How Jan. 6 Hearings Impact GOP Voters

WALTER ISAACSON, CORRESPONDENT: Thank you, Bianna. And Sarah Longwell, welcome to the show.

SARAH LONGWELL, FOUNDER, REPUBLICAN VOTERS AGAINST TRUMP: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You run focus groups, even do a podcast on focus groups, and you’re the publisher of the Bulwark. I wanna talk about some of those focus groups. You’ve been a Republican, but a Republican against Trump. And you’ve seen in your focus groups, I’ve, I’ve read that they tend to still support Trump until recently. Tell me what you’re finding right now.

LONGWELL: Yeah, it’s been really interesting and it’s, you know, I don’t, I wouldn’t say that Trump voters have stopped supporting Trump, but, but something interesting has started happening since the January 6th hearings began. Prior to this and I, I do a foc almost a focus group a week. They’re not always with Trump voters, but they often are. And one of the things that’s been very consistent including after January 6th, is that usually about half the group of Trump voters want Trump to run again in 2024. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never quite bought the argument from some of my friends that you know, Trump is losing his grip on the party because I hear from voters all the time who are excited to see Trump run again. But in the last two groups of Trump voters that I’ve done with the hearing kind of in the background, zero people in both groups wanted Trump to run again in 2024. And I’m not saying that that’s, I mean, focus groups are kind of, they’re a step above anecdotal. But to have so consistently heard from, you know, at least half the group wanting to see Trump run again to having two in a row where nobody wants to see Trump run again. What it makes me think is that voters cause they, they don’t say that they don’t like Trump. They think that the January 6th hearings are kind of a dog and pony show. And so it’s not that the information is making them not support Trump. I think more likely what’s happening is it’s reminding people that Trump supporting him is a lot of work. It’s a lot of drama and that there’s, you know, and, and there’s just sort of a tendency for there was a tendency in these groups to just kinda wanna move on, move on from the January 6th hearings, but also move on from Trump. And that is a difference from what I’d been hearing previously.

ISAACSON: Do you think they’ve been watching the January 6th hearings? Fox has not been covering them fully.

LONGWELL: Yeah, so it was interesting in the, in the first group, there were three people who said that they had started them, but then turned them off because it was too partisan. It was a witch hunt. But I think what’s interesting to me is you would be shocked. I think how often the things we are talking about in Washington you know, that everybody’s talking about, and then I go into a focus group and nobody nobody even knows what we’re talking about. They’ve never heard of it. And in this case everyone’s heard about the hearings. Everyone knows that they’re going on. You know, they’re, they think it’s more like impeachment, it’s just more trying to get Trump. But the fact that Fox is being forced to kind of put up a defense for what’s being forward means that it is breaking through it is kind of bleeding into their coverage because they’re having to have people like Barry Loudermilk on you know, who’s trying to sort of put up a defense of himself for leading a tour through de capitol prior to the January 6th insurrection. And so I think that even though I think, I think that the Republicans thought that like many other things voters would just tune this out and instead, because it has been quite drama filled quite well executed, it is kind of, people are very aware of it and it’s, it’s raising, I think this idea of just boy, can’t we get past this, I wanna move on from it. And, and for Republicans that means moving on from Trump.

ISAACSON: So if you move on for Trump do they have any preferences? I mean, I noticed that Ron DeSantis is truly trying to be Trump without Trump that get that lane. What do they think of Florida governor DeSantis?

LONGWELL: Oh yeah. Desantis has that lane. You know, it is again with the idea that sometimes I’m surprised by what people know and what they don’t know to have so many Republicans across the country know who the governor of Florida is is actually a very, is, is very interesting. A lot of times people sort of don’t know you know, state level officials, but Ron DeSantis is a superstar in conservative world. And I think people see him as a fighter like Trump is a fighter. And somebody who has that pugnacious personality, which they like, I mean, the, the, the appetite right now among Republican voters is very clear that they want this combative style. That’s a thing that they, they sort of crave from their politicians, but he also should he run and win would have eight years. This is something people bring up in the focus groups that I always find interesting is they’re like, you know, I really like Trump love to see him, you know, revenge tour get reelected, but he’d only have four years.

ISAACSON: The hearings focus quite a bit on Mike Pence, the vice president who has, you know, been a long time conservative, but doesn’t have the Trump pugnaciousness and of course got on the wrong side of Trump when he refused to block the certification of the election. coming out of the hearing, did people have opinions about former vice president Pence?

LONGWELL: You know, if Ron DeSantis is the number one choice that you hear, if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, Mike Pence is like the last you know, it’s, it’s interesting how —

ISAACSON: But wait, are these focus groups of Republicans across the board or mainly of people who formerly voted for Trump?

