The Assignment with Audie Cornish

In our last episode, I referred to the Democratic Party's examination of why they lost the presidential election as a vivisection. Essay upon essay upon tweet upon pontification about what went wrong. And if you're one of the people who worked on or supported the Kamala Harris campaign, it goes even further than that.

You know, mainly people have been coming as though they're doing a wellness check on me. Like, I think people are just they I don't know why they think I might be taking this harder than the others, but I was at my kid's birthday party and another parent came up to me and was like, Can I hold you? And I was like, I'm good, I'm good.

'Today we're bringing back Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. The media company describes itself as having no partisan loyalties, no tribal prejudices. It's best known as the intellectual home of the never-Trump movement. So with Trump's triumphant return: Where Do Never Trumpers Go From Here? I'm Audie Cornish. And this is the Assignment. You know, at one point, Sarah Longwell moderated a town hall for the Harris campaign. It featured Liz Cheney. It was in front of swing voters in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

So I am also a lifelong Republican. I currently run a group called Republican Voters Against Trump. You may see our ads. We're running a lot of them in Pennsylvania. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Did you think based on what I have learned from my focus groups, this is the right conversation for Democrats to be having with this group of voters?

I think that their campaign made the calculation, and I think it was a perfectly strategically valid one to say, all right, instead of trying to get a voter to do two things, which is both get up off the couch and vote and also vote for me, we're going to go to this pool of people that we know are going to vote, that we know don't like Trump and try to get them to vote for me.

But we aren't here to play Monday morning quarterback. It's her work, both as a strategist and the host of her podcast, The Focus Group, that I'm interested in because she's always trying to understand how the average voter thinks about politics.

I mean, I also spent close to $40 million on persuasion efforts. Yeah, I was involved in all the ways sort of as an analyst, as somebody who does focus groups, although I've always done the focus groups to inform the campaigns that I run. But it is the thing that people talk to me about the most. And so it's funny, I do all this other stuff, but what people really know me for now is the focus groups. But I, I was invested in this campaign pretty heavily. So obviously, I am extraordinarily disappointed. I am not. Look, I do think that Trump is an incredibly dangerous person. There's a reason I threw myself into it the way that I did. But the results were pretty decisive. Not mandate level decisive, but there's no ambiguity in them. And so there is no choice now but to start looking forward.

One of the things I love about the focus group is that and I think your approach to it and we talked about this last time, is that your your your heart is in inquiry, which I like. Right? Like, obviously bias towards inquiry and curiosity. Do you kind of listen to the voices, your the conversations you're listening to now with different ears?

I you know, I oftentimes it's not even the new conversations. I go back and replay the old conversations after I know the results of things and then often hear them with different ears. And so one of the things that I think I missed a little bit is that there was such a big move when Kamala Harris took over for Biden, like the level of dismal, just dismal focus groups that we were having around Joe Biden, certainly after the debate, but even before. I mean, you just do the swing voter groups and you'd be like, man, I don't know what we're going to do here. Like, God, I hope they hate Trump enough because they really don't like Joe Biden, really think he's too old and really don't have any sense of what he's done. No appreciation for his record. And so when Kamala Harris took over, there was like a such a tone shift, a big tone shift in a way that I really made me think she had a shot to win this. But even in those focus groups with the swing voters, you are always still losing one person maybe to back to Trump. And so, you know, when people would say to me, you know, what do you think's going to happen based on the focus groups? I was like, look, I could explain either outcome based on the focus groups. When you lose 1 or 2 people in every group. You know, at some point you look at it and say, man, that's kind of your margin.

When you think about the Republican Party. Now, as you said, it was a decisive move in the direction of Trump. So are you politically homeless? Because I think going in, I thought, well, all those Nikki Haley voters have to go somewhere, right? Those those never Trump voters. They're going to go somewhere. I'm sort of wondering for you, do you feel like you know where they went? Do you feel even less at home in the Republican Party of today?

Well, let me be clear about one thing, which is I haven't felt at home in the Republican Party for, I don't know, since 2016. I mean, look, I like to think of myself as a renegade independent, Audie. And this like forced binary of like you have to be a Democrat or Republican doesn't feel like great to me personally.

Or a lot of voters.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't feel like a Democrat, but I feel like the Republican Party is the most dangerous version of itself that it could be. And I certainly want to be a part of figuring out how to both do as much harm mitigation as we can during the Trump years, but also how do you defeat this version of the Republican Party? And so it's less about like, am I a Democrat or a Republican? It's more about where does one focus the work?

There's also this question of political identity in general. Do we take away from this election that that supersedes a lot of things? Or do we take away from this election moving in the direction of Trump because of all the things you've laid out? But that doesn't necessarily mean this is a personal identity for people.

