Author Talk: Sarah Longwell — How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time - with Kara Swisher

Sarah. Sarah. Sarah, of course. Of course, we'll be talking about her new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. Sarah's had an interesting and influential political journey. Over the years, for a long time, she worked as a Republican strategist, but during Donald Trump's first term, she emerged as a prominent voice in the Never Trump movement, then played a leading role in several groups opposing Trump in 2020 and 2024. She now heads her own communications firm here in DC, Longwell Partners. And she founded and is publisher of The Bulwark, which really has grown quite substantially since it started nearly eight years ago. She also hosts The Focus Group podcast, which offers a look into what voters think about politics, policy, and current events. Sarah has spent the past eight years conducting focus groups with voters from across the political spectrum. Those discussions, along with her own background, having grown up in the conservative movement and Republican politics, have afforded her a deep understanding of how we got to the politics we have today. In her book, she shares her assessment and also lays out a strategy for how to dismantle the MAGA movement.

Jonathan Last, you know, The Bulwark's editor and the co-host with Sarah on the Secret Podcast, calls the book, quote, 'half field report and half battle plan with a touch of history thrown in for spice.' He also calls Sarah an optimist, which she agrees with, but not in the sense of thinking everything will work out okay. She's an optimist, she says in the book's introduction, because she believes we all have agency. Now all we need to do is use it and act on Sarah's plan for building a bigger, bolder, tougher pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian coalition with a message that resonates and dominates, and with compelling leaders who speak to the issues that actually concern voters. In conversation with Sarah will be one of journalism's sharpest and most skilled interviewers, Kara Swisher.

She's of course been a leading chronicler of the tech world and has become a popular commentator, currently hosting On with Kara Swisher and co-hosting another podcast, Pivot. She's also editor at large at New York Magazine and has been a contributor on CNN. And if you haven't seen her six-part CNN series on the booming longevity industry, you really should. It's very informative and wonderfully entertaining, as is her book, Burn Book, which came out two years ago and is a history and accounting of the tech industry and its most powerful players. So, please join me in welcoming Sarah Longwell and Kara Swisher.

I get that. That's a good joke. I got that joke. Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Anyway, thank you. I'll take these off now.

It's nice of you to cheer for that, but no. No, I couldn't.

Yeah. So, one of the stories I tell in the book is, um, do you remember when Donald Trump stood on the stage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and he sided against America's intelligence community? So, I was really early in my focus grouping endeavors because, you know, we were trying to primary Donald Trump and I really wanted to know what Republican voters thought about him. And I was like, 'Okay, this is great. Uh, all of these Republicans are going to be furious that Donald Trump is siding with Vladimir Putin against America's intelligence community.' And I walked into the room ready to hear it, ready to hear how mad they were, they were going to abandon Trump. And I said, 'So, what do you guys think about the fact that Trump did this?' And everybody's like, 'I have no idea what you're talking about.' And it was a real moment for me to understand that the things that we obsess about in Washington, because you got to understand back in Washington, Paul Ryan was like throwing the biggest fit you'd ever heard of. Donald Trump was getting yelled at so much by Republicans that remember he tried to lie and say he didn't say the thing that he said, that everybody just misunderstood him. So he's walking.

I know it's not like him at all. But this was one of those things where I said these voters don't know. And this still happens all the time. It's like the beginning of a shutdown and a hundred reporters will say, 'Sarah, what are you hearing in your focus groups about the shutdown?' And I'll say, 'Nothing. They have no idea that it's happening.' And so so many of the things that just consume us in Washington don't even break through to voters.

Yeah, it's a bit of everything, right? But I think a lot of it, and this goes to the lesson of what I learned, was how much people look, they are consumed with their own lives, right? They might, and I ask people all the time, you know, where do you get your media? It's a standard question in a focus group and they'll say, 'Whenever I see the headlines when I'm scrolling.' And if you think like, okay, that's how the vast majority of Americans' media diet is, it doesn't surprise you that they're not sort of breaking down everything that happens that we obsess about. Uh, and also it's, you know, we talk about low-information voters in political science. Aren't they just normal? Right? Like I always think like these are people who are not sick like us, who are not deciding to make ourselves crazy all the time by consuming this and scrolling on Twitter, right? They've got kids to feed. They've got jobs to go to. And so, um, a lot of people get really mad that voters aren't better informed. But I have a hard time blaming them for trying to live their lives. And also you throw on top of that, many of them are algorithmically siloed, which is something I think we've all come to understand now. But especially in the right-wing media ecosystem, it used to be that you would go and you would get your news, right? Local news, maybe some national news, and then you'd go like to the Daily Wire or something else to get a conservative perspective, right? Now they live in that ecosystem, right? They may never hear a different perspective, and that sorting is affecting all of us.