LONGWELL: No, no, no. So, so in the ones that I’m referencing right now, these are Trump supporters. They, they at least are 2020 Trump supporters. They voted for him in 2020. And, and, and in most cases also in 2016 but they, they, one, it’s just interesting to me how, you know, Mike Pence, he is seen either, he sort of has no constituency. He either is seen as being too much of a kind of lap dog to Trump, somebody who just stood and nodded didn’t really cut out his own profile, or he is seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump. And so he, he doesn’t really have like a core group of people who are excited about a Mike Pence run. And so he is one of the names that comes up very seldom in the focus groups of Trump voters as somebody they’d like to see run in 2024. And it’s part because they just think he’s sort of milk toast uninteresting. And, and it goes back to this idea of, you know, Ron DeSantis is just much more in the mold of what people have come to decide that excites them, that they wanna see.

ISAACSON: So Ron DeSantis is in this pugnacious model. who else in the Republican party seems to excite your focus groups, either of Republican focus groups or Trump supporting Republican focus groups?

LONGWELL: Yeah, well, it’s, you know, sometimes so we do a lot of groups with what I would call swing voters and, and the, and the, and the swing voters, they voted for Trump in 16, but they voted, voted for Biden in 2020 because they just couldn’t take Trump. You know, these are the people who put Biden over the, over the top in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin Arizona, Georgia. And, and they tend to be kind of the old school, traditional Republicans, but they still think of themselves very much as Republicans. And so in those groups, you might hear somebody like a Nikki Haley you know, or you know, Mike Pompeo comes up from time to time. And, and that’s an interesting one because, you know, I think that that’s, he’s not necessarily somebody who you’d you’d think voters would be super aware of, but for people who are plugged in Mike Pompeo is somebody that they’re looking at. Tim Scott comes up from time to time both, both in Trump voting for Trump focus groups and in the in the swing voter focus groups.

ISAACSON: You’re the publisher of The Bulwark, an online magazine I read often, and Liz Cheney is one of the heroes of that crowd, I would say, correct me if I’m wrong. Tell me how you think Congress woman Liz Cheney has done in these hearings.

LONGWELL: Yeah, she’s certainly a hero of mine. You know, I spent all of tr the, sort of the Trump years crying out for some kind of leadership for somebody in the Republican party to say something. And so not only her sort of clear eyed moral prosecution of what Donald Trump did but also her willingness to do it, you know, she’s facing reelection. And one of the things that I saw from Republicans over and over again, was an unwillingness to take on Trump because they were worried about losing. And if she loses, she’s ready to take that. That’s clear you know, prosecuting these hearings is not helping her back in her home state of Wyoming. And and, and she may very well lose that race, but she is absolutely doing the right thing. And not only is she doing the, the thing that’s right, she’s doing it extremely well. I think the big difference in the effectiveness sort of the differential of effectiveness between both of the impeachment hearings and then this January 6th hearing is the addition, not only of Liz Cheney, who was kind of leading the charge, but the, what they are doing is they are putting forward credible, conservative messengers, the people that they are putting on the stand, the people that they are showing you in their, in their video clips. These are people in Trump’s world, or these are people from conservative world that are incredibly well respected. You know, if you’re not in conservative world, you may not realize just how important Michael Luttig is. The judge who testified in the last hearing, he is a Titan of the conservative legal community, the very powerful Federalist society, you know, he’s revered there. And so for him to not just testify, but, but in his written statements say that this president is a danger and his party is a danger. These are incredible. And I think it could get lost maybe about how much for a conservative, who, you know, never liked Trump behind the scenes, but has done what they could to accommodate him, how much Michael luttig saying that causes them to rethink their choices because he is somebody that matters a lot to them. And so that’s that I think has been the, the real effectiveness of this committee is using Trump’s own people, the conservative, legal community people like Brad Raffensperger all conservatives to prosecute this case against Trump.

ISAACSON: Do you think there’s room in the Republican party, in the near future for a lane, a lane that is the Liz Cheney judge Michael Luttig, Bulwark magazine lane, or do you think the Republican party has totally rejected that?

LONGWELL: Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing, the, the lane is very narrow, it exists. And you know, people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger governor Larry Hogan, people who have been unwilling to bend the knee to Trump and there have been plenty plenty there’s been a handful. I think that, that, it’s a, it’s a, for a, for a small lane, it could be crowded, especially if you’re thinking of, of it 2024 terms.

ISAACSON: You just said there were plenty, and then you corrected your stuff and you said there are some, why are not there more Republicans?

