The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Why Republicans Won the Attention War

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21:47Peter Kafka:And we're back. So prior to starting the book work, like we said, you were in politics, dealt with media a lot. You're still doing that. I'm curious about how you view sort of state of the art right now when it comes to media and politics. Who's doing a good job? Who's not? What are people doing right? What are they routinely getting wrong? Because I'm an idiot, we're recording this on Monday, November 3rd. You guys will hear this podcast on the 5th after Tuesday's election. So we're just going to have to imagine how some of these races turn out. But who's who's doing a good job right now? Well, if you mean which politicians are doing politicians or parties, you tell me.

22:24Yeah.

22:25Peter Kafka:Who do you look at and go, they're crushing it? Well, I don't I don't look at the Democratic Party and think that and that's not going to come as a surprise to anybody. I think that there is. And I think it's one of the things that's interesting is because I worked on Republican communications and now I work by default, basically, because I'm trying to beat back Trump and people like him. I basically have been, you know, sort of welcomed into more Democratic comms side. I've gotten to see things from both perspectives. And what I can tell you is one of the biggest differences is that Republicans are straight up mercenaries and they understand how to be everywhere all at once.

23:06Talking about everything everywhere all at once. It's a movie I didn't like, but is a comm strategy that I endorse and live by. And so to the extent that Democrats and look, there's been a lot of discourse about this post-election. I think everybody agrees that Kamala Harris's play it safe strategy and not be out in the media and not be doing every single podcast was a big part of the detriment. But here's the thing that's changed. People are used to now engaging with anyone through the screens of their phones in a way that that person is being more or less exactly who they are. And as a result, the stiffness of a politician comes through.

23:47People read it now. They can see the practice nature. The number one thing I hear in focus groups when they say it's when I know that they dislike a politician is they'll say, I don't know, that person sounds like a regular politician. He sounds like a regular politician. That means and people throw around the word authenticity. But like they just mean like, I don't trust that person. I don't think they're giving it to me straight. I want to hear somebody talk to me straight.

24:09Peter Kafka:I think that if you turn the camera off and this person kept talking, they would keep talking the same way. They would say exactly the same thing, which is why you and I were talking right before the show. And you were asking, what do we mean when Tim Miller or one of us say, like, oh, we were talking about this in the green room. You're like, what green room? You guys are all sitting behind computers. And it's like, oh, well, we get to talking. And we're like, oh, this is what we want to say on the show. Quick, start the show. And so we tend to reference, oh, we were just having this conversation in the green room.

24:34But part of it is the conversations that JBL, Tim and I have when we are all alone and no one's listening are exactly the same conversations we have when we are on camera. And people can tell that. And I think that is the future because as technology progresses and we see lots more AI slop and everything else, people are going to be like, what do I know is true? What feels honest? What feels like something I can relate to? And I think that parasocial relationship with people that you feel like you can trust who are being real with you is going to become more and more the coin of the realm. Go ahead.

25:11Peter Kafka:And do you think Republicans are inherently or have become better at this than Democrats? Or is it a handful of Democrats, a handful like Trump? No, they're better. They're better. And here's why. Because I was with them when this happened. The big grievance among those of us on the right for decades was that we were locked out of mainstream media, that the media and the university, they were they were dominated culturally by the left. Even people who, you know, sort of got it in terms of what it meant to be a conservative were still doing it in a kind of anthropological study kind of way. Like, yes, conservatives exist.

25:50Let's look at this species of conservative because they were different from the dominant politics of the people who ran most mainstream media. So what did the right do? They went and built their own media ecosystem, first with Fox News. And then as the technology progressed, now there's like this. Then they built their own other cable channels. one American news network. And a lot of that served to push Republicans to the right. And that that but like they were just there first, like because they felt shut out from the dominant thing, they built an alternative media ecosystem. And so like they had the tools and the infrastructure way earlier than the Democrats who basically did and still do.

26:31They're look, if you're a Democrat, you read The New York Times and you read a lot. You read the newspaper, you watch not necessarily MSNBC, but maybe you watch ABC, CBS, NBC.

26:43Peter Kafka:And and you're talking about the delivery apparatus, not the mode and tone of how you appear. Right. Like generally, I mean, until recently, if I would watch the Republican politician on Fox News, they looked like and sounded like a politician and with a blazer and they were stiff as well. So what am I missing here? Well, now it's it's sort of the the Donald Trump effect of him tweeting. And at first, right, everybody's like, you can't do that. He's just tweeting out policy. Why? He's got to stop. And instead, now everybody else is like, oh, no, I'm going to tweet out my policy. Oh, I'm going to.

