By 2024 Sarah Longwell had conducted four hundred focus groups over eight years and she’s learned some things about American voters of every political persuasion, many of them quoted in this book. As she says in her introduction
Listening to what Americans actually think is the only way we can understand why they think and act and vote the way they do…Understanding voters is the quickest and most accurate way to understand the dynamics of American politics and how to change those dynamics.
Longwell is a recovering Republican who founded the political website The Bulwark. She is upfront about her agenda.
We need to burn MAGA to the ground and then salt the earth so that it’s another century before someone tries to overthrow liberal democracy.
Okay then. Part autobiography, part popular history, and part political treatise, written in lively prose with multiple peeks into the recent Republican past where she names names, this is a three-hundred page handbook on where and how we go forward from here. She begins with how America celebrated its two hundred fiftieth birthday by electing, as she says to a smug Kevin McCarthy a month after the election.
Donald Trump lied about an election being stolen and then sicced a mob on the Capitol…We elected the most dangerous, criminal corrupt human being that America has ever elected. And, Kevin, you helped him.
Longwell says the quiet part out loud. A lot. Not that Kevin listened to her.
Once I began really listening to voters, I understood how detached the conversations we have in Washington are from people’s lives. And I came to the conclusion that the only ay to understand what is happening in our country and in our politics is by listening to voters—not the polls that tell you “What” but the voters who tell you “why.”…Listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics—democracy, after all, is just the collective will of the voters—and yet few people in politics do it.*
Longwell devotes chapters to the media, swing voters, and the Biden administration’s inability to effectively communicate, well, anything to the voters about the economy or immigration.
One of the most interesting chapters is “Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus,” which includes better (and funnier) definitions of both species and their behaviors than I’ve read anywhere else.
When you ask most Republican voters what they think about democracy, you get a weird response: “We’re not a democracy.” they’ll say. “We’re a republic.”
Now, of course, American is both. We are a democratic republic. But it’s telling how voters engage with these words.
Because ‘democracy” shares a root with “Democrat,” Republicans have become hostile to the word itself. They prefer “republic”—which, of course, shares a root with “Republican.”
Longwell explains a lot of things I’ve puzzled over for years, giving the credit to the voters she has listened in hundreds of focus groups. On the disintegration of the once-proud party of Lincoln:
I think the twenty-year wars in the Middle East broke something in the core Republican base. Republicans supported those wars. They believed in them. And they watched them fail…The party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is now the party of Putin is a great leader and what are we getting out of Ukraine anyway?
In Part IV, “Concepts of a Plan,” Longwell says that Democrats, first, need their own Communicator in Chief, acknowledging that Trump has changed the dynamic between president and voter forever.
Whoever runs in 2028 will have to be culturally omnipresent, too…Politics is now a 24/7 conversation. And if you’re not in that conversation, you’re losing it…voters are not the enemy. They’re not stupid. They’re not brainwashed. What they are is overwhelmed by information, distrustful of institutions, and trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly chaotic. Many of them are persuadable. Many of them are reachable. Many of them are looking for someone to trust.
Longwell’s respect for the voters never fails. Good read.
* I’ve been watching Mary Peltola, JKT, and Bill Hill this past year running for, respectively, U.S. Senate, governor of Alaska, and US House of Representatives, and they are constantly in motion via road, water, and air, listening to Alaskans from Ketchikan to Kotzebue to Kaktovik. They understand the assignment. On his trip down the Yukon River JKT asked someone, “Have you ever met anyone running for governor before?” Answer: “You’re the first.”
Download a copy of No Stars to read more of my reviews.