LONGWELL: Yeah. you know, Trump disrupted something very deep in the Republican party, he, he changed it in his image. And you know, one of the things that I think is interesting about the 2022 races is I think it’s just starting to come into focus for people, how Trumpy the candidates are that are emerging from their primaries. They are running on campaigns that are based on the stop, the steal lie they are running in Trump’s image, you know, with the same sort of aggressive posture by telling lies. You know, I don’t, there was a, an ad by Eric Greitens from Missouri, who’s currently leading the pack of Republicans there. And it was him with a tactical team, all heavily armed saying that they were going RINO hunting. And RINO is a term that is used here it all the time in the focus groups, that means Republican in name only which they would apply certainly to people like me, but also to people like Mitch McConnell or Susan Collins, or basically anyone that they don’t see as sufficiently Maga. And so when you ask the question, is there room for, for people like us in the Republican party anymore? The answer really is no, that’s the straightforward answer.

ISAACSON: Should we make? So what should we make of the Georgia results? You mentioned Brad Raffensperger, but also Governor Kemp.

LONGWELL: Yeah. Georgia was just a terrific outcome to see Brad Raffensperger win out, win outright was incredible, I just don’t want people to overread those results. The thing about Kemp is that he was a very popular, is a very popular incumbent governor. The idea that, that, that David Perdue, who challenged him running specifically on a stop the steal platform at the behest of Donald Trump and with Trump’s endorsement, he was, he had just lost a Senate race in Georgia. He is not well liked. He didn’t have a platform besides Trump’s endorsement. He never really got off the ground. And as a result, Trump was embarrassed by it. And so he never really went into the state and rallied for Purdue and, and took on Kemp directly or took on Raffensperger. And, and, and two things happened in Georgia that I think made a real difference for Kemp. One is he passed what, what they would call an election integrity bill there in the state. And it was very controversial when he did it, you know, Coca-Cola major league baseball. People came out against it, which allowed Kemp to look like he was really defending, you know, the integrity of elections. And then the other thing, and I heard this in every focus group I did in Georgia was about how, what a good job they thought he did on COVID. It’s very similar to Ron Desantis’s appeal, which is, I think that sometimes people underestimate how much keeping things open during COVID mattered to especially Republican, but also center, right. Independents. and Kemp did that. And so the circumstances in Georgia were very specific and I think they are not people shouldn’t, overread it. And think that can be replicated across a bunch of other places. If you look at Michigan, you look at Wisconsin. If you look at Pennsylvania if you look at just lots of other races, Arizona has one of the most anti-democracy slates that you could imagine. And in this environment, that’s saying something with Kari lake, as governor Blake masters at the Senate level, Mark Finchem at the secretary of state level, these are all people who are the front runners right now on the Republican ticket, all of whom are major stop the steal conspiracy theory candidates. And so, you know, I, I think that what happened in Georgia was great. It’s gonna be very important if, if the Republicans win there that we have pro democracy Republicans, but they will be the exception rather than the rule.

ISAACSON: You speak of Trumpists taking over in various places. Well, let’s talk about Texas and the Texan Republican convention that just happened in the past week. They went for things like secession, being a possibility that Biden they referred to as not a legitimate president, they said homosexual activities are an abnormal lifestyle choice. They wanted to abolish the voting rights act. You’ve been a leader of the log cabin Republicans, which supports gay Republicans, what happened in Texas. And is that a real sentiment of the Republican party these days?

LONGWELL:

Yeah, I mean, look, I think becoming part of the Texas GOP is a, is an abnormal lifestyle choice. I think that the, what, the, the interesting thing about Texas, but a lot of other state parties is the, the Republican party is radicalizing. Like that is just, that is just a true thing that’s happening. And one of the places where that sort of ground zero for the radicalization is in these state parties in Arizona, you have a very similar dynamic where the people who kind of run the Republican apparatus at the state level are really out there. And, and they’re not just, it’s not just that they support Trump, Trump kind of emboldened them to be the most extreme versions of themselves and kind of put it out there. Right. So what I think what’s different is that I’m sure they’ve always believed, right. That, that, that being gay is an abnormal lifestyle choice, but the reason that they wanted to go ahead and put it in the platform this go around is because that probably wouldn’t have been popular or wouldn’t have flown, you know, five years ago when it sort of seemed like a lot of the, the gay marriage fight was settled and Republicans were saying, Hey, we need to move on from this, this isn’t popular anymore. But Trump really emboldened people to say, well, we don’t care if it’s politically correct. We’re gonna say that, you know, we wanna secede. We’re, we’re gonna say that that being gay is abnormal. And that is just, that’s very typical for these state level parties. And I don’t think Texas is the last place. Maybe not, everybody’s gonna wanna secede. That’s a kind of a Texas specific sentiment maybe, but I do think that you’re gonna see a lot more of, you know, Ron DeSantis has been leading one of these cultural wars down in Florida with his, don’t say, gay bill. So I think you’re gonna see more of that kind of thing, kind of reemerging after being dormant for you know, a little under a decade, but but, but Mo mostly dormant and, and sort of put to bed as an issue.

ISAACSON: Sarah Longwell thank you so much for joining us.

LONGWELL: Thank you.