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- [00:00]
Dave Weigel
At Energy Trust of Oregon, we understand that energy isn't just what happens when you flip a switch, it's what happens afterwards.
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
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Sarah Longwell
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Dave Weigel
Additional terms and conditions app Foreign.
- [01:07]
Sarah Longwell
And Welcome to the Focus Group Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, and this week we're talking about Donald Trump's falling approval ratings. He's sitting around 44 these days, down from 47 at the start of April and 52% on Inauguration Day. So that means some significant sliver. Almost a chunk of the nearly 50% of the country that voted for Trump aren't thrilled with him right now. But that doesn't mean that those folks are all ready to jump on the Democrats bandwagon. Now, quite the contrary. We're going to tease out where people find the Trump administration lacking and what that does or does not mean for the coming few months as voters try to sort through their dissatisfaction with Trump, but but their kind of disinterest in the Democratic Party. My guest today spends all kinds of time with any type of voter you can think of. Dave Weigel, author of Semaphore's Americana Newsletter. Dave, what's up? Thanks for being here.
- [02:05]
Dave Weigel
I'm having a great time. It's a fun time to be an American. How was the Milken conference?
- [02:10]
Sarah Longwell
Oh yeah, I was at the Milken conference. Wait, were you there?
- [02:13]
Dave Weigel
No, I've been to that hotel for a DGA event, Beverly Hills Hotel. Whenever I needed to get in touch with real America, I go to the Beverly Hilton.
- [02:22]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, well, I got to tell you, yeah, this was not real America. This is like one of those things I can't remember like what the tickets cost. But it is like an ungodly sum of money. It was. If I lost my lanyard, it was going to cost me 500 bucks to replace, which, I mean, I lose my lanyard the second someone gives it to me. So. Yeah, but it was very intense. It's one of those places where everyone walks around with their eyes on people's chests to read their name tag to see if they're, like, an important person or not.
- [02:49]
Dave Weigel
Yeah, well, we have that in D.C. too, so that's true.
- [02:53]
Sarah Longwell
It's not. Yes. I go to enough of those events that I'm aware of what people are doing with their eyes. All right, man. So you spent a lot of time thinking about voters and how the two major political parties interact with them. What has surprised you most about how either side is handling the current weird moment we're in? And how did the early days of this term, this Trump term, how does it feel or not feel like others that you've observed?
- [03:19]
Dave Weigel
Yeah, I'm a little bit obsessed with this historical comparisons. And even though I'm a big believer in Heraclitus and no man steps in the same river twice. Like, the electorate's different every four years. The media is different every four years. But we have this direct comparison between the Trump term. First time was actually a smaller House majority. They have the same Senate majority. And this one, politically, obviously, he's. And you've talked all about this. He's erased most of the opposition to him inside the gop. But also Democrats have lost a lot of their nerve in how they oppose him. And they just have less brio and less confidence that things are clicking. And they're also less liked. And that's the first thing I wrote this week was about Democratic polling in 2017 was very good. They really came out of the blocks when Trump was sworn in very confident that they were going to win the midterms because they just watched Trump win, lose the popular vote, I should say, by 2%. They knew that the majority of the country did not support him. Majority of the country didn't vote for Trump this time, but Trump, plus the people who still voted for RFK Jr. That was 50 something percent. This is a country that they don't quite recognize, with millions more people who said no. We've seen the Trump experience and we like it. They are less popular, they're less liked. They're more associated with the failures of the Biden administration, which we'll probably get into. They have been winning special elections and doing pretty well. But I'd say they don't have a theory of what the government looks like when they take over. They had one for Biden. They don't right now. And they're just much less confident that if they hit their marks, they're going to win. Not that the election will be stolen, just that voters who they used to be able to message to don't listen anymore.
- [04:56]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Let me hit you with a take of mine. This is part of what I did at Milken. I was on the panel at Milken that was like, the future of the Democratic Party. And, you know, there's always part of me that's like, what am I doing here? Exactly. But to the extent that the two parties have a symbiotic kind of relationship. Right. There was a lot of discussion on the panel about and kind of a fight between, like, the Third Way guy and, you know, Neera and Chuck Rocha near Tanden, who was in the Biden administration. About, like. Is the problem that the Democratic Party has drifted too far left. And I piped up to offer that part of the problem is that the Republican Party has also drifted extremely left in certain areas that have caused a kind of inability to calibrate on Democrat side. Right. When you have RFK and Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard and. And Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, all people who used to be Democrats a decade ago, suddenly controlling the Republican Party and putting up a bunch of things like tariffs, which used to be primarily associated with the Democratic Party, where Trump is running on sort of a populist economic agenda, even if that's not how he acts. Exactly. But he, unlike Republicans, doesn't talk about things like cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, although that may very well end up being where they're going. But to me, a big part of the problem is Republicans are kind of eating Democrats lunch with a certain slice of Democrat voters. I mean, in the focus groups we're going to listen to today, many of whom are people who voted for Trump but are really, really unhappy with how he's behaving. I listened to them, and some of them were RFK people, and they sound a little like they could easily be Democrats if they weren't so mad at Joe Biden and so upset about the economy under him. I guess my theory of the case is that Democrats can't find their footing in a world where Republicans now occupy real chunks of the Democratic space ideologically.
