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Tag: focus groups

  • How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

    How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

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    Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. The post–Trump era had supposedly begun.

    Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.

    Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?

    I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.

    The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.

    My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.

    First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.

    Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.

    But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.

    Read: Nikki Haley’s endgame

    “The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”

    And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.

    “We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”

    Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disruptor. In the business world, you bring in a disruptor when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”

    Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”

    “Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.

    Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”

    The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exception of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.

    DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”

    By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.

    If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”

    Read: Republicans are no longer a political party

    Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.

    In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”

    But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.

    “I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”

    These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.

    DeSantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”

    He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”

    But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.

    “I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”

    By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”

    This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.

    Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.

    This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.

    The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.

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    Sarah Longwell

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  • Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

    Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

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    President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded.

    The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats.

    To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by the right to legal abortion.

    The study was conducted by Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing voters of color, in conjunction with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a message consultant for progressive candidates and causes. Last year, Way to Win was among the top advocates pushing the party to stress a message of protecting personal freedoms and democracy—an approach that helped Democrats overperform expectations despite widespread discontent about the economy.

    Reversing the advantage Donald Trump and the GOP have on the economy will require Democrats to highlight “the tangible improvements their policies have made in people’s lives, in lieu of speaking of abstract economic gains, as well as touting their future agenda of expanding on these gains, taking on corporate greed and the MAGA Republicans who aim to rule only for the wealthy few,” concludes a memo summarizing the research that was provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

    Read: The two Republican theories for beating Trump

    Based on months of polls, focus groups, and other public-opinion research, the study comes amid simmering Democratic anxieties over national and swing-state surveys showing Trump leading Biden. Especially frustrating for the White House and other Democrats has been the persistence and pervasiveness of negative public attitudes about the economy, despite robust economic growth, low unemployment, and a huge reduction in the inflation rate over the past year. Democrats were particularly unnerved by a recent survey from Democracy Corps, a group founded by the longtime party strategists James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, that found that voters in the key swing states gave Trump a retrospective job-approval rating for his performance as president nearly 10 percentage points higher than what they give Biden for his current performance.

    Biden has spent months trying to highlight positive trends in the economy by describing them under the rubric of “Bidenomics.” But the Way to Win study, like the Democracy Corps research, argues that it is counterproductive for the administration to try to convince voters that inflation is abating or that the economy is improving while so many are struggling to make ends meet. Telling voters that “inflation is going down [produced a] backlash” in the research, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s senior vice president, told me: “Their experience is that it’s up. If you make an overarching statement that things are getting better, it rubs people the wrong way.”

    Probably the key insight in the report is the contention that it’s a mistake for Democrats to focus the 2024 debate on any of the broad national trends in the economy, including those that have been positive under Biden, such as job growth.

    For many years, the report argues, voters have been inclined to believe that Republicans are better than Democrats at managing the overall economy—an advantage that may be especially pronounced for Trump, a former business mogul, if he’s the GOP nominee. But, the study found, swing voters, as well as the irregular voters the party needs to turn out in 2024, give Democrats an edge on which party can best deliver for “you and your family’s economic well-being.”

    “If the argument is who [handles] the economy best, even though it’s not true in any sense, that’s their brand advantage,” Shenker-Osorio told me. “If the question is who is going to create the best future for your family, that is a Democratic-brand advantage. That is a story we can tell. It’s a credible story, and it’s a story that people care more about.”

    Read: A war on blue America

    To shift the debate into this more favorable terrain, the report argues, Biden and other Democrats must simultaneously reorient their economic arguments in opposite directions. The group argues that Democrats must narrow their focus by talking less about macroeconomic trends and more about specific policies they have enacted to help families make ends meet. That includes policies that Biden has passed to lower prescription-drug and utility costs, and policies he could promote in a second term, such as restoring the expanded child tax credit that Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia stripped from the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

    “Among both swing voters and surge voters, folks are moved more by talking about tangible gains than by talking about growing the economy,” Shenker-Osario said.

    Simultaneously, the report argues that Democrats must link their economic agenda to a broader promise to defend voters against an array of forces threatening their ability to succeed. In its research, the group found that the strongest case for Democrats blended pledges to deliver concrete economic benefits with promises to defend fundamental rights and stand up to big, wealthy corporations.

