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Hello, everyone, and welcome to season three of the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, and we're kicking off 2023 by talking about 2024. I'm sorry.
So I got to tell you, I was not planning on bringing the show back this early in the year, but I basically couldn't not tell you guys what I have been seeing in my focus groups since the 2022 midterms. Future episodes will drop on Saturdays per usual, but I couldn't wait to get this episode into the world. Now, ever since summer of 2022, basically around the January 6th committee,
we noticed a real drop in enthusiasm for Trump's 2024 candidacy among voters who had just voted for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections. And that phenomenon has accelerated since Trump and his gang of election deniers whiffed the 2022 midterms. So we're going to listen to a bunch of those kind of maybe Trumpers today. But I knew that there was still a cohort of Trump diehards out there.
So we started to screen for two-time Trump voters who also viewed him very favorably. And those voters, they are partying like it is 2015. They still love Trump and no other GOP candidates are turning their heads. We're also going to hear from those voters today, the always Trumpers.
But there was also this question that was nagging me. I wanted to know just how large this group of always Trumpers was, because the size of that number matters a great deal when assessing Trump's ongoing political viability, even at this moment of real weakness for the former president. But I couldn't get that number with focus groups.
So to answer that question, I turn to today's guest, Witt Ayers, a Republican pollster who is the president of North Star Opinion Research. He just did an exclusive poll for the Bulwark on the 2024 Republican primary. Witt, thanks for being here. Sarah, great to be with you.
So, Whit, you were one of my favorite pollsters, and you've done a lot of survey work in order to understand Republican voters. And you did this cool thing that I've always liked, where you bucketed Republicans into three different camps. Always Trump, maybe Trump, and never Trump. I just always found that framing really useful when thinking about the gradations of Trump voters. Can you just give us a quick primer on those buckets? Sure.
Sure. We first came up with that in the middle of last year when you started seeing the same numbers pop up poll after poll. There's a never Trump contingent that is about 10 percent, maybe 12 percent, but really no more than that. We are small but mighty. Yes, small but mighty. That's right. There is an always Trump contingent.
that in this latest poll looks like about 28 to 30%.
These are people who believe that Donald Trump hung the moon, that they will walk through a wall of flame for him. You cannot criticize him with these people. Criticizing Donald Trump with the always Trump voters is like criticizing Jesus in a rural evangelical church. You're not going to change the view about Jesus, but you're sure going to trash the reputation of the person who criticizes Jesus.
And that's the situation you're facing with the always Trump group. But there is a larger group.
a majority of the party now that believes that they liked his job in office, maybe not his behavior, but they liked his policies, but they just want somebody else, or at least they're open to somebody else. Now, keep in mind, these people would vote for Trump again over Biden if it were a two-way race in a general election.
But they're skeptical that Donald Trump can win. And they also believe that he's too focused on the past rather than on the future. So they're open to somebody else. And the question is whether that somebody else can consolidate the roughly two thirds of the Republican electorate that is still open and still available to be persuaded.
So I came to you because you'd done a poll previously that I had seen where you'd done this bucketing between the never Trump, always Trump, maybe Trump. And I kind of wanted to recreate that now post midterms because I really wanted to understand the always Trump number.
And one of the ways we tried to get at this was to ask, you know, how many people would follow Trump on an independent run if he were to lose the Republican primary, but then go ahead and run as an independent? We were like, OK, that's a good way to get to the diehards. And as you just noted, that was 28 percent. Is that the same number that you had before when you were looking at Always Trump the last time you did the poll? Is that roughly the same? Yeah.
It's a little less. When we were looking at it before, we were placing it in the 30 to 40 percent range rather than the 28 percent that we see today. He's definitely weaker than he was before the midterms. The poor performance of the Republicans in the midterms really did a number on him and the perception that he is a winner and can bring winners along with him.