- [06:56]
Dave Weigel
I'm glad you brought that up, because it's often underappreciated you'll talk to somebody who's in the Democratic bubble and we'll talk about Trump moving the party. Right. And there are ways he did. But if you just compare the Mitt Romney agenda, the Paul Ryan agenda, to what Trump ran on 2016, I'm very confident. Had Trump said everything he said in 2016, plus and we're going to tackle entitlement reform and turn Medicare into a voucher system, he would have lost. Trump conceded a lot of the social welfare argument. He conceded more of it in 2024. Because Trump ran on repealing Obamacare in 2016. He did not run on it in 2024. Republicans have a majority. They could do it in reconciliation. They're not doing it. They're even nervous about tackling expanded Medicaid, which has been one of the more successful parts of ACA expansion and tariffs. This was not a Mitt Romney position. This is a Trump position. It has not been as complicated for Democrats as maybe they would have feared because of the rollout tariffs. But you saw this, and I've seen this in your focus group. It does make intuitive sense to a lot of people that the president can use his power to protect their jobs and bring factories back home by taxing foreign goods. And Democrats in their new coalition that has a lot more people who don't rely on manual labor, factories, et cetera, there is a glibness, I think, in how they respond that's different than they would have talked 20 years ago when they had a more labor focused party. Right now, talking about this discussion of how Trump said, you're going to get less cheap stuff from China. And I saw JD Vance demo this in Ohio when he was running in 2022. This Republican argument that we've been flooded with cheap goods from around the world and we need to stop it. That's something that Democrats were comfortable saying in the 90s, in the 80s certainly, and they're less comfortable now. Republicans are more comfortable. And one of the arguments Joe Biden made in 2020 was protectionist. It was that I will take on China. Trump's been ineffective at doing it, which was compelling to people. Trump had taken Xi Jinping's word on Covid, but also Trump's trade war with China didn't turn around that much. Covid happened before they cut some sort of big trade deal. Biden tried to outflank him on that issue. And in office, Trump is doing a lot more showily on trade than any Democratic president has done. I don't know what the long term impact of it is the short term impact is it's. Yeah, Democrats are not quite sure how to talk about it, except point to the stock market and say that stocks are down. I mean, I was at one Democratic House press conference a couple of weeks ago where they're referring to how much value had been lost in the stock market this year. And one, I thought, well, they're wrong now because this was after a bunch of corrections. Two, that's not the traditional Democratic message is let's do what's good for shareholders.
- [09:29]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I do think they're right to go on offense around economic anxiety because regardless of where the market is now versus where it was, like the fluctuations and you hear this in the groups, has caused people a lot of anxiety and people are very anxious about the tariffs. And obviously that's not true across everybody. There's a big part of MAGA voters who I listen to all the time say, you know, we're going to have to take some pain and this is what it's going to take to bring manufacturing back, or we need this to pay off the debt. They offer a range, actually an inconsistent range of reasons why tariffs might be good, but that's just essentially them being like, I believe in Trump, I think we should take some big swings. But there's another group that's basically is like, ooh, I'm scared about the tariffs. And more than anything, I now feel very uncertain. And absolutely, number one is, and prices are not going down like he promised, which I think is. I mean, I would not look at the stocks because that's going to be day to day. I would say, is your grocery bill lower like Trump said it would be? Because those voters know that it isn't.
- [10:33]
Dave Weigel
No, that is the biggest weakness. It's not the policy, it is the promises. And this has been also very hard for Democrats to run around Trump as kind of a Santa Claus candidate who has proposed not just extending his 2017 tax cuts, but adding on no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security. He has promised that your taxes will go down, your prices will go down, and maybe even the income tax will be eliminated. He didn't promise that in the campaign, but he said that when he talked about tariffs. And that is the opening for Democrats not to say, well, actually we're going to make everything free. The opening for them is he didn't make the prices go down. And so it has the same, I wouldn't say the same risks as the stock market. You have a risk of pointing at the stock market one day and the Dow goes up the next day and you look silly. You can have a event at a gas station where gas is $4, and then the next week it's $3. However, this happened to Joe. One thing they learned from the Biden experience is that Covid, because of the depression in spending, lowered gas prices. They rose really quickly. Once the economy kind of came back to life, they were falling at the end of the Biden term. I remember one of the times I thought, well, maybe Harris can win was I just was driving through North Carolina and noticed gas under $3. And I said, well, psychologically, as a, I hope normal person, if I see under three, I get excited. And if I see $3 $0.01, I get less excited. And voters didn't give them credit because Trump was out there saying, well, it used to be $2, I'll bring it back down to $2. Yeah, that hasn't happened. So that's, that's. There are visible signs of Trump saying prices will go down, and that is attackable. But what Democrats can't say and elect us and the prices will go down. They're the party of Joe Biden, who presided over prices going up. And we learned voters who have not lived through inflation in their lifetimes. That's me as you. I mean, I was born in the 80s. I don't remember inflation. We don't know how long that hangover is going to last. And Trump hasn't fixed it.
- [12:23]
Sarah Longwell
Well, that's right. And look, that hangover, like, it takes a long time, like these prices aren't going down. It's just like the question of the entire economy sort of adjusting to this place that we're in. This is what I think is sometimes tough for Democrats when they're thinking about the message and the messaging. I talked about this on this panel, too, is like, because these Democrats, the rest of them on the panel are getting into a relatively in depth discussion on sort of what they can sell voters. Like, well, should we talk about, you know, decreasing their energy prices? This is real. And they're having this very earnest debate. And I was like, well, Donald Trump just got up there and lied. Like, this is a fundamental asymmetry right now between what Democrats are doing. They're trying to find out what are the ways we can actually better people's lives. And then how do we message on that and how do we talk to people, which often leads them to PowerPointing things or having to walk people through their new vision of a green economy or whatever. Whereas, you know, Trump's just like, I'm going to lower your grocery prices on day one. I'm going to end the Ukraine, Russia war on day one. Just lied about this stuff. And voters were like, well, that sounds good. I do think there's just like a tough space for Democrats who are like, we can shade things, we can, you know, maybe overestimate the impact of things. But, like, that's not in their brains about, like, well, I'm just going to lie to people and say I can lower prices when I can't. Okay, but we got to get into some of the voter stuff because I can end up just talking with you about this the whole time. So I want to level set this show by putting everyone into the time machine. Back in 2021, we were talking to Trump, 16 Biden, 20 voters. So I was very interested in that segment of swing voters. And what struck me as we dug through all of this was how similar sort of the wait and see attitude towards Biden was to the wait and see. We've heard about Trump's recent months. So all the sound you're about to hear happened between July and September of 2021. Let's listen to the early reviews and grades of Biden's presidency. As with all, there's a little bit of good, a little bit of bad, things you'll agree with and things you won't. But it doesn't seem as tense as it has been or tumultuous as it has been over the past four or so years. I'll say at this point, we're seven months into four years, so we're pretty.