This is an enormously common response that I get in focus groups of Trump voters actually, where they're like, they're mad about the war in Iran because they know gas prices are high. They know prices are high in general, so they're upset maybe about tariffs, but you'll be like, 'Okay, but some of the...' They'll be like, 'But you know what? He's got trans people out of sports and so it's okay.' Like, you know, it's like war, gas prices, but as long as trans people are out of sports, we're all right.

So this is true, I think, just in general about politics. The things that break through are the things that have negative personal consequences for people. Why do people know about the war in Iran? Because gas prices are high. They don't feel the bombs dropping. They don't feel the idea that we're over there now. They understand that Trump is going back on his word, but mostly they're experiencing it through high gas prices. Um, and I think, you know, the tariffs, again, it's not that they understand a lot about tariff policy, but they understand that things are more expensive and that Donald Trump's central promise was that he was going to lower prices. That hasn't happened. And he owns tariffs and he owns the war because he's done them unilaterally. And so that has been the thing that has broken through, that voters are feeling it because they're feeling it themselves and they understand it as a direct product of Trump's actions.

That's okay. There's, uh, is it less than a golf course? I don't know. You're the tech person.

Um, and so the voters, um, yeah, it is. And look, the data center one is really interesting because I think it hits across a bunch of vectors for voters. Uh, not only does it hit them with the sort of like, these really rich tech people are going to make all of this money. Two, uh, they're doing it in our neighborhood that is raising my energy prices, which is the thing that most people talk about is feeling like their energy prices are going up. Um, and then, uh, the third thing is they think it's going to come take their jobs, right? They're like, 'Someone's going to get rich. I'm going to lose my job and I'm going to pay more for energy.' And that is why there's this enormous backlash. And also the tech community, this is your area, not mine. But it feels like if they were going to go into people's communities and do this, they had to talk to them first, right? It feels like it's something being done to people.

Yeah, I don't think that works with voters generally. Um, but I also don't know that voters pick it up as much. Donald Trump, you know, he used to... Twitter was really a better medium for him. The fact that he has no character limit on Truth Social and he's kind of sequestered there has done him a lot of good because people don't always, you know, catch all of that stuff now. Like they don't hear that he's calling them stupid. But they did hear, um, you know, last year when he would say things like, 'Forget about Epstein, I love the inflation.' Like those things do. And but I got to say the thing that I hear about right now all the time is voters genuinely can't believe we're in this war in Iran. Like they say all the time, I think Trump thought it would be like Venezuela and it would be like in and out and it'd be done. And that's not happening. And they are furious. Like there is a reason he is living in the low 30s right now and it's because once you're down in the low 30s you are at his core base that is basically like, uh, these are the people who... I was doing a focus group in Florida and one of the guys was like, you know, 'I am frustrated with Trump because he is not doing deportations hard enough.' Um, that's a different kind of voter. Most of them are just, most of them are upset. And it really is, listen, the other thing, so it's not that the reflecting pool or the East Wing doesn't have personal consequences for voters, but it is a contrast for voters about what Trump is paying attention to. Voters will let him do all the weird stuff he wants as long as the economy is working like his voters. But the second that he is focused on the East Wing instead of affordability, that contrast breaks through to voters.

And I do think that voters, including his voters, and part of, you know, there's always a spectrum of Trump voters, right? There are the ones who just think, 'I love Donald Trump no matter what, no matter how poor I get. Like I could be naked in the street, have no food, no water. I just have a red MAGA hat on and I'm running around going, I still love this guy because he is making the libs mad and he's triggering them, and that's great.' That is not the entire Trump coalition. There's also a bunch of people who are either just like Republicans who are like, 'I'll never vote for Democrats.' But a lot of people were these low-information voters who are like, 'I don't like the wars. I want to see the Epstein files and I want my costs to go down.' Those people are infuriated with Trump right now.

