovered voters who were fine with Trump, and she picked up a years-long addiction that turned into this show. We listen to audio from Sarah’s earliest focus groups with reluctant Ohio Trump voters, and not-so-reluctant New Hampshire Trump voters. Then, Sarah and producer Conor Kilgore take some listener questions and look ahead to 2026 races.

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Transcript

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0:31.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark,
0:41.2	and this week we are plugging back into 2026 with a bit of a history lesson for you guys,
0:47.3	not the history of the world, just the history of focus groups. So instead of playing our
0:51.8	focus group audio about the news of the day, because there's going to be
0:54.9	plenty of time for that as we get into the new year and election year, we're going to look back
1:00.3	at the origin story of our focus groups because I think it's going to tell you a bit about
1:05.3	why we do these and what we hope you get out of them when you listen to them, especially as
1:10.0	we head into an election season full of focus grouping.
1:13.7	And you guys are always emailing me to be like, why do you do these? And what's it going to tell us?
1:19.5	And these aren't good at predicting things. And that's not the point. We want to explain what the point is, why we do them and why we think they're useful.
1:28.0	So we're going to walk through some never-before-heard focus group audio from some of the very first groups I ever did when we started this whole thing.
1:37.5	And I think what you're going to hear is almost like my early stages of grief as I was breaking up with the Republican Party and realizing
1:45.9	that Republican voters were okay with the direction of the Republican Party, something that I
1:53.6	as a lifelong Republican was not. So I've got the show's producer, Connor Kilgore, with me.
1:59.1	He's been on before. And so he's going to turn the tables on me a
2:02.8	little bit, ask me some questions. I actually don't even know what the questions are, but they are
2:06.6	going to be sort of the essential ones about how we do the focus groups, why we do the focus groups,
	...

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