    Across all of these fronts, Fernandez Ancona argues, the key for Democrats is not just to warn about what a second Trump term could mean but to give voters a positive vision that emphasizes their success at stopping him and the prospect that reelecting Biden could deliver measurable benefits. “We really believe we can’t just rely on telling people the bad things,” Fernandez Ancona said.

    Key results in the 2022 election offer Democrats some reason for optimism that the approach urged by Way to Win can succeed. In the five swing states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race, Democrats won seven of the nine Senate and gubernatorial races in 2022, primarily around variations on the themes that Way to Win wants the party to stress next year.

    The range of problems confronting Biden, such as doubts about his age and capacity, can’t all be resolved by recalibrating his message. Fernandez Ancona doesn’t pretend otherwise. But she argues that a more precisely targeted message will provide Biden the best chance of maximizing his support whatever the background environment looks like next year. “We can’t control what conditions are,” she told me. “Messaging can’t solve all problems. But it does do something to paint the path forward and make sure that voters go into the booth knowing what the stakes are.”

    With Trump looming as the likely GOP nominee, Democratic strategists at this point may have greater consensus about the stakes in 2024 than the path forward for the party. The sheer proliferation of studies proposing a new approach for Biden may be the most telling measure of how much more difficult this election looks than Democrats once anticipated.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

    The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

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    It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.

    Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.

    “It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.

    David Frum: Never again Trump

    Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.

    “At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.

    Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.

    Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.

    Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.

    Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.

    It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.

    Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”

    From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.

    But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.

    Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”

    Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.

    DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.

    Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.

    Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.

    Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.

    The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.

    Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?

    One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.

    Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.

    Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.

    Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.

    Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.

    But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.

    Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”

    Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.

    “I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. “Within so much of what we used to call the Republican establishment, there is still this denial” even after all these years of dealing with the former president “that Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Upgrade to Real-Time Feedback with This Focus Group Style | Entrepreneur

    Upgrade to Real-Time Feedback with This Focus Group Style | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Research is a crucial component of any successful business decision. One of its most popular and effective forms is focus groups, where people are brought together to discuss and provide feedback on a product, service or idea. Usually, it’s conducted after people have interacted with the product for some time.

    My company tried applying this research method in a bit different format. By dividing the data collection into two parts, one just after another, we made the process faster and more accurate than ever before. Here’s a guide on how to level up your focus group if you’re limited in time.

    Related: If Your Company Is Not Customer-Obsessed, You’re Doing It Wrong

    How to organize focus groups differently

    The main difference in our type of focus group was collecting data on your customers’ opinions on the service or product almost simultaneously while interacting with it. We asked our participants twice: briefly while they were getting our services and more lengthy as soon as they were finished. Here’s how to build this type of focus group.

    1. Gather a representative sample: Inviting people who closely match your target audience is essential. For example, you can select participants who have already registered for your service and have some familiarity with our product. In our case, we randomly invited people who enrolled in our free webinar. Of course, you should offer compensation for their participation.

    2. Don’t set any limits: Explain that people shouldn’t treat your study as something they should change their behavior for. In particular, they are free to drop out if they don’t like something or get bored.

    3. Collect feedback while they are getting your service: You can chat using the most popular messaging app among clients to collect feedback in real-time. We asked questions regularly so that participants could share what they liked and didn’t like as the webinar was taking place.

    4. Arrange a follow-up call: After the webinar, we arranged a group call that was just like the usual focus group to get additional feedback and more detailed information. During this, give a brief intro and encourage participants to take turns telling you about themselves. Then ask questions on matters that are most significant for you, like:

    • Did you finish taking the service?
    • What were the good parts?
    • What were the inconveniences you experienced?

    Related: This Is Why You Should Never Ignore Customer Feedback

    Benefits of “real-time” focus groups

    As mentioned above, our goal was to make more data-driven decisions about the webinar funnel. We were looking for some little insights that might not be obvious at all, which people will soon forget about but are crucial in decision-making.

    There are several benefits to changing your approach to focus groups. Here are the key ones:

    • Unfiltered feedback: When participants provide feedback in real-time, their thoughts and feelings are not distorted by time or memory, resulting in unfiltered feedback. For example, we learned that people were really annoyed when the speaker’s icon covered a piece of presentation. It’s not surprising that it can be unpleasant, but we were astonished to know that it could be a reason for people to leave the webinar!
    • Realistic representation: It was important for us to allow the participants to drop out or lose interest in the webinar, just as they would in real life, providing a more realistic representation of the process.
    • Simultaneous information acquisition: By providing a platform for real-time feedback, we can understand the perspectives of different participants while gaining insights into cultural and social differences.
    • Quick implementation of changes: Consequently, you can plan improvements on your product significantly after just one round of data collection.