- [14:35]
Dave Weigel
Much still early on in the first quarter here.
- [14:38]
Sarah Longwell
So at this point, I'm pretty indifferent. The jury's still out and to be determined. I think his response to the pandemic.
- [14:46]
Dave Weigel
Has been kind of as the wind.
- [14:49]
Sarah Longwell
Blows, he gets ahead of things a little too early and is behind on some others.
- [14:54]
Dave Weigel
So that feels kind of like we.
- [14:57]
Sarah Longwell
Don'T know where it's headed.
- [14:58]
Dave Weigel
There's just a lot of things that.
- [14:59]
Sarah Longwell
Feel maybe not as blatantly bad as Trump, but also not like strong leadership.
- [15:06]
Dave Weigel
They just kind of feel like he's got a lot of people guiding him.
- [15:10]
Sarah Longwell
And he doesn't have a strong presence on his own. And for better or worse, I don't feel like that's really what we need right now. Except for Afghanistan, I can't come up with anything that's been truly detrimental, but I also don't come up with anything that, wow, boy, has he been great. I would give him A B, because I think handling Covid, I would say, has been pretty good. Well, Afghanistan, the pullout I don't think was the greatest, but I think the decision to leave actually took a lot of courage. You know, 20 years we've been there, I think to go against the kind of military industrial complex that wants to keep us in these forever wars. I think for him to make that decision to get out took a lot of courage.
- [15:53]
Dave Weigel
I don't expect all A's for my kids. I don't expect my president to be an A for four years.
- [15:59]
Sarah Longwell
But outside of Afghanistan, I can't point.
- [16:01]
Dave Weigel
To anything that I say he screwed up, but I can't point to five policies that I would say I'm for that.
- [16:10]
Sarah Longwell
I'm for that.
- [16:11]
Dave Weigel
I'm for that. He's in a difficult situation. This country's in a difficult situation.
- [16:16]
Sarah Longwell
But I think he's definitely better than average. You know, that's why I gave him a B, because I think he's better than average.
- [16:25]
Dave Weigel
That could hold this sport together.
- [16:27]
Sarah Longwell
Like, he's holding it together. He does some good things. But, you know, like somebody else said he's inherited a lot of garbage and.
- [16:33]
Dave Weigel
I don't know if he's the right.
- [16:34]
Sarah Longwell
Man for the job.
- [16:35]
Dave Weigel
And I think is a one term president.
- [16:37]
Sarah Longwell
So, you know, a lot of presidents will fix things in her second term. I don't think Biden will get that chance. True enough, sir. He did not get that chance. I think what's interesting to me about and the reason I wanted to kind of revisit this is there's a way that voters are both, like in this first period, let's call it the first hundred plus days, they have some patience, right? They're still sort of like, you know, he's all right, he hasn't done anything terrible, but he hasn't done anything great. And they're still in sort of wait and see mode. And that period is interesting to me because I remember it was like August where you had the Afghanistan withdrawal, you had the resurgence of COVID like, and you started to see the first inklings of inflation. And so everything went south at the tail end of this period. You know, I think the way that people right now are kind of jonesing for people to turn against Trump, right? They're like, well, with all this bad stuff, shouldn't he just be collapsing? Like, how is he even at 44%? And I'm like, well, we're just in this phase right now where people still give you leeway. Like the Rome wasn't built in a day, even though Trump made promises. Does that sound right to you?
- [17:53]
Dave Weigel
Yeah. And this is pretty normal for a new president, even a second term. President Bush's approval rating when he first got back in 2005 was not that bad. It was driven down by an entitlement fight. And not to keep repeating myself, but Trump learned from last time, don't fight about entitlements, don't fight about Obamacare. I'd say the message Democrats are most comfortable making is that we're going to defend Medicaid from Donald Trump. And he keeps saying he's not going to do anything. So they're waiting for this Medicaid bill to come out, but until then, they're punching at Trump's actions. And there are lots of voters who say, well, at least he's acting because he gets to be antithetical to Joe Biden. The implication or image, I should say what Trump is doing is he's acting all the time. He's trying stuff out. A lot of it hasn't been popular, but you can understand why the impression that he is doing stuff and that you heard it from that voter four years ago, even the Afghanistan withdrawal not going the way he wanted, that you could hear the same argument being made about the tariff strategy not going the way I wanted, but being basically right. And I've heard that, and you've seen that in focus groups, people saying, you know, it's not working yet. But I like that somebody's finally doing it, because audacity is a big power Trump has. There are a lot of things he does that he just talks about. He directs his attorney general and members of his cabinet to go in front of cameras and talk about stuff. And the norm that Democrats were very stuck on is that when you're in power, the government shouldn't look too partisan. The president shouldn't look like he's abusing his powers too much or doing things that might get reversed in court. They're very embarrassed, as happened a number of times, Barack Obama doing something that would get reversed by the Supreme Court. Why try? Trump tries things. And I do think that is not leading to a lot of resilience in his numbers, but it's keeping his supporters and the people who took a chance on him in line, unless they are directly impacted by something he did that they think is a mess. And again, if they were told gas is going to be cheap and it's not cheap and they drive a truck, they were told that he was going to bring jobs back and I should go back to the truck driver. And they're worried about how it's affecting their business going across the border with Canada. Yeah, they're pissed off. But for a lot of people who just said, I want a president who's going to act and fix these problems, I'm worried about he's at least acting like he is. And coming after Biden where it looked like he was overwhelmed. Completely true that he never recovered after both Omicron and Afghanistan appropriating. Never recovered. The idea that he was old but he was able to do things, never quite recovered from that.