So it is lower, but it is not insignificant at all. You know, if you've got a lock on 28 to 30 percent of Republican primary voters, that'll go a long way in a multi-candidate primary. Yeah. And we'll dig into that a little bit more because I totally agree with you. It is interesting to think that people who were always Trump have kind of, you know, moved away into maybe Trump, which...
sort of goes to the idea that this number is a snapshot in time and not necessarily where it will be always, which is, I think, important to keep in mind that this stuff is fluid. But you did a bigger poll for us. And one of the things that I think, you know, for the purposes of this show was interesting is how closely what you found in your polling reflected what we were seeing in the roughly 10 focus groups that we've done with the sort of maybe Trumpers and the always Trumpers.
since the midterms. But can you just walk us through the top lines of the poll that you just did and some of the other findings? Sure, sure. First of all, let me say this was a national online survey of 1,000 likely Republican primary and caucus voters.
voters, and it looks like what we know to be today's Republican Party. It's overwhelmingly white, 93%, 3% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 1% Black. There's more non-college voters in this sample, 57% than college graduates, 43%. And that's a function of the kinds of folks that Donald Trump has attracted into the Republican Party.
38% are evangelical Christians. 63% support the GOP more than Trump. 26% support Trump more than the GOP. But the key point here is that 85% of these people in the sample voted for Trump in 2020, 85%.
7% for Biden, 3% for a third party candidate. 5% didn't vote or wouldn't say. So that's the sort of never Trump group somewhere around 10, 12%. But 85% of these folks voted for Trump. So we're talking about Trump voters and Trump supporters. Several key highlights.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis holds a substantial lead over Donald Trump on three different ballot tests. Trump is locked in consistently at 28 to 30 percent. So if it's just a two way ballot, DeSantis leads Trump 52 to 30.
The rest are undecided. On a three-way ballot, we did Trump, DeSantis, and another candidate. DeSantis has 44 in that, Trump 28 again. We did a 10-way ballot with DeSantis at 39, Trump 28, Mike Pence has nine, Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney 4% each, and five other candidates are at 1%. So you see a consistent Trump number throughout all three of those ballots.
One interesting tidbit, Sarah, is that for those people who say they support the GOP more than Donald Trump, Mike Pence has overtaken Trump. He's still in second place. But I thought that was an interesting point from the cross stabs.
You mentioned the 28% of Republican primary voters who in a general election between DeSantis, Trump, and Biden would still vote for Trump. DeSantis would take 56% in that of these are Republican primary voters. Trump would take 28. Biden would get five. And the rest are undecided.
So DeSantis still gets a majority of those. But if you lose a quarter of the base vote, you've got a situation comparable to what we had in 1912 when former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt ran as a bull moose against Republican nominee William Howard Taft and the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson split the Republican vote and ensured that Democrat Wilson would win the election.
In order to try to get a sense of why people may be reluctant to support Trump, even though they supported him in the past, we did two different examples with a split sample. Half the sample got one, half the sample got the other. Donald Trump is the best candidate Republicans can nominate in 2024. That comes in at 35%.
I supported Donald Trump when he was president, but I don't think he can win the presidency in 2024. And I want a different nominee who can win is 52%.
And I did not support Donald Trump when he was president, and I did not want him to be the Republican nominee in 2024. It was 13. So a majority to say they want a different nominee who can win. We asked that again, but the second option was a little bit different this time. We said, I supported Donald Trump when he was president, but he now seems focused on the past, and I want a nominee who's focused on the future. That gets 57%.
We asked him an open-ended question, Sarah, about what doubts do you have here for a Trump candidacy in 2024? Now, a lot of the people who support Donald Trump more than the GOP said they had no doubts at all. He was the best president we ever had and can't wait till he's back in the White House. But the other answers of the people who were looking somewhere else refer to his personal characteristics, not his policy positions or his record as president.
So they talked about his behavior, his mouth, his age. He was too old. They thought maybe like somebody younger who could serve two terms rather than one, that he's a loser, that he has baggage, and that he's too divisive.
The open-ended questions were really interesting just because they totally reflect what we hear from the focus group participants about why they think Trump is not electable. And that is, it's not that they dislike Trump. They're not even saying that they disagree with his behavior. They think other people disagree with his behavior. They think his baggage makes other people not vote for him. And so they have these concerns about his electability. I hear it all the time in the focus groups. Let's listen.
I'd like to say flat out that I would vote for him because I do think that he does what he says he's going to do. But at this point, there's so many people that don't like him. And I have friends that have the same feelings that I do when it comes to politics, but they despise him. And it's not because of what he did. They like what he did. They just don't like his attitudes.
You've still got a lot of people holding on to the election was stolen and blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was, but you can't move on until you let go of this.