    Related: Steal These 4 Proven Customer-Retention Strategies

    Challenges

    While real-time decision-making during focus groups has many benefits, it is not without its challenges. The main problem one would face is typical for any kind of focus group: this format is not for newbies. To gain valuable insights, it is essential to have a skilled moderator who can keep the discussion on track and ensure that all participants are heard.

    Moreover, there is a risk of people who talk too much – those who form opinions for other participants or do not let them express themselves. In this case, the moderator should encourage others to speak during their turn and know how to interrupt and even silence that person politely. Of course, all the participants must have a stable Internet connection. It can be hard to reassure, and technical difficulties can disrupt the process.

    Moreover, it would be a mistake to think that focus groups are less expensive than other qualitative interviews. To recruit the participants, you will likely have to pay each of them the same honors as for other interviews, so you will spend several times more for one hour and probably learn less from each participant. Apart from them, you will need to hire a research team if you don’t have one, which would cost you extra. However, if your goal is to get the most information from several people simultaneously, you’re unlikely to find a better solution.

    Conclusion

    Real-time decision-making during focus groups is a revolutionary research method that can provide quick, unfiltered feedback and a realistic representation of the decision-making process. By following our step-by-step guide, you can organize your own real-time focus group and take advantage of the many benefits this method offers. While there are challenges to consider, the rewards are well worth the effort.

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    Roman Kumar Vyas

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  • The Brutal Things Republican Voters Say About Mike Pence

    The Brutal Things Republican Voters Say About Mike Pence

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    Mike Pence is making little secret of his presidential ambitions. He’s written his book, he’s assembling his team, he’s mastered the art of the coy non-denial when somebody asks (in between trips to Iowa) if he’s running. In early Republican-primary polls, he hovers between 6 and 7 percent—not top-tier numbers, but respectable enough. He seems to think he has at least an outside shot at winning the Republican nomination.

    And yet, ask a Republican voter about the former vice president, and you’re likely to hear some of the most withering commentary you’ve ever encountered about a politician.

    In recent weeks, I was invited to sit in on a series of focus groups conducted over Zoom. Organized by the political consultant Sarah Longwell, the groups consisted of Republican voters who supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The participants were all over the country—suburban Atlanta, rural Illinois, San Diego—and they varied in their current opinions of Trump. In some cases, Longwell filtered for voters who should be in Pence’s target demographic. One group consisted entirely of two-time Trump voters who didn’t want him to run again; another was made up of conservative evangelicals, who might presumably appreciate Pence’s roots in the religious right.

    I’ve been covering Pence’s strange Trump-era arc since 2017, when I first profiled him for The Atlantic. By some accounts, he’s wanted to be president since his college-fraternity days. I’ve always been skeptical of his chances, but now that he finally seems ready to run, I wanted to understand the appeal of his prospective candidacy. My goal was to see if I could find at least one Pence supporter.

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    Instead, these were some of the quotes I jotted down.

    “I don’t care for him … He’s just middle-of-the-road to me. If there was someone halfway better, I wouldn’t vote for him.”

    “He has alienated every Republican and Democrat … It’s over. It’s retirement time.”

    “He’s only gonna get the vote from his family, and I’m not even sure if they like him.”

    “He just needs to go away.”

    It went on and on like that across four different focus groups. Of the 34 Republicans who participated, I only heard four people say they’d consider Pence for president—and two of them immediately started talking themselves out of it after indicating interest.

    Some of the reasons for Pence’s lack of support were intuitive. Hard-core Trump fans said they were alienated by Pence’s refusal to block the certification of the 2020 electoral votes, as the president was demanding. This break with Trump famously prompted chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” to echo through the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

    Although the sentiment expressed in the focus groups wasn’t quite so violent, the anger was still present. During one session, three people—all of whom had reported “very favorable” views of Trump—took turns trashing Pence for what they saw as his weakness.

    “I’m so mad at Pence that I would never vote for him,” said one man named Matt. “He would be a horrible president … I just don’t think he has the leadership qualities to be president.” (I agreed to quote the participants only by their first name.)

    “That’s exactly it,” a woman named Christine said, nodding eagerly. “He didn’t have the leadership qualities to do what everyone wanted him to do on January 6. He just doesn’t have that spine.”