Look, I think that so many of the people who voted for Trump are doing it because they've decided that they are Republicans. I would use the term more like red pilled. You can look at who Trump embraced and made the big surrogates in his election. It's RFK Jr. It's Tulsi Gabbard. It's Elon Musk. And one of the things that all of these people have in common, both with each other and with Trump, is that they all used to be Democrats and they've kind of put together a new coalition in the Republican Party that is a sort of multiracial, working class coalition that I think has a bunch of elements of more populist economics. More. They don't like a regular politician. You know, it's combined with this sort of Barstool Sports, wellness, like there's all these new facets that have nothing to do with limited government, free markets and American leadership in the world. In fact, quite the opposite. And so I think a lot of our terms are failing us because they use an outdated frame for what these coalitions look like. And what Donald Trump was able to do is bring more black voters, way more Hispanic voters, more voters of all kinds, more voters in the urban areas. Like the one group that kind of held actually are white, college educated voters to whom the Liz Cheney might appeal. Like that's the only group that actually was held by Kamala Harris. Everybody else slid toward Trump. And I think it has a lot less to do with being a Republican and a lot more to do with Trump and the coalition that he's put together. And also some like very some things that have nothing to do with ideology but the idea of, you know, Trump as a businessman and somebody who is going to do good things for the economy and not a regular politician. Those are the things I've heard over and over again. And I think there's a lot of young voters who bought into that.

'One of the big criticisms that I think Trump Republicans have of the Democratic Party is the idea that racial, gender, these identities trump everything else, no pun intended, and that this kind of groupthink is a big problem. And you hear a lot of this, frankly, in the Democratic hand-wringing, like how do you go forward talking about these issues if you've now been deemed a scold, a nag, preaching, condescending, all of these phrases? And I'm wondering kind of how you're thinking about that, you know, give given sort of what you hear from voters?

Yeah. I mean, look, there's a reason that Donald Trump put almost $100 million behind the ad that said, you know, Kamala is for them, Trump is for you. It is an anti trans attack on one level. On another level. It had Kamala Harris on tape talking about taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery for prisoners. And so it had all the things in there. It actually isn't just about the trans issue. It's generally about the idea that Democrats are out of touch. And you hear this all the time. And I do think that it was a problem for Kamala Harris that she couldn't address the ad. Right. Like she couldn't go out and say, no, no, that's not what I think. Like, I think she felt kind of between a rock and a hard place. And so they just ignored it. And I'm not sure there's anything they could have done, you know, in the immediate term to deal with that fact. But I do think it just goes to this bigger problem with this idea of kind of the Democratic scold is something that has very much permeated the culture. Like, you just do hear it.

You also heard it from James Carville many months ago with his term when he said, I've got a feeling there's one too many sort of preachy females in the Democratic Party. And the reason why I'm interested in this going forward is so much of the sort of moral argument that Democrats have had against Trump are about these issues that that Trump and that Republicans who support him, you hear described as racist, misogynist, transphobic. There's like there is a moral component that says Democrats are not those things, to be those things, you know, obviously is bad. But Democrats are saying that they are a sort of moral good to be standing next to. And that seems like going to be a really complicated argument going forward.

Yeah. And I do think there's got to be a way to I mean, like there's got to be a world in which some of those tough conversations can happen because Kamala Harris should have been able to distance. I mean, there were two taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners like two total. And it's like such a small issue, but it codes to like a bigger cultural problem the Democrats have. And I do think that it's bigger than just saying, like I see a lot of people being like, we're just going to throw trans people under the bus. And I think that's not right. I actually think it's less about excluding who you pay attention to and more about being much more inclusive about who you pay attention to. So you have to show, like working class voters you're for them, too. Right. And I think there's it's what's getting away from Democrats is that people think that they are for like these small, smaller niche groups of people and smaller niche on these sort of cultural issues without addressing the bigger picture problems of economics, immigration. It's not about excluding people. It's about being much more focused on the problems that impact the vast majority of people. Now, I also say, though, Kamala Harris, it's not like she made trans issues a big part of her campaign. Republicans made it a part of her campaign. The issue was not that she leaned into it hard. The issue was that she couldn't distance herself from it because the party doesn't know how to how to talk about these things in a way that I think makes sense to a majority of voters and also hasn't figured out how to convince the majority of voters that they have an agenda or even like a cultural focus that feels right to them.

What you said about this issue of trans rights is fascinating about her not being able to answer because the perception is she couldn't really answer because then she would anger the loudest activist in the community on that issue. And you could say the same thing about the war in Gaza. You could say the same thing about a lot of different issues. Right. The idea that your professional Democratic politician is, in fact, sort of hemmed in because it's tough to bear internal dissent.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like a lot of it is just Democrats having to have these conversations among themselves and figuring out like how they can manage their coalition. I mean, look, I'm not a Democrat, but Democrats have a way bigger hill to climb in managing their coalition, like Republicans are starting to get a taste of it because they have a more unruly coalition than they used to. Mainly because they have to hold together factions of old traditional Republicans and the new MAGA Republicans. That's a pretty uncomfortable alliance. But the number of stakeholders in the Democratic Party and the coalition you've got to cobble together to have a winning coalition makes Democrats and how they handle issues just really complicated for them.