27:17And so they I think because they were close to Trump and because they embraced him as opposed to rejected him. They also embraced his communication style, which is why when Gavin Newsom does his performance art as though he's Trump, everyone knows that's fake. Everyone knows it's a parody because Democrats don't talk like that. But Donald Trump talks like that. And obviously lots of other Republicans don't do exactly what Trump does. And in fact, it's not really working for people when they try to be just like Trump. But the broader notion and like J.D. Vance is a good example of somebody who has a totally different communication style from Trump.

27:57But it's like still in that he's like he's a shit poster on the Internet. He engages with people, right, goes back and forth, has fights with them. He goes on every single podcast that exists. He sits there. He talks about his life openly. When people said they felt like they didn't trust or know Kamala Harris, it's because you need to be able to sit for three hours and let people be like, I want the real measure of you. I don't you can't I won't absorb you in soundbites.

28:23Peter Kafka:So does this just become something where just naturally politics just moves to this in both parties and everyone will end up doing this because it's the mode and it's the it's the path to success. And so everyone from now on will end up being comfortable on podcast or is this a sort of wave and then we overreact to it and then we move on to something else? Can I say that the answer is a little bit of both, I bet, because on some level, I do think Democrats, Democrats have tried to solve this problem by making more videos. And everybody who looks at them is like, those are cringe. Like, these do not work.

28:58And so Democrats, I think, still have a ways to go. And this goes to a deeper problem that the Democrats are experiencing on the communications front, which is they have to know what they believe. like whether you dislike the Republicans know what they believe. Donald Trump tells them what it is that they believe. And so they are like, OK, well, whatever Donald Trump says, now I'm going to go out and I'm going to defend that and I'm going to do it and I'm going to be chill about it. I'm going to talk normally and people it's going to be accessible. Donald Trump has the has the language skills of like a fifth grader.

29:27And as a result, he's very accessible to all people. Everybody understands him. Democrats have a long way to go before they figure out or at least start doing well, the like, now I can sit down and talk about anything. Like there's a couple of people who do it well. Pete Buttigieg does it well. Mom Donnie is doing it well right now. Like, and I'm not, this is not an endorsement of people's policies, but like AOC does it well. And in fact, oftentimes people with whom I disagree on policy the most are still some of the best communicators because they know exactly what they believe. There's a problem I think right now among the moderates where they tend to be a little like, well, what, what does the research say?

30:06You know,

30:06Peter Kafka:So you got Bernie Sanders, who's a million years old, who's very good on social media because he knows what he wants. He just knows what he believes. Like you ask him a question. The guy knows exactly what he wants to say. And I think that that is the Democrats biggest challenge is figuring out not what the right message is. Like, what do you believe deeply? Just say it. Say it like you would say it if you were at dinner. During the 2024 election, I kept seeing polls listing what voters were concerned with. And broadly, you kept seeing the same thing over and over. Economy, economy, economy, cost of living, cost of living, cost of living.

30:40Peter Kafka:But so much of the discussion after the election in particular is about social issues and and did this anti trans ads sway voters. And if you watch the way the Republicans are conducting their communications now, there's very little of it seems to be about the economy. What do you make of that that gap? Or do you even see that gap? Oh, no, no, no, no. There's a gap. I think that the gap, though, is the reason that they're talking about the social issues post-election is that they understand that those issues hurt them. And it's true that. Which issues hurt them? Well, people get mad because I use their framing.

31:25But woke, DEI, the trans ad that Kamala Harris was in that was played over and over again. And that taps into like a wide frustration I hear from voters and not just voters on the right. That is like, what what is the people people people do not realize how new the issue of trans people and sports about even though it's kind of been around for a while. If you go back.

31:52Peter Kafka:It also it also affects 10 people. Right. These are small issues. But like the problem was, is Democrats. And I think this is what Democrats really struggle with is they need to be and want to be on offense on economic issues. Right. And and they want to be like, no, we're working for working class voters. But Republicans keep trapping them in a kind of framing war where they're like, well, we're going to put you because the Republicans understand narrative dominance. They understand the attention economy. They're like, no, we're going to talk about the things that we know Americans care about and that where we have.

32:25They have a better impression of our position than the Democrats position, which is why they talk about things like transports, immigration, crime. Like, that's why you hear them. And so until Democrats realize how to get those to basically moderate that, I don't think that the Democrats writ large have to be more moderate on everything. I do think there's a couple of places where it's less about moderation and more than being entirely out of step with where the vast majority of American people are.

32:48Peter Kafka:So I understand that people culturally feel like I don't really, you know, I saw Kamala Harris, you know, you know, presenting her genders and their pronouns, et cetera. I don't really like that. But again, they were telling pollsters, I care the most about the economy. Rent's too high. Groceries are too expensive. So should they have not pursued that line of argument? Who, Democrats? No, of course they should have. But they need to— I think you're asking two different things. So if you're asking why they talked about the social stuff after the election, I'm saying it's because they were trying to correct for it.