You know, if he was president, that'd be great because I like the policies. But honestly, I consider that he's lost less through elections. I mean, midterms for him, whether or not he does a good job when he's in there, part of his role as leader of the party is getting others elected within the party. We lost a lot of seats in 2018. 2020, he lost. A lot of his candidates that he endorsed lost midterms. Don't get me wrong. I love Donald Trump and everything he stands for, but
I mean, you look at him and people just across the U.S. and even some Republicans, I mean, they just look at the guy and just disgusted by him for stupid reasons. I love Donald Trump, but I think DeSantis would be better for the country as a whole.
If you ask people about the 2020 election and if they're sort of tired of hearing about it, they'll definitely say yes. As time's gone on, they've gotten more and more annoyed by Trump focusing on like looking back on 2020. But when they offer reasons, it often has to do much more with electability and their concerns that they don't think that Donald Trump can win. And one of the things that I noticed, like when I saw the drop-off begin to occur in
It was during the January 6th committee, like prior to that, we had always had in any group of two-time Trump voters, you'd get at least half the group wanting Trump to run again. But during the January 6th committee is when we started to see groups with zero people, like multiple groups with zero people wanted to run again. And that was really unusual. And it really raised some bells for us.
I don't think it was the January 6th committee per se, because it wasn't like they were sitting there watching the January 6th committee hearings and being like, oh boy, Trump did some really bad things. I'm not going to vote for him anymore. It was raising the specter of this idea of Trump has too much baggage. But the other thing that was happening was the rise of Ron DeSantis. There was like this Ron DeSantis boomlet. And I feel like
These maybe Trump people, it is both – they don't think that Trump's necessarily electable, but they have somebody else that they do think is electable. Like I think you and I would like it to be that people see Trump for who he is and they're breaking with him. But it's pretty clear that's not what's happening. The drift is more –
I want somebody like Trump, but I'm not sure Trump the man is it anymore, right? Yeah. There's no question DeSantis had a great year in 2022. I mean, a thumping reelection in what had been a very close swing state. And he is very, very popular in Florida. So a lot of the people who like Trump, they also like DeSantis. And so some of them believe that with DeSantis, you get Trump.
the policies that they liked about Trump without the craziness, so that he is a more electable version of Donald Trump. Now, that being said, a lot of them don't know very much about Governor DeSantis, and we're going to have to see how he performs in these sort of living room to living room discussions that occur in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But he has had a very, very good year. He's raised a ton of money. And he's developed a very effective national reputation among the Republican Party base.
Yeah, boy, do I agree with you on this point that they really like him, but it's also sort of like a shallow commitment to him. Like they don't know that much about him. They're looking for a Trumpy alternative. They like what he did on COVID. They've seen YouTube clips of him like yelling at teenagers in masks, yelling about Disney, you know, yelling at reporters in his state. And they think,
Yes. Like that's, that's what I like. And it's like DeSantis, Trump without the baggage. I always think it's interesting how they all always frame their interest in DeSantis in relation to Trump. Right. Because Trump is still very much at the center of everybody's political worldview with these voters. But let's listen to how some of these folks, the folks who are talking about DeSantis being the, the cure to what ails them on electability, hear what these voters had to say.
I think he's Trump, not on steroids is how I like to explain it, because he does basically the same type of things, but in a whole different level. And I think that's more appealing to people. Even if Trump said the same thing that he did, they would like to sentence better just by the way they communicate.
Trump doesn't bother me at all. I mean, sometimes he does. Sometimes I feel like he's being like a child. But as long as he's saying something that is worth saying, I'm okay with it. But 95% of people I talk to don't feel that way.
I like that he can get votes from a big range of people and doesn't scare people away so bad as Trump does sometimes. I know a lot of people just love Trump. I like him and I would vote for him again as president. But I don't think DeSantis would drive out the vote against him as bad.
He does a good job of taking Trump's strengths, you know, how he deals with media, how he deals with people who are combating towards him. But he does a better job of communicating it. And he's much more refined when he comes with policy decisions. You know, he's not just going off the cuff. I mean, he took also a purple state and turned it blood red. I mean, he turned Miami Dade, which has been blue ever since I've been born. So I think he can do a better job of garnering new votes to his cause.
I have a lot of friends. My son worked down in Florida for a long time. He was down there for almost a year. So, you know, they call him like Daddy DeSantis or something like that.
That's creepy. So the guy who said he turned Florida blood red, I've heard a lot of variations on that sentiment about DeSantis, where there's sort of this mythology that's grown up around Florida, right? Like the free state of Florida. DeSantis took it from a swing state. You know, people are like, Florida, that was a place with hanging chads. You know, his first gubernatorial election against Gillum was pretty close, actually. And now he's winning it by 20 points. It's a solidly red state. They're picking up
a lot of Hispanic voters.