'One of the things I think we firmly understand now is the idea of anti-establishment. When I look at the so-called gender gap and look at the sort of male voter side of that, so many of the avatars of it, whether it be, as you mentioned, Elon Musk or Joe Rogan, etc., the thing that stands out is the idea that they present themselves as anti-establishment and. We're going to go into a couple of years where the Trump Republican Party is the establishment. How do you think of that term as establishment?

'I mean, when I think about it, I think about it's the thing that Donald Trump ran against that taught everybody a new lesson about politics. That we are in a moment that is more populist and therefore much more anti-establishment. And that's why I'm not calling a lot of these people who voted for Trump Republicans so much as I'm saying red pilled because in sort of the I know that's like an online term, but it basically is this idea that if you're like so frustrated with the elites and the media and wokeism that you just have to react to them and reject it. But the thing that is the coin of the realm now, it's not just being anti-establishment, it's that they want authenticity. Like they want the voters now. And it's a change in our media environment and the way that we interact on our phones and the way that we feel like we need to know people and connect with people in order to like and vote for them. That doesn't mean we need to agree with those people. And so I think that one of the ways that Donald Trump has really affected the culture is that people are like, well, I like him because he's not a regular politician. And when he goes on Joe Rogan and he talks for three hours, like he doesn't sound like Hitler, he sounds like a guy who seems like pretty normal to me. And I think that Democrats are going to have to figure out that a lot of the sort of poll tested answers, I mean, the way the Democrats test everything they are missing the biggest thing, the biggest thing, which is just like a gut level authenticity where people are like, I feel like I know this person. I feel like I understand this person. I don't even maybe agree with this person 100%, but I feel like they're giving it to me straight. Feel like they're telling me I'll tolerate.

Yeah.

And I don't mean me, but I mean voters, they will tolerate a lot of.

No, no, I know you're saying it. You're describing somebody who is uncompromising about who they are.

That's right.

And that that has some appeal.

I think that's right. And I think that Donald Trump like the thing that they did in this campaign that I really think was one of their smarter things that they did was like they were everywhere all at once. Right. They were on every podcast. They went in all kinds of nontraditional spaces. And Kamala Harris kind of put her toe in that. But look, she ran a very good technical campaign. If it was 2004. But that's not the environment that we live in anymore. We live in an environment where voters have different expectations of what a candidate's going to do, and they know that candidates are lying to them. Like they feel like you hear this all the time. They're just like, well, I think they're just saying what they're saying to get my vote. And I think because she sounded so different even from 2019 and like voters just never got this great sense of her, didn't like hater or dislike her. They're just like, I don't feel like I know enough about her. I don't feel like I know her. Whereas Donald Trump, they're like, I know exactly who this guy is. And I think Democrats are going to have to figure out how to start connecting with voters in ways that are much more authentic.

'I'm talking with Sarah Longwell about the never-Trump movement and the future of the GOP. Stay with us.

I want to look forward for the bulwark, which, you know, got so much attention this election cycle and drew such a big audience. Tell me how you're thinking about going forward, because obviously after 2016, groups like yours came into being. Is there that same energy to reclaim the Republican Party going forward?

'No, I think certainly from the board's perspective and mine, we have been chroniclers and observers and explainers of this moment in Republican politics because we are people who came from the center right, saw what was happening to the Republican Party and said, we oppose this. We are against this. Both Trump, but also the effects he unleashed on the party. And I think one of the things that we've understood actually much faster than a lot of other people who were sort of anti-Trump on the center right or conservatives who are anti-Trump, is that the party was never going back, like after 2020 and after we saw the way that Trump could dominate the primaries in 2022, like there was nobody who should have looked at what was happening and said like, we might return to the party of Mitt Romney. No chance. The party is fundamentally changed. Its coalition is fundamentally changed. And I think for the bulwark, the reason that people are interested in us, I hope, is not because we are anti-Trump, but because we provide a really honest perspective on what's happening to the Republican Party and the Republican movement, and also because the quality of the writing and analysis is really, really strong.

And you know, Sarah, to be clear, like I totally get why people are into it. Do you know mean that it is not just about being Never Trump. But I also understood it as kind of also an intellectual support and cheering section, even for those lawmakers who were Republican, but who were holding on for dear life oppositional to Trump, right. Or trying to strike a more independent pose within the Republican Party. A) Do you think any of those lawmakers are left and B) like, can they survive this next four years?

