The Head vs the Heart in Big Ten Country (with Tim Alberta)
The Focus Group Podcast
The Bulwark
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2022
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta joins Sarah to discuss whether Ohio is really more Trump+8 than R+8 — and to debate Tim Ryan's chances against J.D. Vance. Meanwhile, in Michigan's governor's race, Gretchen Whitmer hits Tudor Dixon on her biggest vulnerability — abortion — while facing lingering resentment over her Covid response.
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Transcript
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| 0:14.5 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell publisher of the bull work and this week we've got a big 10 focus group matchup with swing groups |
| 0:20.6 | in swing states Ohio and Michigan. |
| 0:23.0 | In Michigan, we have a group of swing voters, the people who voted for Trump in 2016, |
| 0:28.0 | but not in 2020. |
| 0:30.0 | Talking about the governor's race between incumbent Gretchen Whitmer and Republican Tudor Dixon. |
| 0:35.6 | And in Ohio, we've got a very interesting group, all women, that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but they also voted for Democratic |
| 0:45.2 | Senator Sherritt Brown in 2018 just two years earlier. And if Tim Ryan is |
| 0:50.5 | going to pull off a big buck-eye upset of JD Vance in the Senate race, |
| 0:55.0 | those are the voters he needs to win over. |
| 0:58.0 | There have been a lot of summer polls with Tim Ryan leading Vance, |
| 1:02.0 | sometimes by large margins, but as we will discuss, |
| 1:05.7 | elections are not decided in August. We'll also hit a couple big topics like |
| 1:10.3 | Biden's student loan forgiveness and abortion. |
| 1:13.0 | To do all of this, we're going back to one of our favorite guests, |
| 1:17.0 | the medium of the Midwest, Tim Alberta, writer for the Atlantic. |
| 1:21.0 | Hey Tim, thanks for being here. |
| 1:22.0 | Sarah, put that on my gravestone. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:25.0 | Did you like that? We actually talked about that in the office. I was like, he needs like a name. |
| 1:30.0 | We came up with the medium of the Midwest. I was going to call you the Midwest man like Florida man but I love I've been called a lot worse so really this is I don't have any tattoos but were I to choose to go get one today that would be the one seed put it on your body I like it |
| 1:46.5 | Okay, so we rarely do we have a guest come back as quickly as we have you come back |
| 1:51.8 | But whenever we're gonna to talk about Michigan, |
| 1:54.6 | there's really just nobody better. And so we wanted to do this Midwest episode. |
... |
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