They do break through, but that's the stuff that actually... Look, I'm in the camp where Trump does that because he knows that it sort of just distracts people. It gets them talking about something other than the war. He does these things whenever he's losing. There's also, we just went through a massive news cycle about, you know, trans women in the WNBA. Why? They got to change the subject from the other. And Trump's good at changing the subject and that's what Lake and Everything is all about. So they know about it, but it doesn't... Other people will talk about it like, 'Ah, that's a stupid thing,' but they don't really care.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when I started hearing voters, when abortion became a dominant issue and we started talking about it all the time in focus groups, I heard this line over and over again that said, 'Well, I'm pro-life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose.' And I get like, 'What are you talking about?' I was like, 'That's like a binary thing. You're either pro-choice or pro-life.' And obviously, or you could be like, 'Well, you know, I think that it's at this point,' but it wasn't that. It was, 'I'm pro-life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose.' And like pollsters aren't going to pick that up, that contradiction sits in people. And frankly, it was a lot of, you know, women over 50 who were saying like, 'Well, I personally for myself am pro-life, but like this right is there and I'm glad it's there and I want it to be there.' Um, and I hear those kinds of contradictions all the time. The other one that is my favorite is we start every focus group the same way: 'How do you think things are going in the country?' And everybody's like, 'Bad.' Uh, and a lot of people, right now people are mostly talking about the economy. They're talking about the war in Iran, but oftentimes people will lament the deep divisions in the country. They'll be like, 'We are a powder keg. We are too mean to each other. We hate each other too much.' And that same person, and I'm thinking, 'This is so good. They don't feel good about the fact that we're so divided.' But five minutes later, that same voter is like, 'These libtards are doing this or that.' And you know, it's... So my mom was in that boat. Yeah, that's okay. She doesn't feel bad about the partisanship. It wasn't her. And you know, so just like people are complicated and one of the things I... it's one of the reasons I'm optimistic though is I do think that people contain both multitudes and sort of light and dark. And I do this thing in the book, it's maybe a little cheesy, but I don't care. I'm going to live and die by it, about this Native American parable where the grandfather's talking to his grandson and he's like, 'Grandson, inside each of us there are two wolves.' And there's the good wolf, which is, you know, light and truth and everything brave and whatever. And then there's the bad wolf and it's avarice and greed and everything terrible. And they're always in tension. They're always fighting. And the grandson says, 'Well, which one wins?' And he says, 'The one you feed.' And that the idea of leadership, right, is about saying this is... and it's the same thing. It's the Federalist Papers. All right? If men were angels, we wouldn't need government. Uh, it's the better angels of our nature. It's the devil and the angel on your shoulder. Like, this is the human condition. And leadership is there to try and draw out the better angels of our nature. And Donald Trump's literally his political mission is to do the opposite. He has been feeding the bad wolf for a decade. And so, you can feel people struggle, right? You can feel people saying, 'I know that this, you know, in my life, I want this better way. I want to not hate my neighbors. I don't want to be angry all the time.' But like everything, the algorithm, Trump, you know, the outrage cycle, everything pulls the bull, you know, feeds that bad wolf. Um, and the pitch in the book really is about like, how do we get to a leadership, um, how do we get our leaders and how do we build a country where we're back kind of in the... our leaders aren't trying to divide us for sport.

Yeah. I mean, it is a... look, the 'How to Eat an Elephant,' obviously it's a great title. I thought of it. Um, but it really is about how do you solve a big intractable problem? And I think after 2024, which is when I started, when I was like, you know what, I'm going to write this book. It was because I was coming to Bulwark events and doing Bulwark things and everybody was sure we were cooked. Everybody thought it was over. We're not going to survive this. America's done. People are bad. If we are a country, it was one thing to elect Trump the first time, but people really felt like if America could elect him a second time after the insurrection, and look, I felt this way too. They're like, then we're not a very good country. And I just can't let that sit there. Um, I think that's not the right lesson to take. And I think that we do have agency to make things better. I think there's a lot of things that need to change, a lot of things we need to build. But I kind of wanted to do, look, we're lesbians. We're sitting here like a softball coach being like, 'Yeah, let's get it done together.' Yeah. I'm a little bit like that. I'm like, 'Get the up.' Yeah. They're like, 'I'm really depressed.' I'm like, 'I don't care. Just move along. Let's get it done.' Lesbians should run everything and have all the children, but that's another... it's another show. It's true. Yeah, it's true. Um, there's not enough tiny lesbians to save democracy, though. Yes. Like, I don't know if there's enough of us. It's going to take everybody else. Very true. You know my joke, the militia etage. We're going to form one. Militia etage. That's for the older people in the audience. She right there. All right. Nearly every... I tell that joke a lot and it works every time. Um, kills. So, as I know, nearly every election is won along the margins is something you talk about in the book, and you identify a handful of distinct groups whom you call the persuadable electorate. Uh, for all six, read Sarah's book, but I want to talk about two of them. Uh, the first is the double haters. These are people who distrust both parties, but say they're also, you said they're the most gettable. Um, why was Trump the lesser of two evils for many during the 2024 election? And cynicism is always part of politics. It always is. And you hear a lot of people talk that way or I'm zoning out. I'm not listening to news and things like that. So talk about this dissatisfaction and how you turn it into, you know, turn that frown upside down kind of thing.

