Sarah Longwell, let's start by listing your accomplishments.

Do it.

Your CV, if you will.

You are the publisher of the bulwark.

Yes.

You are the host of the Focus Group podcast. Yes. You are the host of the Focus Group

podcast. Sure. You've got a new book coming out in September called How to Eat an Elephant. One voter at a time. One voter at a time. That's a sub title. That's right. I'm glad we got that a whole end. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the press box. Yeah, thanks for having me. I want to start with focus groups because you have so much fun with focus groups on your podcast.

For people who might not be... Yeah, thanks for having me. I want to start with focus groups because you have so much fun with focus

groups on your podcast. For people who might not be familiar, how do you put together a focus

group of interested or disinterested voters? Yeah, so there's actually people who do this

professionally, focus group facilities, focus group companies. And so we work with a bunch of different companies across the country. And it was funny, in the beginning, when I started doing focus groups, it was pre-pandemic. And so I was flying everywhere. You'd fly and you'd sit behind the glass and it'd be like, you'd on a pleat show, where it's like the mirrored glass and you're sitting behind it, eating M&Ms, listening to the people

talk.

But once the pandemic hit, we asked these focus group facilities, hey, can you help us do this on Zoom? Because Zoom was like the thing then. And so that's how we do all of them now. And it's allowed us to do them basically at scale, right? So you can do them four times a week. You can mix and match different people. You say, hey, I want women who are

college educated in households that make over $100,000 from swing states. And you can find,

you know, and then they curate them, and then you can put them in a room, but you can also do,

hey, I want men and women, or I want non-college, white voter, you know, and that allows you to just take the different demographics that you see in polling, because the polling will tell you the what, you know, 87% of people, you know, white people think this or, you know, 50% of black people think this, that's fine, but if you want to know why they think it, you've got to go talk to them and you've got to sort of say, explain your thinking here, explain why you approve or disapprove of this. The other thing you can do, and this is really helpful right now, is you can give people sort of a quiz or we call them screeners and you can say, okay, you voted for Trump. Rate him right now is doing a good job, a bad job, a neutral job, or like a very bad job. And then you can find what we would call Trump disapprovers. And so right now when you see Trump's disapproval rating, you know, at these new highs, you can say, okay, well, why are people disapproving of him? And so that's what focus groups are. And you get to puppet master these,

like in the Truman Show? Do you watch live and say, hey, prompt, ask that question? Yeah, so it's actually, I sit there with my phone. And so I've got moderators that are doing them now. I used to moderate them myself and I'm texting them and I'm like, follow up on this or, hey, that person hasn't talked in a while. I'll ask them. So I'm not puppet mastering so much as I do.

That was kind of an evil word, wasn't it? Yeah,. I'll ask them. So I'm not puppet mastering so much as I do.

That was kind of an evil word, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's funny. So you can say, oh, follow up on this, ask that question. Get a little more out of that person because they seem like an interesting person. That's fascinating. What have you been hearing about J.D. Vance in focus groups are Republicans? Well, this is why I think focus groups are so great. Okay, so I wrote a

piece in the Atlantic a few months ago that said, hey, I'm hearing something in the focus groups, strange new respect for Marco Rubio. And it was funny because I always thought, look, they're never going to go for a pre-Trump sort of Republican figure. And that's, I see Marco Rubio as somebody from the before times.

Back in my days as a Republican, Marco Rubio, I supported Marco Rubio going into sort of 2015,

2016. He was my guy. I thought he was the future of the Republican Party. I would never vote for him now

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