- [20:15]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I want to get into the. How voters sound now about Trump because they are quite annoyed with him in a way that actually I think more annoyed than people sounded with Biden. But I do think it's just early for the bottom to drop out. But actually something you said I think is really right, that I would love for people who are Democrats to give some thought to, which is Trump takes big swings and he takes a lot of them sort of in quick succession. Right. So it's like sort of even difficult for them to parse out each, like loss in the courts or whatever. What they know is there's a lot of activity. I do think Democrats are gonna have to learn the lesson. I'm a lapsed Republican conservative. So like incremental change. Good. To Sarah Longwell listening to voters. Right. They need kind of big, bold things now. I just remember the Democrats in 2020 when they had their primary and they had multiple debates in which they focused on like the incredibly nuanced parts of health care. And it is true that health care matters an extraordinary amount to Democratic voters. But proposing big swings and like fighting on them and saying them over and over again and convincing people. I do think Democrats, they listen to voters and, and they're like, okay, well, we need to go where the voters are. Trump does like, I'm going to stand here and I'm going to bring everybody to me and I'm going to do it by just saying the same thing over and over again and like pounding my position. I'm not going to get you into the details. Right. I only have. What does he say? The, the outlines of a plan. What concepts of a. Concepts of plan. Yeah, but like, they're big, bold swings that people can get their arms around. I'm going to build a wall. No, you're not. Like, no one's mad at him that he didn't build a wall. Really. They took it as a stand in for like this guy's going to go hard on immigration, which is a thing I want to happen. And this is, I feel like, where Democrats have sort of got to shake themselves loose of a lot of the old ways because the media is not going to carry a nuanced message. You got to start taking big swings. Let's just say, hypothetically, this is sort of, if I fantasy ran for president, I would run on a massive education reform platform that was about, like, schools are going to be the center of our society. We are going to pay teachers a ton more. We're going to enter into a grand bargain with teachers unions where, like, they back off protecting crappy teachers. And, like, we're going to put schools at the center of communities. We're going to build schools, not prisons. Like, this is how we're going to lead the world is through education. And we're going to change America by making us the best place for public education in the world. World. And schools are also going to be places where people can get minor health care. And we're going to do ESL training and all kinds of other trainings and things in the summer, like, whatever. You make a big pitch to something new that, like, leads to some aspiration. You weave in some abundance here and there, right where it's not scarce. We can still do big things. The audacious part of bold leadership, having some vision about how we make the country a better place instead of arguing over different modes of how you might tweak the health care system, which I don't think is where voters are now. Like, they feel like things are in a tough place. They want to see big, bold things. And Trump did that. Now it's all the extra legal stuff is a problem. And if I were a Democrat, I'd be like, hey, guys, we can do big things in this country without breaking the law. We can do it and include Congress and have checks and balances.
- [23:49]
Dave Weigel
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that yet. Because it was supposed to be Biden and build back better. It was supposed to be when you have the three branches of government, you use it for a bunch of spending that's going to go to people and improve their lives. You mentioned education reform, but there's an unfinished Biden agenda that was not passable because of Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, which included public option raising, the minimum wage. There's the childcare plans, there's a bunch of expensive plans. And the challenge is more once you say, hey, here's our big vision for the country, the question will now be, which it wasn't four years ago. What won't that cause? Inflation. How do you do that without causing inflation? I think their answer is going to be this is I have Jamie Pritzker in my head because I talked to him most recently. You need to raise taxes on rich people. And for Pritzker, that is raise taxes on people like me. I'm very rich, I can afford it. But they have given up as the parties have changed and their position in the last campaign was very muddy. But they're not running on restoring the tax rates that were there, frankly, when the budget was balanced. I think you're right. They will need some sort of big idea. It will not be we're going to tweak things. It can't be. We're going to do what Trump did, but slightly better. But what are the big ideas that they can run on and convince people that you will enjoy this when you pay for it? They have not tried that in a very long time. Bill Clinton was the last president to try it. They're afraid to do that now and they're competing against Republicans, like I was saying, who just don't try to make the math work. Just run on giving you free things. Or don't worry, we're going to tariff people and we're going to make the money again. I think they just need some reality to click in. And if voters change their minds and decide you can't replace all taxes with terrorists, then they can have that argument. But you're right, they need a big vision for the country. They just can't do it because Biden tried that and voters decided it's too risky because it makes stuff cost more.
- [25:37]
Sarah Longwell
Well, sort of. I mean, I would argue that having listened to voters the entire way through the Biden administration, that Biden may have did stuff, but he didn't sell anything. Voters have no idea what bills he passed. And I swear to God, build back better. Sounds like your kitchen got flooded and you're renovating it. And nobody wants to spend a lot of money just to get back to where they already were. It's the most annoying money you can spend. Right? It's just to get you back somewhere where you were before. And so I don't think they ever sold the country on a big vision. I don't think they ever connected with the country on a big vision. Foreign. Let's fast forward to the present day and for the rest of the show, we'll be hearing from 2024 Trump voters. And most of them voted for him in 2020 as well. Not everybody who currently disapprove of his job performance. That's what we screen for. And like at the start of every group, we asked them how they thought things were going in the country. And we also got some of their high level impressions of the Trump presidency so far. So let's listen. I have the same concerns about inflation and prices, wages, not really keeping up with that. I'm also a federal employee, so I strongly, strongly disagree with a lot of the changes being made in government. They haven't really been well thought out. And it's been heard in clinical care here because I work for the VA and I find the amount of executive orders to be disconcerting. I just think it doesn't really show respect for the political process and the checks and balances of government. I think the rhetoric I was hoping would die down, but it's not. And I'm very concerned about the 2028 election, whether our democracy is going to be ruined.
- [27:29]
Dave Weigel
It's shocking the number of executive orders that are coming through. The fact that we have these checks and balances in place are important. We have to go through them. And it's the fact that we've got DeSantos here in Florida, where I live, saying and doing crazy, incredible things all on his own during COVID that most of us ignored because we were too busy worried about something else. And he was doing stuff that nobody else was doing. Then you've got New York, the mayor of New York and the governor of New York deciding to do things that the government's like, no, I don't want you doing that. Oh, we're okay, we're good. You can't stop us. So those are the things that I, that I worry about when it comes to what he's doing.