    A third participant, Nicholas, chimed in: “He just chose to go along with all the other RINOs and Democrats, not to upset the applecart.”

    Meanwhile, less MAGA-inclined Republicans thought Pence was too Trumpy.

    “The only thing I liked about him was that he actually did stand up to Donald Trump,” a woman named Barbara said. “He’s too a part of Trump. I don’t think Trump has a chance, and I don’t think anybody in that inner circle has a chance either.”

    “I think he put a stain on himself for any normal Republican when he joined the Trump administration,” said another participant, Justin. “And then he put a stain on himself with any Trump Republican on January 6. So I don’t think he has a constituency anywhere. I don’t know if anyone would vote for him.”

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    Longwell told me this is how Pence is talked about in every focus group she holds. What to make of that 6 to 7 percent he gets in the primary polls? “I imagine there’s a cohort of GOP voters who are not particularly engaged who don’t want Trump again, and Pence is the only other name they really know,” she speculated. That, or “they’re all from Indiana,” the state where Pence served as governor. A second Republican pollster, who requested anonymity to offer his candid view, told me, “Seven percent is a weak showing for the immediate former VP.”

    Devin O’Malley, an adviser to Pence, responded to a request for comment in an email: “Mike Pence has spent the last two years traveling to more than 30 states, campaigning for dozens of candidates, and listening to potential voters. Those interactions have been incredibly positive and encouraging, and we place more value in those experiences than of a focus group conducted by disgruntled former Republicans like Sarah Longwell and paid for by some shadow organization that The Atlantic won’t disclose.” (Longwell told me the costs for the focus groups are split between The Bulwark and the Republican Accountability Project, two anti-Trump organizations with which she is affiliated.)

    What I found most fascinating about the voters’ digs at Pence was that they were almost always preceded by passing praise of his personal character: He was a “top-of-the-line guy,” a “nice man,” a “super kind, honest, decent” person. Not only did these perceived qualities fail to make him an appealing candidate, but they were also often held against him—treated as evidence that he lacked a certain presidential mettle.

    “I don’t like how Trump was just in your face with everything, but Pence is almost too far in the other direction,” one participant named Judith said.

    Perhaps these voters were identifying a simple lack of charisma. But their casual dismissal of Pence’s wholesome, God-fearing, family-man persona is emblematic of a sea change in conservative politics—and a massive miscalculation by Pence himself.

    When Pence was added to the ticket in 2016, his chief function was to vouch for Trump with mainstream Republicans, especially conservative Christian voters. Pence’s reputation as a devout evangelical gave him a certain moral credibility when he defended Trump amid scandal and outrage. He performed this task exceptionally well. Those adoring eyes, those fawning tributes, that slightly weird fixation on the breadth of his boss’s shoulders—nobody was better at playing the loyalist. And for a certain kind of voter, Pence’s loyalty provided assurance that Trump was worthy of continued support.

    Pence had his own motives, as I reported in my profile. All of this vouching for Trump was supposed to buy Pence goodwill with the base and set him up for a future presidential run. For many in Pence’s camp, the project took on a religious dimension. “If you’re Mike Pence, and you believe what he believes, you know God had a plan,” Ralph Reed, an evangelical power broker, told me back then.

    But in creating a permission structure for voters to excuse Trump’s defective character and flouting of religious values, Pence was unwittingly making himself irrelevant. In effect, he spent four years convincing conservative Christian voters that the very thing he had to offer them didn’t matter.

    In 2011, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” By 2020, that number had risen to 68 percent.

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    Pence won the argument. Now he’s reaping the whirlwind.

    In one of the focus groups, a devout Christian named Angie was asked how much she factored in moral rectitude when assessing a presidential candidate. “I try to use my faith to choose someone by character, but it hasn’t always been possible,” she said. Sometimes she had to vote for a candidate who shared her politics but didn’t live her values.

    “Who comes to mind?” the moderator asked.

    “I think Trump falls into that category,” Angie conceded. “But quite honestly, the vast majority of others do as well.” She paused. “I would say Pence actually doesn’t fall into that category. I would say his character probably aligns with biblical values fairly well.”

    But Angie remained uninterested in seeing Pence in the Oval Office. If he had a record to run on, she wasn’t aware of it.

    “Anything he did got overshadowed by all the drama of these last four years,” she said, hastening to add, “Seems like a perfectly nice man.”

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    McKay Coppins

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