Uh, you know, I always say that if we had a drinking game in the focus groups and we took a shot every time somebody said lesser of two evils, we'd be dead every time because the vast majority of American voters are not that psyched about either political party. Um, and they are, you know, deeply cynical. And this is one of the... cynicism really plays to Trump. Uh, he wins that jump ball oftentimes. Uh, because when if you think both political parties are corrupt, the scale of his corruption doesn't land because you're like, 'Wow, they're all corrupt.' So, um, and you know, uh, they're all bad people. They're all sex pests. You know, when if you think it's all that they're all like that and you're a double hater, then you're like, the only thing I care about is like, is this person going to make the economy better? And the reason that Trump won was because, and this is one of the... I'll talk about this something else that knocked me off my feet very early in my focus group endeavors was I would ask people, people started bringing up The Apprentice. Mhm. 'How many of you watch The Apprentice?' 'I watched every episode.' 'How many of you watch The Apprentice? Seriously.' All right. I'm embarrassed for you, but that's fine. Um, that's fine. I watched every single episode. I'm embarrassed for you, too. Why? It was a great show. Did you watch that show and you thought, 'Boy, this is a compelling guy. I want to sit down.' No, no, no, no. But I... The reason now why I'm extraordinarily... why is the last season was a disaster. And that's where we are. We're in the last season of The Apprentice. The one that Schwarzenegger hosted. Yes. All of them. They were all terrible. No, the last few was... but the last season was pathetic. Yeah. And these things happen, but it was an interesting... No, I thought it was just a game. It's like, well, I'm not deep on The Apprentice. I like that kind of stuff. So, the thing that stunned me was, um, in the focus groups, they'd all watch The Apprentice, all these Republican focus groups. And so, they had a parasocial relationship with Donald Trump that preceded his relationship with politics. And they got to see like, this is like what he was like firing Gilbert Gottfried on a sound stage and everybody's like, 'That's a good businessman right there,' you know, like Andrew Dice Clay, he told him to get the hell out. That's business in America. And so people think of Trump as a good businessman. And even worse because his first... and I heard this just a million times, everybody thought his first term was a success. They forget the part where a million people died from COVID, but they remember the pre-COVID economy as really strong. And so you, I would just hear person after person say, 'I'm going to turn off the news. He's a buffoon. I'm not going to listen to it. I'm just going to enjoy his economy.' And that's why he won that jump ball. And then there's the deficiencies of his opponents was just a different story. Um, because, you know, when you talk about the parasocial relationship, one of Kamala Harris's biggest deficiencies. And I went back and listened to all my Kamala focus groups after she lost. And I also did a bunch of ones with people who had not turned out to vote. And I just heard the same thing over and over again. 'I had no idea who she was. I didn't know what she stood for. I just didn't even know. Is she a liberal? Is she...' It's funny because there's this fight among elites. Did she lose because she was too moderate and she ran as a moderate and she ran with Liz Cheney? Or did she lose because she was a California progressive and she was too progressive? I'm like, I don't know. These voters were like, 'I don't even know anything about her. I don't know what she's like.' And so her inability, I think, to connect with people. Yeah. Um, and his ability to be so durable with people. Ultimately things...