33:25Everybody's talking about it because they realized that was a weakness that hurt them, that the Republicans were on offense. That's why Democrats are talking about it. That's why Democrats are talking about them. Are you making a different point?

33:36Peter Kafka:Well, I guess if voters were telling everyone the economy is killing us last year and I know that there's partisanship. And so now Republicans say the economy is better. But still, the nationwide, the country said we don't like the economy. Economy hasn't changed in a meaningful way. Trump has his worst numbers on the economy that he's ever had. Right. So how do you come like if if I just how do you tackle that as a politician, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat? I'll tell you how Democrats should tackle it, which is. Instead of saying things like human infrastructure, go out and start telling people you've got a plan to hire a million new community cops, a million new nurses, a million new teachers.

34:15We're going to give people jobs and we are going to rebuild the infrastructure in this country that has been crumbling. We are going to stop having culture wars in our classrooms and we are going to focus on making sure that we teach the next generation of young people how to assess problems, how we can be more competitive against China. Like, have a big, bold vision that includes work, how people work, how people get paid more, how we rebuild the society of people who help everybody else get through and build a better country. I mean, just get yourself out of the old. I mean, listen to Democrats talk about the economy and it's like they can't hold more than one thing in their head.

34:52It has to be.

34:52Peter Kafka:I mean, Kamala Harris said, I'm going to build more houses now. Granted, she wasn't. That was going to take a long time. And I'm not sure what it would work. But she was trying to do that. I realize now what you're asking. And I've been pretty frustrated, actually, with this stream of questioning where, and this isn't about you exactly, but there's a lot of people who say, well, didn't Kamala Harris do this? I just want to laugh so hard and be like, in 107 days, what, she completely recast herself? Like they think that that little just because she did that messaging right then and it didn't work in persuading the vast majority or like a plurality of voters.

35:28Like she only lost by what, one point seven million actual like general election voters. But when you look at that, you think, well, she tried that messaging and it didn't work. No, she didn't. We don't people. Nobody heard that messaging. Nobody just nobody over. Do you know how long it takes to form an opinion on something to go deep? People, what they knew about Kamala Harris was that they thought she was too close to Joe Biden, that Joe Biden was too old, that she was there watching him deceive the country about his age. This is something humans understand or in a way where if she just comes out and says, no, we're going to build houses, that wasn't enough to win people over.

36:07It wasn't enough time. They hear Sanford. They think she's a San Francisco progressive. Like people who think that just because somebody grabbed what I think is a winning messaging formula overall and tried to do it for the last hundred days after the disastrous nature of the Biden candidacy and that she was going to be able to turn it around. That's you can't like that's just that. And I don't think it's an indictment of the idea of running as as a moderate. I just think the voters didn't buy that she was a moderate.

36:39Peter Kafka:We'll be right back, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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37:34And we're back.

37:36Peter Kafka:The last thing I want to talk to you about is the focus group work you do. You've been doing it a long time. It's not the only stuff you do. You do other research, but you really lean into it. Like you said, you've got a whole show dedicated to it. It seems in some ways counterintuitive in a world where Facebook and Google print money because using really hard data, they're able to present people who want to buy things with people who want to sell things, and they're really good at matching that, and that's just clinical. What is what is gathering a group of humans in a room and talking to them tell you?

38:08Peter Kafka:And what can you do with that information? I mean, I started doing the focus groups because I was a Republican who didn't understand why other Republicans liked Donald Trump. And so for me, a lot of it and I wanted to figure out if there was a way we could primary him, if there was an appetite for something different. And but it was this like jolting experience to go listen, not in the not in the think tank world that I sat in and talked about education policy and our debt sustainability. It was like listening to just regular voters say they basically it's just cheat code for understanding politics.

38:44They will tell you all the answers. Like I was like, well, why why did you vote for Donald Trump? And it was like, oh, I really hated Hillary Clinton. I thought I'd give him a chance. Oh, I watched The Apprentice and had for a long time. And so a lot of times people look at polling. Here, I'll give you an example. I'll give you a real world example right now today, something that I know from listening to voters. There is a bunch of new polling coming out because, as you said, we're going into an election on Tuesday. And there's not just polling about Virginia and New Jersey. There's polling coming out everywhere about Donald Trump's approval ratings and the generic ballot.

39:13And a bunch of them have the Democrats now are ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot. So people, they're just saying, you know, who do you want to be in charge now? And more people are saying Democrats. I'd rather have generic. If you had a generic Democrat, would you vote for them over a generic Republican? So the Democrats are at least in one of them five points up, but they are ahead in almost all of them. So that's a good trend line for Democrats. But then you dig one layer deeper and they ask the question, you know, what is the favorability, unfavorability of the Democratic Party? And what is the favorability, favorability, unfavorability of the Republican Party?