- [28:06]
Sarah Longwell
I'm very concerned with our immigration, the way we're doing things there, as well as just the tariffs, expenses and just how we're treating some of our minorities like RFK and the autism comments and things like that. I'm just very disgusted by the administration and how they're treating people. His first hundred days I felt like, have been absolutely chaotic. I was embarrassed by the way that he treated the president of the Ukraine. I was kind of ashamed of us. I don't believe that's how we should have behaved. And then I think there's some things, you know, I agree that we needed to work on our budget and to eliminate a lot of wasteful spending. And so I was hopeful that that would happen. But I think the way that things are going, it doesn't make sense with these genocide that's going on over in the Gaza. I don't like that at all. He's promised that he would stop the killing. The killing has not stopped. That's a big one for me. I liked the Maha movement. We need to keep Americans healthy and what we're doing to our people is not right and it's all for profit. And that's just sickening to me. The other reason I voted for him was the woke the DEI thing that was just going in another left hand direction. I didn't really agree with it all. It was just bizarre. Bizarre. So in conclusion, it's too soon. It's 100 days in, he's doing a lot. There's a lot of confusion. People are pissed or people are happy, I don't know. So that's kind of the way I feel. I liked that the executive order defined two sexes, male and female, because it's just been a lot of insanity with the whole DEI thing. That's really it. Honestly, what jumped out to me was a lot of people, including myself, voted for him because we wanted prices to go down. Really none of that other stuff matters if we can't afford our basic needs. But as an autistic person, I think that the autism registry is a little bit concerning and I'm worried for how I'm going to be regarded in this country. I've never had many issues as an autistic adult and I didn't think that I would ever have to, but now I'm very worried. I originally liked him because when everyone was being forced to get like the COVID vaccine and everything, he was telling everyone, hey, it's causing this, that, and the third, so don't get the vaccine. And then I seen he was getting banned off of Google, Spotify, everything. So I was like, maybe he could really be honest. So I was like, okay, I like him. I like that he started, you know, only two genders. I originally thought he was gonna lower the prices, but he lies. It was one more thing that I like. Oh, he stopped kids from being able to go transgender at a young age and mutilate themselves. But what I didn't like was I was planning on going to the military and he took off the law that stopped women from being harassed. And I didn't think that made sense. He's just touching stuff that doesn't need to be touched. Okay, so people have their complaints, but I will say we asked the groups if anybody would go back and vote this. There's multiple groups in there. We did a couple different ones of people who had a low approval of Trump, but we asked if any of them would change their vote to Kamala Harris. Nobody said they would. There were some people who said they either wouldn't have voted or would have voted for a third party if they'd known. That's an interesting gauge of how mad they are. It's like, I don't like what he's doing, and I don't want my fingerprints on it. But I'm not mad enough about it that I would have voted for the Democratic candidate. That is not a bottom falling out, and that is not a boy. I. I would rather vote for Dems. And so you've written about how there's less appetite this time around for impeachment, sort of the way that Dems were aggressively going after Trump in his first term. Why do you think it is that Democrats can't find a gear like an aggressive gear on Trump? What's different this time?
- [32:40]
Dave Weigel
I was saying at the top, I do think they just, they had a vision of a country that never fully accepted this guy, and it was enhanced after January 6th. And it takes a while for that drama to fade, if I can call it trauma. But you heard in that focus group, and I'd listen to it for the show, there are just issues they have not figured out their position on that they know are hurting them, and they don't know the line of attack. I mean, the transgender issue has many facets. One thing you've noticed in states this year, it's Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire. There are Democratic state legislators who are voting with Republicans, not many on protect women's sports bills. They were speaking out against gender medicine. And that is a fairly new issue for Trump. Right. He did not run on that 2016. He didn't talk about it a lot. He signed orders rolling back some trans rights, which were put there by Barack Obama and the code. But now he's very aggressive in talking about it. It forces the question. Democrats don't quite know how to respond just to pick one of them. And I think a lot of their problems are the voters that we're talking about who are in that group. If they don't follow every beat of politics. They also intuitively know when somebody is having trouble answering a question. And this is never a problem for Trump. Trump can just beast it out. He can lie, which he's done before, but they can tell if a Democrat. Let's go back to Biden. If a Democrat is just kind of being lawyerly and not admitting what they think is true about Biden, that he's too old to run again, they say I can't trust that person. If they're mealy mouthed about gender in some way, that's another strike. And so I think that in attacking Trump and attacking Republicans in general, Democrats have been very evasive on the toughest issues for them that are fairly new, let's say the 80, 20 issues where they are on the 20% side, even some of those, they're not sticking their neck out and saying, you know, the party's been wrong about this. They're saying Republicans want to talk about that issue. But I want to talk about Medicaid because a focus group told me that voters trust us on Medicaid and they don't trust us on that. And I think that wasn't there the first term. They were always worried about bringing up impeachment. I think that's changed because there's now been two Trump impeachments and Democratic legislators have learned that just you don't get rid of the guy by impeaching him. It is embarrassing, maybe to him, it drives his poll numbers up with his base, what's the point? But you have a base out there that's demanding they talk about it. And from the left you could say, with the exception of Jon Ossoff, they often have really mealy mouthed answers to that. Their answer in 2017, hey, I'm a Democrat, I'm angry. Will you impeach him? Was, well, voters need to act and he's done so much. We're going to investigate it and he's not going to win again. They were very confident in saying we're going to beat him at the ballot box and they just don't know what their answer is. A termed out president, let's leave aside the third term thing that he drops. Sometimes a guy that they just say, no, he's going to be there. We don't have a constitutional way to get rid of him. For their own base and for skeptical voters, there are just a lot of issues. They don't have a confident answer. And the ones who do are very rare. Even the Biden age issue, which is a topic this week, it'll be a topic kind of this whole month because of the Alex Thompson, Jake Tapper book.
- [35:41]
Sarah Longwell
And because Biden has decided to get.
