Sleepwalking Toward Catastrophe? (with Whit Ayres)
The Focus Group Podcast
The Bulwark
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Focus Group podcast is BACK, with a twist: We're releasing The Bulwark's first-ever poll of Republican primary voters where we're trying to figure out just how big the "Always Trump," "Maybe Trump," and "Never Trump" buckets are among Republican primary voters. For that, we brought in Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who joins Sarah to stack our poll results up against the focus groups we've done since the election.
Links:
Poll by The Bulwark and North Star Opinion Research of Republican Primary VotersPoll Toplines from Whit Ayres
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to season three of the focus group podcast. I'm Sarah |
| 0:15.2 | Longwell publisher of the bulwark and we're kicking off 2023 by talking |
| 0:20.4 | about 2024. I'm sorry. So I got to tell you I was not planning on |
| 0:26.0 | bringing the show back this early in the year but I basically couldn't not tell |
| 0:30.4 | you guys what I have been seeing in my focus groups since the |
| 0:33.0 | 2022 midterms. Future episodes will drop on Saturdays per usual but I |
| 0:38.1 | couldn't wait to get this episode into the world. Now ever since summer of 2022, basically around the January 6th |
| 0:46.8 | committee, we noticed a real drop in enthusiasm for Trump's 2024 candidacy |
| 0:51.8 | among voters who had just voted for him in the 2016 and 2020 |
| 0:55.8 | general elections. And that phenomenon has accelerated since Trump and his gang of |
| 1:01.1 | election deniers whiffed the 2022 midterms. |
| 1:04.7 | So we're going to listen to a bunch of those kind of maybe Trumpers today. |
| 1:10.2 | But I knew that there was still a cohort of Trump diehards out there. |
| 1:15.0 | So we started to screen for two-time Trump voters who also viewed him very favorably. |
| 1:21.0 | And those voters, they are partying like it is 2015. They still love Trump |
| 1:26.0 | and no other GOP candidates are turning their heads. We're also going to hear from |
| 1:30.4 | those voters today, the always trumpers. |
| 1:33.0 | But there was also this question that was nagging me. |
| 1:36.0 | I wanted to know just how large this group of always trumpers was, |
| 1:41.0 | because the size of that number matters a great deal when assessing |
| 1:45.4 | Trump's ongoing political viability even at this moment of real weakness for the |
| 1:50.0 | former president. But I couldn't get that number with focus groups. |
... |
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