A Never Trumper and a Democrat on Beating MAGA for Good

Longwell’s signature research tool is the focus group, the centerpiece of her popular podcast from the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion website she co-founded for fellow anti-Trump conservatives. In 2016, Longwell was one of many Republicans who viewed Trump as self-evidently unqualified to be President and who thought he would never win. After the election, she attended a small gathering in Washington, D.C., named “The Meeting of the Concerned,” which she said was more like “The Meeting of Sad Republicans”: a support group for conservatives who felt newly alienated. She connected with the former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and together they started looking to recruit a candidate to challenge Trump for the 2020 G.O.P. nomination. She commissioned some polling and focus groups in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, but the results were disappointing: Republican voters strongly identified with Trump, thought he was doing a good job, excused his bad behavior, and treated criticism of him as an attack on themselves. Still, she fell in love with the focus-group process, likening it to “a tiny window into the soul of America” and labelling it “a cheat code for understanding politics,” as she writes in her book.

Her professional mentor, Rick Berman, a hard-knuckled Republican adman and lobbyist, passed down to her a parable for understanding how complicated, contradictory people actually make decisions: An executive is hiring an assistant. He interviews three women for the job. Afterward, he tells his colleagues in great detail about each candidate’s qualifications, and they ask him whom he’ll choose. He answers, “The one with the biggest tits.” The point of the story is that people don’t make logical decisions; their rational minds are constantly in tension with their baser instincts. In politics—according to Berman and, by extension, Longwell—the most convincing arguments play to love, sympathy, greed, fear, and anger.

Trump is a master of this technique. He flattened existing American anxieties about jobs, crime, drugs, and terrorism into one catchall fear: illegal immigration. He told a story that made emotional sense to many Americans, who didn’t always agree with him but liked that he appeared to be taking action. Not only were they willing to overlook his bad behavior but they also turned it into a positive—his caustic personality was core to how he got results. I had a similar realization while covering the 2024 Presidential race for the Washington Post. My colleagues and I would constantly meet voters who told us that they didn’t approve of Trump’s language or that they wished he would tweet less often. As we understood it, that meant there must be some point at which they would get fed up with him and turn away. In reality, they were telling us that they were carving out a permanent escape hatch for him; as long as he kept delivering on what they voted for, they would give his indiscretions a pass.

Tucked inside that ambivalence, Longwell hears an opportunity. In focus groups, Trump voters sounded less like committed ideologues than like people struggling to reconcile competing values. “You want people to do things the right way,” Longwell writes, “but at the same time, as a Christian, you should be accepting of people that are in need,” James, an evangelical from Missouri, said. Of illegal immigrants, Wendy from New Hampshire said, “If I was in their situation I would sneak in, too,” but, she added, “I can’t open my front door to just anybody.” To Longwell, such statements suggest that voters don’t want politicians to force them to choose between their hearts and their fears. But Democrats have often responded by dismissing their fears and attacking their motivations, as if to say, “Things aren’t as bad as you think, and, also, you’re kind of racist for thinking it,” instead of “We see what you see, we feel what you feel, and here’s how we’re going to fix it.” Longwell believes that neither party is currently giving voters the choice of being simultaneously tough and fair, secure and humane, protective and decent. Democrats, she argues, can’t offer a watered-down version of conservative border policies; they need to convince voters that they care about immigration even more than Republicans do, by telling a different story of strength. “Most voters aren’t looking for cruelty,” she writes. “They’re looking for control. Give them a way to feel safe that doesn’t require them to be cruel, and they’ll take it.”