- [35:43]
Dave Weigel
Back out there and because Biden's decided, I think preemptively to get back out there. But that is not a top of Mind issue for voters. I don't think anyone's going to vote in the midterm and say, my top issue is that Biden was too old in 2024. But it's one of those things you hear somebody talk and they don't have a good defense. I think this has hurt Republicans sometimes. It always hurt them when they talk about January 6th in a confusing way. They wouldn't admit that Trump lost in 2020. Again, voters have some sophistication here. They can tell if you are uncomfortable answering a straightforward question. And it's weird how many people in politics are not good at that. You give a perfect interview for 30 minutes and you say one thing that's off script and that's the story, and you have to answer for three days. They're still in that mindset where they're very worried about boldly saying, you know what? You're screwed up. People to judge. Is often cited as one of these Democrats who is comfortable and can talk in a setting. Sounds realistic. This podcast he did, the one he did with Andrew Schultz, I forget what the name of it is. Flagrant. I think they were not murderboarding him with the tough questions that Democrats get on a Sunday show. They didn't ask, like, hey, you worked for Biden. Was he too old to run again? I don't know he's gonna answer that. There's a day maybe when Lia Thomas is in the news where the big issue is transports. Not most days, but there are so many of these topics where Democrats don't have a confident policy answer. And they were very confident on policy in Trump's first turn. They're very confident talking about him kicking trans people out of the military, for example. They have commented on it this time, but it's not a full court press because they really have lost their confidence.
- [37:09]
Sarah Longwell
They have. And they have not figured out what their offense positions are. But, man, I could talk about this forever, but it's this piece of just being able to answer a straightforward question, like, because you're 100% right, people say they don't want a regular politician. It's not that you can't be in politics because they still want you to have some experience. Often somewhere what they mean is, stop talking to me. Like, I don't know, like, how carefully worded this is. And this was one of the big problems for Kamala Harris is she was a. You know, it didn't feel like it was coming from just a super authentic, this is what I believe place. And so people are like, yeah, I know Trump lies, but I think he's being honest. And what they mean is, I don't know, he, like, consistently says thing, and he seems to think it, like, yes, the 2020 election wasn't stolen, but, like, this dude really seems to think it is, and he keeps, you know, pounding away at it, and that gives him a sense of authenticity. So, like, Democrats, when people are like, what's the message I need? Or whatever, I'm like, what do you think? Like, what's your authentic position on transports? Because I bet it's somewhere, like, why don't you leave trans kids alone and, like, let them play sports if they want. But once we're talking about high school and college, it's a different situation. There are safety considerations and, like, we should let people who are super close to that issue look at it. But I'm not reflexively for it. And people would be like, hey, that sounds like something you believe. I really feel like a lot of these politicians, they spent their whole life figuring out how to be politicians, and now you have to, like, spend some time figuring out how to be people again, because that's what voters want. They want to know that you're a person who cares about them, trying to improve their lives, and, like, we'll be real with them about what's happening.
- [38:48]
Dave Weigel
That's totally right. And Democrats have talked about this, but in this way that accentuates what you're saying was they love to say we need to talk more to normal people about kitchen table issues. Well, that's not talking like normal people. Sometimes there's a fight where they can talk about it and they know how to get there. And look, Trump does have abilities to get out of bad news cycles or out of bad quotes that other politicians don't. There are still people who think they'd run like Trump and they say something stupid and it's the only thing people know about them for their entire campaign. But the lack of just normal person talk among Democrats, when a hard question comes up, I think it is a consistent problem. If they have an agenda that hits with people, it just doesn't get there. And Schumer and Harris and Jeffries are. Whatever you think of their political skills, I'm not going to indict them here. They're lifelong politicians who only know how to talk in that register. Joe Biden, at his best could go off script, but he always had a bunch of stuff he would double back to, even what he would bring up. Scranton's story, for the 10 millionth time, was more Effective than saying we need an opportunity economy to pick on Schumer and Jeffries. One of the things I wrote on Monday was that they love talking about Trump's poll numbers. They love to talk about how his poll numbers are down. And that is, again, a weird politician consultant way of talking that normal people don't use. Like, we know we're winning because his poll numbers are down. I remember when Kevin McCarthy said that to Sean Hannity about the Benghazi committee and Hillary Clinton. Everyone agreed that's stupid. You shouldn't say we're doing this because it makes the guy's poll numbers drop. I feel like I'm doing media consulting for them right now by accident. But just as a reporter who also tries to understand what people who are not plugged into the news are saying. People who are just kind of scrolling or paying attention if they have to, oh, there's a hurricane coming, I'm going to turn on the news. It is a paradox I don't think they've figured out yet. How do they make this real? I think attrition does work. The 500th time. You go to the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, and talk to somebody who's being screwed over by the trade war with Canada, Netflix. But in daily political storytelling, it hasn't really. And I don't think that's an indictment of the press. The press will cover normal people. But in the context of we have a thousand words or we have three minutes to tell you if this bill is going to pass, that's not part of the story.
- [40:53]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And I want to get to this next bit of sound, because this is sort of like the most important thing that we've been hearing from people who are frustrated with Trump. He pretty much had one job from these voters, the people who voted for him, and that was fix the economy. Like, they wanted him to lower prices and fix the economy, and he's not doing it for these voters. So let's hear how they talked about that.
- [41:18]
Dave Weigel
I think, like myself, a lot of people voted for Trump with hopes that the economy would get better. And we're seeing stock markets in free fall, uncertainty in the financial markets with tariffs. So I would say very chaotic, very radical and unsure of what the next three and a half or so years look like. It's a little more difficult right now. A lot of ups and downs.
- [41:42]
Sarah Longwell
I don't know how to strategize or how to set my goals due to.
- [41:49]
Dave Weigel
Situations with the country, with the prices and especially investments and stuff.
- [41:55]
Sarah Longwell
As you know, the stock market will Go up, go down, go up, go down.
- [41:58]
Dave Weigel
And for me, setting a goal, like, I have my daughter's wedding in a month or so, and, you know, it just. Especially the prices. The prices, you just went up the roof.