There is basically one left, and that is Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. I would say most of them are gone. You know, Mitt Romney is retiring. Liz Cheney obviously lost her race. Just about everybody who voted to impeach Donald Trump is gone. There's a couple people left. There's, you know, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. But, you know, there isn't this wing of the party. I think we have basically been politically realigned out like now. We've had many cycles where the people that we've been talking to have had to make a decision to get on board with the current Republican Party or to, you know, walk away. Whether it and that doesn't necessarily mean becoming a Democrat, but it certainly means, you know, being in opposition to the party and you're sort of politically realigned out.

What are the three questions you want to answer in the next four years? Like, I don't know if you're going to continue talking to voters through focus groups, but I know you went into this previous four years with some questions like when you're talking to a voter from now on, what is it that you want to know about them?

Okay. So Trump has to govern now. And so I think all the time in terms of opportunities for persuasion. And so I think my one of my biggest questions is, will voters say as Trump begins to govern, yeah, this is what I wanted. Or will voters say, well, this isn't what I meant at all. I didn't want this at all. And then where are the opportunity is to sort of show people that Donald Trump was the wrong choice and lead them to reject what it is that Donald Trump is selling? That's one question. I think the other is I'll be interested to see if a lot of Republican voters suddenly decide that the economy is great. Like, I know that the pain around price points was real. But I will be interested in the extent to which Donald Trump's communications efforts and his ability to try to kind of shape his own reality works with voters, and that everybody suddenly is like, wow, the economy is really good. I think it's on fire when essentially he'll have the same economy that Joe Biden did. And I wonder how voters like Democratic voters are going to figure out what it means to put their coalition back together and whether or not they will be willing to forgo some of the parts of the resistance over the last eight years in order to forge a broader coalition that can win elections, because that will mean having some uncomfortable conversations. And it will be interesting to see whether Democratic voters feel like having those conversations like right now. Doesn't feel like 2016 or 17 when people were in resistance mode. It does feel like people are in introspection mode and it'll be interesting to see how those conversations filter down to sort of Democrat voters and whether or not they sort of double down and say like, Nope, we live in a sexist, racist country and this sucks and I hate everything. Or whether they're like, okay, we got to beat these guys. Like, what can we do to expand our coalition?

What I love about these questions, let's say the first one, is that, you know, there is an argument going around that says this is what people voted for. Everything that he said, whether it be mass deportations, for example. That's when people are talking about a lot right now. And it's interesting to me that one of your questions is, well, actually, is it, you know, in real time getting an answer from them as these things start to play out?

I don't love. There's sort of a strain of this conversation that is like, well, you know, it's almost like punishing voters for the choice. Like it sort of really welcomes the idea that voters will be harmed by the choices of electing Trump. And I don't like that because I don't think that posture should be. I read there was a column. It's actually quite a good one by this guy, Nick Catoggio that I like to read. That was kind of like a you broke it, you bought it. And there's a J.V. Last my colleague at the Bulwark has written versions of this where it's like, okay, guys, this is what you wanted. You actively voted for it. And now. I hope, you know, you enjoy all of these different things that are coming your way. Yeah, I read that a lot. Yeah, I would just shift it slightly to say. These are the moments where you can reach voters because the consequences are personal to them, and those are the opportunities for persuasion. And during the last few years, to really persuade voters was actually really hard because they were so deeply frustrated with the state of the country and they were so frustrated with Biden and his record that, like, I think it's very important that everybody orient themselves now to the work of showing people not I told you so, but hey, look, this is what this meant. Like, this is what he meant. This is what he said he was going to do. You thought he wouldn't do this, but he is. And so doesn't like shouldn't we reject this now? Shouldn't we reject it in 2026? Overwhelmingly, I do think this is the opportunity for persuasion and we shouldn't miss it because we want people to just suffer the consequences of their actions. I don't think that's that helpful.

Well, Sarah Longwell, thank you so much for digging into this with me. I really appreciate it. Because honestly, there's like a pile of hot takes out there. I feel like I'm swimming in people's hot takes. And it was I really love sitting down and kind of making sense of it with you.

'Yeah, you ask great questions and I will say beware of hot takes, because mostly hot takes are just people trying to figure out how whatever just happened, like fits their priors. And in a lot of ways, this election was a pretty normal one in the sense that people thought Kamala Harris was the incumbent. We've had a lot of like there's anti-incumbent sentiment across the world. All the incumbents are losing. So a lot of anti-incumbent sentiment here. It has a lot to do with inflation. And so people shouldn't despair that, like, it'll never swing back. It's not the last election, I promise.

Sarah Longwell is a political strategist and publisher of the news and opinion website The Bulwark.

That's it for this episode of The Assignment, a production of CNN Audio. It was produced by Jesse Remedios and Lori Galarreta. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. We also had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt , Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And as always, thank you for listening.