39:48And the Republicans are performing much better than Democrats in that. So why, if the generic ballot is 5 percent more, are the Republicans 20 points ahead in perception of their party? Well, I can answer that from listening to the voters, which is that the people who are skeptical of the Democratic Party now are Democrats. Democrats are so mad at the Democratic Party for being unable or unwilling to take on Trump in a meaningful way. And over time, you're going to see the numbers for Democrats probably go up a little bit because they haven't caved on the shutdown yet. And that's the kind of thing that voters are saying.

40:25I want to see more of that. I want to see Democrats fight.

40:29Peter Kafka:So in this in this is this is focus group telling you something before you see it in polls. Is it telling you something that a poll can't uncover? And do the two ever conflict? Is this someone in your focus groups are telling you X, but the polling data says Y? Yeah, that does happen. I think it's more that if polling can tell you the what, focus groups can tell you the why. You know, they can tell you what people are thinking. Like, what do they focus on? They focus on immigration. And the focus groups can tell you, like, why do they focus on this? So I could tell you that one of the reasons Donald Trump has been so successful on the immigration, on the issue of immigration, is it's not just immigration.

41:09Immigration for Americans who care about it, and that goes including like Democrats, certainly swing voters, is that they tie immigration to drugs like fentanyl, even though it's actually not something really that comes across the southern border. there. Terrorism, crime, all of these. And then also the idea of like America first, which is not a slogan. It's a declaration of prioritization and people saying, why would somebody else get something that I should be getting? Which is, again, people are like, oh, they bust people into my city and they got a hotel room and they got, you know, five thousand dollar card.

41:42I didn't get that. And I'm an American citizen. It taps into it sort of collapses the space between the issue of crime, drugs, immigration, terrorism. And it plugs into people's fear centers because people can access their compassion centers for immigrants, but not until their safety needs are met. And so when people feel under threat, they can't access the compassion that is sort of need to have this sort of like, yes, people should come here. And if they're going to be killed in their home place and they should become, you know, So that's a good example of where I feel like you just get a much deeper, richer picture of.

42:20Peter Kafka:What was the hardest thing for you to hear in a focus group or the most surprising thing where you're like, well, obviously the world works this way. People see the world this way. And your focus group said, nope, you got it wrong. Well, I mean, the hardest thing is listening to people talk about why a woman shouldn't be president. That one always stresses me out. You get a lot of dudes being like, well, what if she's on the reg? Like, can you trust it? Women don't say that. Well, women definitely say they don't necessarily think a woman should be president. They usually don't say it's because of their periods.

42:49But they might say things like, I think they're too emotional. And so I think some of that stuff can be, this is a contrast where you want people to be their most authentic, like you want them to tell you the truth. But, you know, what people believe is when they start saying racist, sexist, homophobic things or in any way dumping on any particular group of people. And like, that's always that's never that fun to listen to, but it is illustrative.

43:17Peter Kafka:And it's also like, oh, I've hit the I've hit the vein where we're now. This is where this is what this is what we hear in terms of like the most shocking thing. I will say the amount of contradiction you get from voters, even in a very short span of time, can be disorienting. So, for example, I remember the first time I heard a woman say, well, I'm pro-life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose. And I was like, what is that? And then I heard it all the time. Like, everybody said it. All these people. And it was basically, you know, what they're saying is I personally am pro-life. I come from – but I don't want them to change this law.

43:56And that was a shocking revelation because when you get polling, they're just like – they present things in binary ways, right? Pro-life, pro-choice. and you're like, actually, people are much more complicated than that.

44:09Peter Kafka:And sometimes people will say complicated, and they mean the voters don't understand what they're talking about. But in this case, it seems quite clear, right? They don't want to have an abortion. They don't think you should have it. They also don't think the government should prevent you from having it. That's exactly right. Or something like that. Yep. Okay. And there's a lot of those types of big picture contradictions that I think our political discussions really flatten in ways that keep people, they have people making the wrong strategic choices. Sarah Longwell, I guess we're going to end this conversation on abortion, which is not where I thought we'd go, but it's been a great conversation.

44:41Great conversation. Thanks for having me.

44:43Peter Kafka:Thank you for your time. You can find Sarah on The Bulwark and all of the many platforms The Bulwark exist. Can't miss me. Thanks again. Thanks again to Sarah Longwell. I really like that one. Thanks to our advertisers. Thanks to my excellent producer, Charlotte Silver. And thanks to you guys. See you next week.

45:07Peter Kafka:When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GEICO app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to GEICO.