- [42:08]
Sarah Longwell
I'm not like a. I love Donald Trump or whatever. I'm very, like, in the middle. And Trump promised, you know, a better economy. So I was like, that sounds good to me. I have no money to begin with, so let's bring the price of everything down so I can't afford a house and can buy groceries or whatever. And now it's like, oh, actually, everything is either worse or exactly the same because now there's tariffs on everything. And it just feels like everything is still going up in price. So it's like, this is not all what I was, like, promised every day you keep hearing about we're going to add more tariffs, we're going to do this. And that was not at all what was promised to us. I guess I could start with why I voted for Trump. And a lot of it is because I do think that we do need to reduce the size of the federal government. I actually was trying to look up how much debt we have, like 36.8 trillion, which is ridiculous. I guess I just don't approve of the way it's happening. It seems to be just nonsensical and without any type of reason. I never approve of tariffs. I'm not about protectionalism at all. So that part I definitely don't like. Part of the reason it didn't seem so bad to me is because tariffs are always so temporary compared to other tax increases historically have always kind of just disappeared, at least ones that are this big. The reason I voted for Trump this time was last time. Financially, I was a whole lot better than I was when Biden was in office. Our taxes were lower. You know, the economy was doing great, and I thought that's what we was going to get again. And it started out, you know, they said they were going to save all this money, cut all this waste stuff that they said. I mean, it was infuriating when they talked about all this money going to all these places for just crazy stuff. But I haven't seen any benefit to everything that they've done. All they've done is pretty much said, oh, hey, we're saving all this money, but where's this money going? Well, you know, what's happened to all these big savings? Then he throws in these tariffs. And in. In my industry, in the utility industry, we've seen dramatic Price increases because so much stuff gets imported because we're a global economy. So now it costs us more for the same things. And it directly affects every single person. It's not that they're punishing any of these companies because all they're doing is just raising their prices to cover these tariffs. It's a wash. And the only good things I can say that I've seen is his stance on energy, which now the energy market is getting a lot of support. Part of the reason why I voted for him 2.0, I guess, was because I was hopeful that it would be the same, similar to the first administration that he had. And I feel like now he's so beholden to the donor cost because so many large checks were written to his campaign, that now he's lost focus. We are not America First. We are funding endless wars. We are sending our sons and daughters to fight for other countries. And we have Americans that are homeless, veterans that don't have medical care. Prices are so high. I mean, I think we're really headed for a recession. And it's. It's like everybody else has mentioned, it's nothing that we had hoped for by voting for him. I feel that we were lied to. You know, everything in the campaign that he promised, it hasn't happened. It's just going the opposite direction. They said Christmas is going to be rough holidays.
- [45:34]
Dave Weigel
You know, things.
- [45:35]
Sarah Longwell
Things are going to start coming off the shelves here soon. You know, they're not going to be able to restock. I mean, this. It's getting hard. I mean, for people to even survive with basic needs. You know, this really goes back to something you just said. That again, I'm going to kind of footstep, which is Democrats talking about. Those polls are going down, and I just want to be like, guys, please stop being analysts and be politicians who say he broke his promise to you. Here's what we would do instead. You were lied to and your prices aren't going down. Like, don't talk about poll numbers going down. Talk about them and the fact that their prices aren't going down.
- [46:10]
Dave Weigel
That's true. And I should give Democrats a little bit of grace here, is that they do. I've thought a lot about their messaging just because I do try to read everything they say. They're giving a speech. Let me read the whole speech, not the highlights. They do get to that when they're talking, but they're very defensive about the fact that it's just a loop they're stuck in. How come you guys lost and how come you guys aren't winning now? And they'll refer back to the polling instead of the issues. And the Democrats who've been more effective. You watch their messaging. They just had the time to explain, well, here's what I actually did. And sometimes I worked with Republicans to do it. And here's what that Bill did. Here's 60 seconds of me saying, I passed this and it helped you in some way as negative messaging. It's hard to do that, except you can warn that something bad's gonna happen. The only thing I'd say about that, the warning is every time the opposition party has to confront a new president, it says, these policies are gonna lead to a recession. And it happened with Biden. There was no recession under the Biden years. It turns out that when voters think recession, they don't think the economic definition of two quarters of negative GDP growth. They think, my personal economic situation's not good. When they do get the time to message, they talk about the economy all the time. They actually were better at that in power than they are out of power. Because they need Trump to fail in some way for voters to say, you know what, good point. We made a mistake, which voters don't like to say. Voters do not like to say, sorry, we screwed up the last time I voted for the wrong candidate. They need Trump to make more mistakes and for things to look worse. But in the meantime, yeah, you predict a recession because voters understand that, as you're right, my personal economic situation didn't get better.
- [47:42]
Sarah Longwell
Absolutely. All right, we got to keep moving. We asked, and have been asking now voters, especially Trump voters, what they think about Trump kind of playing footsie with this third term in 2028 and whether they take that talk seriously, because a lot of people write that off, it's just like, oh, yeah, Trump, that's not real. Like, this is just bluster. So let's listen to what they said about the third term. And then I know he was, like, maybe joking or whatever, but him talking about the third term just, like, scares me. Like, I don't like it. I. People have talked about, you know, he's a powerful dude. Like, he can rally people behind him, and he is making a lot of orders that he's just kind of skipping everything. So if he decides, yeah, I'm going to do a third term, it doesn't seem like that unlikely with how things are going. And I don't like that. I don't think it's the way that things are supposed to be. So to answer Your question? Bad things are going bad.
- [48:40]
Dave Weigel
If he's saying he's thinking about it.
- [48:43]
Sarah Longwell
And people saying he could do it, trust me, Trump, he will do it. He will try everything in his power.
- [48:50]
Dave Weigel
To do it, especially if he did not accomplish majority of his things of.