I think, and I'm interested in what you think, that there's something in the psychology of Republican voters where Florida has taken on this sort of like mythic proportion. It is their version of California. It is the place where their policies thrive and their way of doing things thrive. That's right. And he has made a real success at promoting those kinds of policies, talking about Florida is a place where what goes to die and freedom lives.
It's a very effective message for the Republican base voters. And Republicans know they've got to have Texas and Florida to counterbalance California and New York in the electoral college. So if you can put Florida firmly in the Republican camp, along with Texas, then you've gone a long ways toward winning a majority of the electoral college vote nationally. That's
I think in your poll, he had like a 73 percent favorability rating among all GOP voters, which is really high. How durable is that favorability rating? So like it's one thing to have like a high favorability because Trump voters like you. The dynamic of going head to head with Trump and not being able to sort of run alongside him as a Trump acolyte.
Like, can he do that? Have you been watching him closely? Like, is he a talented enough politician? Because it looks just based on your poll, the analysis from that is DeSantis is winning head to head and not all the polls show this. There's other ones that show, you know, that Trump is still maybe because of his 100 percent name ID that he's still winning in some of these head to head polls. But like once DeSantis goes head to head with Trump, can he sustain Trump?
How does that work? It's going to be really interesting to watch him operate. He's very savvy. For example, he's talked about promoting election integrity in Florida, starting an election integrity task force. But he's never actually said the 2020 election was stolen.
And I've watched what he said about that. And he's walked a very fine line there. So he's keeping the door open to bringing in some people who would not go for Trump and his stolen election rhetoric. But it's going to be real interesting to see how that works. You're right. His favorable rating overall is 73 percent and 54 of that 73 is very favorable.
So that's way up there in Trump territory. Trump's overall favorable rating is 68% in this sample. 34% varies 34% somewhat. So it's a much more temperate evaluation of Donald Trump than it is of Ron DeSantis based on what they know about him today. Oh, hey, speaking of the favorables, I also noticed that
Nikki Haley and Glenn Youngkin were both about 30 points above water with the Trump first crowd, like the people who identify more with Trump than with the Republican Party. And I found that piece fascinating.
fascinating. We're going to drop the poll into the show notes so we can go look at the crosstabs. But what do you make about that? Are Nikki Haley and Glenn Youngkin, are they sort of sleeper candidates? Oh, I think so. I mean, I think they've both got real potential. Nikki Haley has walked a very fine line, you know, pulling back from Trump and coming closer to him. Glenn Youngkin has not had as much contact or comment about Trump. And he still has, you
a third of the Republican Party or more who don't know who he is.
But he's got a very strong 35 to 7 favorable, unfavorable rating among these Republican primary voters. So I think both of them have real potential as candidates. The best case scenario for Donald Trump is that these all get in, obviously. And we have a 2016 scenario again where Trump wins, as you pointed out, winner take all primaries with 28% or 30%.
But these other candidates have some real potential, and I think that's particularly true of Nikki Haley and Glenn Youngkin.
It's funny, you know, Glenn Youngkin never comes up in the groups, in part because they don't know who he is. You have to be pretty Beltway focused. But Nikki Haley does come up, though it's interesting. She comes up much more among swing voters. That's what part of the reason I was so interested in this is that she's the kind of person that the swing voters remember. She like reminds them of the normal GOP. I know you said she walks a fine line. I would say she's walked fine.
back and forth across the line. I'm trying to say it nicely, Sarah. I understand. You can, you'd be nice. I'll be how I am. It is funny. The swing voters who sort of have what I always call the Reagan hangover, they sort of view the party in this way that is like 10 years old. She's the one they like. So she surprised me a little less than Glenn Youngkin, who I just never hear come up because of the M.I.D. But, but I think part of what was interesting to me or what I was trying to explore here with this poll is
is if that always Trump faction kind of implodes, that you get more of an open primary scenario where if the bottom kind of falls out from Trump, DeSantis is a clear front runner, but then like Haley and Yunkin sort of have a chance because otherwise, if you're in the I'm scared about the 2016 repeating itself, you sort of have to consolidate a
around somebody, not to repeat the sins of the past, like by January or by early February, you need people to be dropping out. Because last time what happened is they went into those early primary states, they knifed each other, not Trump.
