Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.

And today, one of my favorite pods every single month, we're checking in with swing voters. These are voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020

and then switched to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 in all year. Thanks to you and Mara, Ashley.

Thanks to you both. We've been hearing from them from different battleground states. So Ashley,

this group of voters that we're hearing from today is from North Carolina. What else can you

tell us about them?

Right. So seven of the voters who participated identified as independence, four said they were Republicans and one identified as a Democrat. This group was maybe a little more conservative

leaning compared to some of the other states we've covered. It's particularly in the Midwest.

Not surprising North Carolina is in the south, just a more

conservative state. Although I should say the electorate of North Carolina is pretty interesting.

It's about if you look at just how people are registered, it's a state that's like, you know,

a third independence, a third Republican and a third Democratic, but there is a considerable

amount of Republican control. So anyways, and this was a group that these two focus groups were

online, which is important. And they were put together, like these were conducted by messaging

and market research firms in Gages and Sago, which works with NPR on the Swingvoter Project.

And we should say, what we always say every month, this is not a statistically significant

sample. We're not doing a focus group to find out what people think. We have polls for that. We are doing the focus group to have them describe why they think that way and to get some insight into their thinking. But this is not statistically significant. There were only 12 people there. Okay. So, but to your point, Mara, polls have found that the president, President Trump, is at his historically unpopular right now. What did this group, this small group of voters say about him?

Well, don't forget, these are all voters who voted for Biden, then Trump and 24. They don't like the war in Iran. They don't like the ballroom. They don't like the economy. They don't like a lot of things that are going on. But their support for Trump and their support for Republicans is very sticky. It's hard to see what would dislodge them at this point. Here's Steve. Steve is a self-described independent.

He's done a lot of what he said he was going to do, immigration,

rule of law, doing things for the working families through his tax revisions and stuff like

that, voting integrity, what he's done with NATO so far. And yeah, the Iran war has been tough,

...