- [48:55]
Sarah Longwell
His, you know, assignment for the next four years. But I don't think it's going to happen because who in their right mind would vote for him again? I mean, based on what we've seen so far that he's done, I don't know. It is possible that he could take our country in a good direction. Like, you know, he has a long time to go to make stuff happen, but I don't see it happening. Whether he can do it or not, that I don't know. But do I think he believes he could and has the right to? Absolutely, I believe he does. I think he's an egomaniac and I think he is a dictator. And I hate saying this because I know Hitler killed people and Kim Jong Un has done, but that is the kind of things I am so strongly against. The autism, making them have to record who's had autism, any of those kind of things, it starts creating a really uneasy feeling of what are we doing to our people again and where are we going with this? And when he starts doing that kind of stuff, it just makes me feel yuck and uncomfortable. And we need to stick to our Constitution. It's good. Is it infallible? No, but it's worked for a long time and we need to stick with it. He loves to hear himself talk and anytime he can stir up a little controversy, I think he does. It's kind of like making Canada a state or, you know, building a Trump Tower in the Gaza Strip. He was just going to take it over. I think he just shoots off at the mouth and does it just to get responses and just keep his name in the top of the headlines. But I don't think there's any way possible that he could get a third term. You know, they keep saying how he loves America and he's such a patriot. Well, a patriot wouldn't change the Constitution. And that's one of the main things in it. You know, now there were murmurings in there, which I was pleased to hear of something you've written about, which is that some of these folks seem to think that Trump has some dictator like impulses, some point on which I agree with them. But you heard it in there and it was interesting. You know, I think oftentimes voters think of democracy as an abstract term. They still have like kind of a gut sense of what are the things we can do here and what are the things we can't. And so they're feeling uneasy about how he's behaving. Right. And you say there's been a down with the king line of attack from Democrats that it's out of like a Schoolhouse Rock video about the revolution with their pride for due process and checks on executive power. What do you think's happening here? Do you think that voters are starting to see him as sort of an imperial president, more of a dictator?
- [51:56]
Dave Weigel
Some of that, because I was saying earlier, people appreciate the action, the impression that he's taking action whenever he can. People remember FDR for a reason, although he had Congress acting at the same time he was creating agencies that the court would strike down because, look, people have a president, but they also have a governor and they have a mayor. And you've not seen the same demand in the states, like the demanding that my governor overrule the legislature and act, that they take immediate executive action on something that they never heard of before. And some of the more famous Trump initiatives have just not been very popular, like the Gulf of America, kind of, to my surprise, because people like America who live in it, that is polled pretty poorly. You've not seen people pick it up. I haven't been to Key west recently, but Key West's T shirt shops are a good indication. Beach T shirt shops in general. Okay, what's the right wing stuff people are putting on their shirts? A little bit of that. But to the extent where he's associated with doing executive actions for silly things, that's not been helpful to him. The challenge for Democrats, and some of them have started to do this actually. John Ossoff in Georgia is taken the lead on this is saying it's not just that he is ruling like a king, it's not that he's a fascist, which they're very comfortable saying now. It's that he's using this to enrich himself and his friends. And I'm surprised it's been so hard for them to connect those two, because that is based on our experience, American politics, much more powerful. I think this comes from the same place that Democrats are winded and rattled and don't think anything sticks to Trump anymore. But the idea that he's using his powers to get rich with this coin he created, I've seen Democrats connect that to the imperial nature. Because a president using his power for silly things, not very popular. A president using his Power for popular things. Actually, it turns out to be more popular than Democrats wish it was. But a president using his power for people to give him money who might not even be American in exchange for deals, that is probably the greatest area of opportunity for Democrats because they had the very recent experience when Republicans were attacking Joe Biden for his family members, using his last name to benefit in some capacity, or Hunter Biden selling paintings, et cetera. That was unpopular. It really did drag down Biden's approval. People don't like the idea if it's their mayor, if it's their governor, whatever, of corruption. Even Trump has not been immune to that. More immune than other people. That's a perfect example. If right now Greg Abbott created Greg Coin and people were getting deals with Texas and legislation because they bought Greg Coin and you didn't know who they even were and the people buying it on the chain were from Singapore and Malaysia and stuff, I think that would be a scandal. I think Democrats know how to talk about that. But Trump has his own exoskeleton that's tough to penetrate.
- [54:33]
Sarah Longwell
It might be, but I actually, I think they should really try on this one. We have said this on many other pods elsewhere that like the crypto scammy stuff. I think it's difficult because I think people don't understand crypto like really, really broadly. It's still like complicated and they're like, but they're just giving him fake computer money. I don't understand. And I think that Democrats, here's why Trump's bad, here's why we're good. And I think the corruption and the self enriching while you are getting poorer because people do hate the Gulf of America stuff like I hear Trump voters all the time where they use it as a, well, he's doing some dumb stuff like the Gulf of America or whatever or talking about Canada. At least with the tariffs for people who are, are invested in Trump succeeding, they can like make a case for why this could be good. That stuff seems totally off base and it contributes to, I think, an overall impression that you see in voters, which is that Trump is not focusing on the right things. So we're starting to see earlier than is typical with presidencies, people, yes, seeing lots of motion, but a lot of people unhappy with his job performance, seeing an early dip in poll numbers, even if it's not the floor dropping out immediately that people might like to see and that there is a lot of opportunity for Democrats to go on offense against this guy because voters are spooked.
- [55:52]
Dave Weigel
Yeah, it's always tough to be the opposition party. One hundred days in, Trump is less popular than other presidents. After 100 days, people are more tired of some stuff that he's doing than they have been. And the final thing I'd say is his immigration handling. One poll I'm highlighting in the newsletter this week is even in Texas, people say they're satisfied with immigration and how he's handling it. But as an issue, the salience of it has fallen way down. They're much more worried, actually about government corruption than they are about immigration. That's the paradox of success. Democrats can't talk about preexisting conditions anymore because they got rid of that problem. But the thing that most people will tell you in polls, they agree with Trump so far on and they might shorten it to he closed the border, meaning I don't have to watch that footage of people rushing across the border anymore and getting in the country illegally. And who knows, they are having fixed that. In his way, he pockets that win and it has not helped him on anything else. So there are opportunities here for Democrats, but there's a lot of stuff they need to confront the next time they're actually running. And they need to have an answer that's not that's a hard question. Let me talk about Medicaid.
- [56:52]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, agree, agree, agree. Dave Weigel, thank you much, so, so much for joining us here on the focus group podcast. And thanks to all of you for listening to another episode with us. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, rate and review us on Apple Podcast, subscribe to the bull work on YouTube and become a bull work plus member at the bulwark.com see you guys.