Christie knifed Rubio, knifed Jeb, whatever. And they all bled out slowly into Super Tuesday where Trump's just like put the whole thing away. And that primary calendar, I'm going to do a whole episode on the GOP primary calendar because it is so important to how the cadence of 2024 is going to go. But anyway, I'm sorry, I'm getting myself off track. So I think I think are always Trump groups, right?
reflect the DeSantis admiration? Like they're sort of DeSantis curious. They like him. They're polite about him, even though they're sticking with Trump. Let's listen.
I am in the great state of Florida, and I like the way DeSantis basically put Disney on notice, changed everything there, put in a government board instead of letting Disney run the county and run it into the ground. And the fact that he has basically made the statement that Florida is the state that comes to die. And it's huge here. And if you look at the last election year, there was three small pockets of blue. You know, he's doing what people want him to do.
I also have friends that live in Florida and they praise him up and down. I like that he took the immigrants that crossed the border illegally and sent them to Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard, yeah. Yeah, that was right. That was a good thing to do. You know, I can respect him for that. If I had a second choice, it would be DeSantis. But I think ideally I would like Trump to run and DeSantis to be his VP and then DeSantis to run for the next eight years.
Boy, do I hear the Trump DeSantis VP thing get floated a lot. So I want you to put your Ron DeSantis strategist hat on wit and tell me, how do you win these types of people over? Because we're going to in a minute, I'm going to play some some more from them and just to show you how ride or die they are from Trump.
But like they're DeSantis curious. They like him. They think what he's doing is good. How do you move them from the always Trump category to the pro DeSantis category? I'm not sure it's possible to do, Sarah. If you look at the people in this survey who support Trump more than the GOP, Ron DeSantis has a towering favorable, unfavorable rating of 79 to 6.
But if you pit them against each other, the people who support Trump more than the GOP go with Trump 70 to 20. That's the exact opposite of the people who support the GOP more than Donald Trump. They go with DeSantis 70 to 12.
So it's like you have these two groups in the party that reflect mirror images of each other. And frankly, I don't know, as long as Donald Trump is living and breathing and upright, I think it's going to be really tough to peel a lot of those people away.
Yeah, that's right. On a side note, this thing about while he's upright, man, McKay Coppins has this great piece in The Atlantic right now about the Republican Party's magical thinking. And he's talking to a bunch of elected officials and he's asking them, like, well, what are you guys going to do about Trump? It's like goes to this question of how do you sort of pull the always Trumpers away? What do you do about them? And a whole bunch of the elected officials off the record said he's just going to have to die.
Like, that's the only way we get out of this conundrum, which to me, they called it something like an actuarial strategy. I just like, that does not seem to me, I don't know, like a sound strategy. But let's jump in. Let's jump into these always Trumpers. I think people have a good sense of kind of the
generic two-time Trump voters, but they more identify with the Republican Party than with Trump. They want to move on. They like a guy like DeSantis. But I don't think people have as much of a sense. I know I didn't until we changed the screen to the very favorable group, have a really good sense of why the always Trumpers were always Trumpers. And so let's listen to what they had to say about why they want to stick with Trump.
I'm just ready to be proud of our leader again. Like I feel embarrassed a lot when I see the current administration speaking as though like read from a teleprompt and then confuse like really simple things. And I just feel embarrassed and afraid that we don't have like a solid leadership in place. So just looking forward to having that again, hopefully.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, basically, that we need somebody who actually knows what they're doing and is going to put their foot down. Like Joe Biden can't even form coherent sentences and it's just a disaster. So we need Trump's leadership back. He accomplished a lot in the construction industry.
building industry, and he was able to get through and get things done. Now, the reason I like the guy is because everything he says is true. I can't see anything that he makes a claim about that's untrue. If they could say, oh, that the pipeline, let's say prime example, was bad. No, they're coming out now and saying it lost a lot of jobs and it cost a lot of money to cancel it.
So everything the guy says is straightforward and it ends up being true. You know, he may embellish a lot of things just to promote himself, but that's his business. They can't get anything on him.
I like him because he's not a politician and I don't like the way they sugarcoat everything and for when they talk down to us, like we're idiots. I like that he spoke like we did. He says it like it is. He doesn't care who he makes mad and he's not establishment because the problem is we keep getting these lifetime politicians in that are establishment. They're all in cahoots together. He was an outsider and he,
Look how much we're finding out about how shady our entire government is now because of what he brought to the forefront. What he said he was going to do, he did. You know, nobody else can say that. Right or wrong, I believe him.