Look, there's... well, there's a... so there's a bunch and I do six and the chapter is called 'Anatomy of a Swing Voter.' Uh, and I do my best to come up with a heuristic for who these people are, but it's Hispanic voters. If I can do all six right now, I'll be shocked. Um, it's young voters. And young voters, it's not that they're swingy, it's that they're unformed, right? Like there's a lot of people right now, young voters, who voted. Donald Trump won the highest proportion of young voters than any Republican has in our lifetimes. Why did he do that? Well, because a bunch of young dudes thought he was a vibe, you know, and now that there's a war in Iran and their lives aren't getting better and they can't afford houses or rent, he's much less of a vibe to them. Right. And so now Trump is underwater with young people. Similarly, Hispanics, another swingier group. They've been moving right. They are... they have now moved back. Uh, it's one of the reasons Texas is in play right now is because Hispanics, the bottom has dropped out for Trump with Hispanics. Then there's the double haters. Then there's the... um, boy. There's the... Are you trying to whisper it to me so I know? You wrote the book. I don't have to pick up my book. Uh, one of them is... I know the book's right there, but I'll never find the chapter. Uh, whatever I call the people, one of the things that I'm talking about is the people who switch sides, right? So, there's the people like me who are... uh, they're like the college-educated suburban voters, but this is actually really important for anybody who thinks that it is just easy peasy to be Donald Trump. Why is Donald Trump winning? Democrats now have people like me, lucky you guys, uh, that college-educated suburban voters, and we're great in a midterm, man. We will always show up. Donald Trump and Republicans have taken over. They've built a multi-racial working-class coalition, but they win white working-class voters. And the median voter in this country is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree. There are more of them in that trade. Mhm. There are just more of those voters than there are the college-educated suburban voters. And that is one of the reasons that in the general elections, which are very different than the midterms, Republicans have had because of Trump a structural advantage.

Yeah. To say what we do is to basically ask me to explain the entire book. And I'm going to actually try and give you as short a version as I can, which is this. Donald Trump, this is what I want people to rock with me for a second. Donald Trump is going to not be president in two years and a few months. Right? Now, you might be like, 'Well, JVL, if he was sitting right here, he would tell you that guy's not going anywhere.' Um, but like let's just assume that whether for actuarial reasons or for constitutional reasons, 2028 is the end of Trump. What is the Republican Party post-Trump? They have built an entire political party around one guy. When I tell a story in the beginning of the book about being at a DealBook summit with Kevin McCarthy and Kellyanne Conway and Jason Miller. Oh wow. And I got party. Yeah, I know. It was super fun. And I like lost my mind and got in a fight with Kevin McCarthy. Uh, wait, why did I just start telling the story? I can't wait to see where... What were we just talking about? Because now I'm lost because now I want to tell you... I'm talking about... Let me look. Now I want to tell you this whole story about right-wing podcast media spaces, media in general. Go ahead. The end of Trump. Thank you. That's what I was looking for. Right. So they built an entire political party around this guy. This is why Kevin McCarthy is in the green room before we go on this panel and he's pining around for the media and he's like, 'This guy's putting up Saddam Hussein numbers in these rural areas. He's a turnout machine. He's being so cocky.' And I'm sitting there, not talking to Kevin McCarthy, but thinking in the green room, what are you going to do when he's gone, man? What's your... where's your turnout machine? They going to turn out for JD Vance. And so my point is that the Republican Party is going to be in its weakest state that it has been in a decade in 2028. As you go into those... Okay. Well, that's good. That's the good part. The question is, can the Democratic Party... There's only two of them, guys. There's only two. Can the Democratic Party build a coalition that is big enough to dominate a post-Trump Republican Party that is fractured between the MAGA establishment and the America First coalition? You got your Tucker, you got your Marjorie Taylor Greene on one side, you got your Marco Rubio, and your god, I don't know, Pete Hegseth. How many of them are going to run? Sean Duffy is probably going to run. Okay. Oh man, they're going to be weak though. Donald Trump's not going to be there to turn it out. So, Democrats have this historic opportunity. I wrote the book because I don't think people realize that there is a chance to go overwhelm what is happening right now, but it requires building a new media ecosystem. The Republican Party, I was there when they did it. They said, 'Hey, the mainstream media shuts us out.' You know, and so they whined about it a bunch and they worked the refs, but they also built their own competing media ecosystem. The Democrats have to do the same thing and not just the far-left because that can be... that comes with its own challenges, but like the center-left too, the entire spectrum. I'm pro all of it. They've got... they can't just keep relying on mainstream media because the mainstream media...

Is Medicare for all, affordable housing — those things resonate and resonate. And you saw him on a — he was on some — oh, he was on Stephen Smith's show, and Stephen Smith looked like he wanted to him at that — at the end of it. I was like, 'You're a smart guy. Wow, you're right.' And I was like, 'Oh wow,' you know, but that's what's resonating. Let me — speaking,

I'm — well — but the point is, is that, and look, it's not even my — it's why do we have to — every and every time someone says Hassan to me, I'm going to say just talk about Epstein instead. Instead of fighting about Hassan, please talk about Jeffrey Epstein.