I'm sure he embellishes. I'm sure he stretches the truth. But if he says he's going to get something done, he gets it done. I also like the fact that he's the only one that really has something to lose, right? He's a billionaire. It's not worth his while to take on the presidency.
You know, he has all the money. He has a supermodel wife. He has a great family, etc. It's more of a burdens and hindrance for him to take on the presidency. So that makes me ask the question, why would he give it all that up unless he was definitely motivated to do so?
So the last three people you just heard in that clip were from a group where everyone said that they would vote for Trump as a third party candidate, even if DeSantis were the nominee running against Joe Biden. So our poll, Witt's poll, clocked 28 percent of Republican primary voters taking that same position. And that was the most interesting part to me. As we've talked about, that gives Trump like an enormous base to work with.
But one of the things that struck me as I've listened now to several groups of these people who are ride or die for Trump is the way they talk about Trump is basically the only person that they can think of that is against the establishment. Like even Ron DeSantis, who they like fine, but basically they talk a lot about this idea that there's an establishment Republican Party that they hate. Right.
And that Trump is the only one who's taken them on. And that's why they will follow him even if he runs an independent bid. And, you know, I got some pushback when I put out the poll from people like Ross Douthat being like, you know, 28 percent are not going to follow Trump to a third party if he runs against Santas. And I think that's probably true. Like, I think this 28 percent number probably continues to go down somewhat.
But there's a number. Is it 20 percent? Is it 15? Is it 10? Any of them are enough to crater, as you said, to split the vote. Just like I can't remember what historical year you threw out there. Your history is better than mine. 1912. 1912. So what do you think? Do you think Trump would run as a third party candidate? Because that was the other thing. Not only would that many people not follow him, but Trump won't do it.
Now, my response would be me.
Maybe, maybe he doesn't run as a third party candidate, although Trump loves to raise money. That's a great way to raise money. And he does not care about the Republican Party. Not one bit. Trump only cares about himself. He does not care about the Republican Party. And also, if somebody else gets the nomination, won't he just trash them endlessly and drive down, maybe just diminish enthusiasm for whoever the candidate is? Like, how much damage can Trump do with this sort of lock on this percentage of voters? Yeah.
Sarah, we need to mention one other consideration that we haven't talked about, and that is some states have sore loser laws where if you run for the nomination and don't get it, then you cannot get on the ballot as an independent. But I think Donald Trump's reputation and standing is sufficient.
so that his forces could go to work and get him on a lot of ballots. And as you said, it doesn't take 28% to split the Republican vote and put a Democrat in the White House. Any significant percentage is enough, given how closely balanced Republicans and Democrats are in the country as a whole.
But it's fascinating to me to listen to your focus groups basically verify the numbers that we found in this survey. Of the people who like Trump more than the GOP, 98% have a favorable view of Trump and 78 of that 98 have a very favorable view of Trump.
That is a solid base, a rock solid base that I think is not going to go anywhere, even if he ran as an independent and got on the ballot in a number of states. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I think sometimes maybe some of the political observers who don't listen to these voters don't.
maybe don't understand is the intensity of their commitment to Trump and the fact that they don't really care about the Republican Party. Like some of them might make some strategic calculations. They might sit there and think to themselves, well, I don't want to reelect Joe Biden. You know, there's definitely some percentage is going to do that, but
But there's a percentage of them that are like, no, you guys are a uniparty. You're all the establishment. I'm with Trump forever to the grave, pry him from my cold, dead hands. And whatever that percentage is, it's not 1%. It's not 2%. Like it's a bigger percentage than that. And I think that presents an existential threat to Republicans. And I guess my question for you and to anybody else who wants to answer it is,
because I'm not sure that people will sort of know what to do with this. It gives him this like weird leverage, right? Like your poll found and so many other polls have found the majority of the Republican Party wants to move on.
But they can't move on while 30 percent or 28 percent have that deep level of commitment to him because he can wield that in a lot of destructive ways. And so isn't he kind of holding them hostage with that 30 percent or that 28 percent? Well, that was the fear of a lot of more establishment Republican types in 2016.
Was it that if they tried to block him or keep him from getting into debates that he would run as an independent and split the Republican base? So, yes. I mean, I have never seen in my many, many years of doing polling, Sarah, the commitment that a particular political figure has garnered from his supporters, right?
I mean, Trump famously said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. I think he's right. I think he's right. It is. And he can certainly stage a mini coup and not lose too many supporters. Like, I haven't heard a single person say January 6th is their reason for being out on Trump in these last focus groups. Right. And that did not show up at all in the open ended responses for what skepticism they had about Trump in 2024. Right.
So in closing-ish, because actually there's like more I want to ask you, but I want to turn back to this electability question. So the always Trump crowd may not think Trump is less electable. That doesn't mean they're not worried he won't win. They are worried that the election could be stolen again from Trump or from some other Republican. And it removes the roadblock to supporting Trump that the maybe Trump crowd has had lately.
So to be clear, what I'm saying is, is that the maybe Trump people, they don't say that they don't think the election was stolen anymore, but they talk about electability a lot and winning, which means there's some tacit admission in there that Trump lost the last couple of elections. The always Trumpers are deeply committed to the idea that the election was stolen. So let's listen.
I think in the next election, I'm going to do a mail-in vote as early as possible. I think that is a major problem with Republicans because I vote in person and I've always done that every time I vote. But this time I'm thinking since they're playing this game, Oz lost because of all the mail-in vote. If they had voting on election day and they saw that one debate, Fetterman or Festerman would have lost. There's no way the guy has any capable talent.
Anyone behind their name is going to have a problem. They will be cheating in all the blue states. They hate the Santa's just as much as they hate, unless it was a rhino, you know,
Unless it was a McCain or Liz Cheney that they are willing to put up with, then they're going to try and crush it. They're doing all of the forensics on this and they're watching the votes get flipped. They're going to China until somebody gets all of those machines. In Pennsylvania, we had those nice big machines and you just went and pulled the lever and there was a piece of paper that was a trail. Until we go back to that, it will always be a problem.
You know, the fact that they believe that these Republicans are actually winning and that Trump actually won, it helps them not have to have that electability concern, which is, I guess, makes some intuitive sense when you think about it. If you think that they're just going out there and stealing elections from all these Republicans, then you just vote for the person that you like the best and you're not doing the armchair analysis about electability concerns. I
I was surprised. Originally, the number of people who said that the election was stolen, it kind of peaked around 70%. But after 2022, it seems to be taking back down. Have you seen that?
Yes, it's down in our poll, 52% overall say the election was stolen from Trump. But once again, there are dramatic differences between the people who support Trump more than the GOP and those who support the GOP more than Trump. Among Trump voters, 85% say the election was stolen and the rest say they're not sure. Virtually no one says that Biden won fair and square.
Among the GOP more than Trump voters, they're split into thirds. A third say Biden won fair and square. A third think it's stolen from Trump. And a third say they're not sure. Now, I don't know what more you would need to be sure, but a third take refuge in that not sure response.
So once again, you have a radically different perception on whether the election was stolen, whether you're more Trump or more GOP. So technically, that was supposed to be my last question. But I want to circle back, actually, just pick your brain about a couple more things. Unfortunately, because I haven't done this show in so long, I've got an enormous amount of pent up analysis I want to get through. And I've watched 10 groups since 2022 midterms.
And one of the things I want to go back to this question of DeSantis. One of the things that was interesting to me that happened recently was watching DeSantis during the RNC election to see who would be the chairwoman. Would it be Ronna Romney McDaniel again, despite some consternation from her own party that she has presided now over many losing elections elections?
And she was challenged by this woman, like a real crazy person, Harmeet Dhillon, who has hung out a lot with the MyPillow guy. She did a lot with Kerry Lake. And Ron DeSantis endorsed Harmeet Dhillon. And I couldn't understand why, because I was like, this guy has become a master at strategic silence. He stays out of a lot of the big Trump-related controversies. And it was pretty clear Dhillon was going to lose to Ronna, that Ronna had the votes.
But when I listened to DeSantis explain why he was doing it, he said things like, we need new blood because we've been losing too often. He was really hitting the losing. He talked about we shouldn't have an RNC in Washington, D.C., in the swamp. And he was doing this thing where it seemed to be painting Donald Trump –
Ronna, as the establishment. And I've talked about this a lot. You know, we at The Bulwark have a phrase, Tim Miller came up with it, called the MAGA establishment, which is kind of the Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene unholy alliance, like forms this MAGA establishment. And so do you see Ronda Santis lining up like an outsider strategy to
Because it's funny, there's this tension between the way a lot of the sort of maybe Trumpers view DeSantis as a more electable, more polished, maybe more mainstream version of Trump. But that DeSantis seems to be building a profile that is meant to be as base friendly as possible, that he is trying to sort of outflank Trump, not on the right per se, but like on the outsider, fringy stuff. Do you see that or am I making that up?
No, no, I think you're on the money there. I think he's developing a sort of outsider versus the establishment type. And when you've been the president of the United States, I guess that makes you the establishment, doesn't it? Not in the eyes of Trump voters, but I do think that's an interesting strategy that he's starting to develop. Yeah, and it's interesting just because listening to the always Trumpers,
What they love about Trump is that he took on the Republican establishment. The deep state. And so I get – that's right, the deep state, but also Mitch McConnell, right? Like the number of ads Republicans ran in 2022 against Mitch McConnell, against leaders in their own party was pretty weird. And I guess I see DeSantis kind of trying to –
get at the always Trumpers by being like, no, Trump's the establishment now. And I hate the establishment more. But it's funny because actually a lot of the swing voters or even the sort of more maybe Trumpers, they see DeSantis as more mainstream. They don't use the word establishment. I don't think anybody's used that word, but I think they would see him as more of a normal politician. And so I guess I find that dynamic shaping up very interesting. Yeah.
I agree. And I think, as I said, Ron DeSantis is a very smart, very savvy guy. And if it's possible to peel off any of those always Trump people, I think he'll figure out how to do it. I'm just not sure it's possible. OK, last sort of hot seat question, and then I really will wrap up. I've been struggling with the DeSantis Trump issue.
match up. Because if I were my 2015 self, and Ron DeSantis was acting the way Ron DeSantis does right now, and he was running for president, I wouldn't like him one bit. I would have no interest in seeing him become the nominee. Now, I got away right now the fact that Donald Trump did a coup, tried to overturn an election, and Ron DeSantis has not done that.
And so while I think Ron DeSantis is really, really a bad candidate, I don't see him as the same kind of existential threat that I see Trump as. But do you feel like an election of Ron DeSantis, and don't let my opinion, forget my opinion of this, does in your opinion, the election of Ron DeSantis represent the moving on to something better than Trump? Or is it just moving on to kind of Trump-ish?
Without the same kind of baggage, like a slightly more, I don't know. I don't know. Like in the frame of those voters, like, is he like Trump without the legal problems? Or do you think he represents a significant shift away from the dangers that Trump represented? Like deep down, he's a relatively normal guy that you don't have to be so afraid of.
I think that Ron DeSantis has an unerring ear for what motivates base Republican voters today. And I think he is the kind of candidate that if he performs as well at the presidential level as he did at the state level, that could really unite the Republican Party. Now, I need to
tell the story that my first presidential candidate, Lamar Alexander, told me. He said, going from a statewide race to the presidential race is like going from eighth grade basketball to the NBA finals. It is a completely different level of scrutiny.
But if he can successfully make that transition, I do think he's got the persona and the ability to unite the party. And as I said, he's been careful not to say that the 2020 election was stolen. He's hinted at by his election integrity stuff, but he's never said the election was stolen.
So in that sense, he would be a more, quote, normal, unquote, kind of Republican candidate. Yeah, like I agree. I think he's shrewd enough that he tries to keep his avenues open. But he's like the only one who went and campaigned with Doug Mastriano, the most insane. And there was like a lot of competition. But the singularly most insane candidate in the 2022 cycle, he went and he campaigned with Kerry Lake. But, you know, so did Glenn Youngkin. I mean, there didn't seem to be too much competition.
from a lot of these candidates, a sense of like, boy, I need to stay away from Herschel Walker. I need to stay away from Kerry Lake. I need to stay away from Tudor Dixon. Like they all went all in. And so I don't know. I don't quite give him the pass on, well, he's managed to not utter the words the election was stolen. But I take your point that he is playing a different game. He is trying to give himself room to maneuver in a general election for sure. Right.
WIT airs. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for listening to the focus group podcast. Please go rate and review us on Apple podcast. These Wednesday episodes are not going to be a regular thing. Like I said, we'll be back on Saturday, February 11th, and we will see you then. Sarah, thank you very much.
