- Republican voters are depressed right now.

They don't like their candidates.

They don't think their candidates are good.

Like if you talk to voters, Republican voters in Georgia, they're like, "Ugh, I don't, I don't like Jon Ossoff, but everyone I know is voting for him because our candidate sucks."

- Hey there from KQED in San Francisco, this is Political Breakdown.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

Today on The Breakdown, "The Bulwark" CEO and publisher Sarah Longwell has spoken with thousands of American voters over the past decade.

A former Republican strategist who left the party after President Trump's first election, she's become one of the nation's preeminent experts on voter sentiment thanks to the hundreds of focus groups she's led.

She recently wrote a book about what she's learned in those focus groups and her own political journey.

It is called "How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time."

On the eve of the midterm elections, I am thrilled to welcome Sarah Longwell back to The Breakdown to talk about the state of US politics in 2026.

Hey, Sarah.

- Hey, how you doing?

Thanks for having me.

- Yeah.

Well, since you wrote this book, I mean, we've had you on the show a bunch, but I do want to kind of go back and for folks who may not be familiar with your journey, remind us a little bit who you are.

Do you consider yourself a recovering Republican, an independent?

Are you a Democrat now, a journalist, an analyst?

You wear so many hats.

- Yeah.

I like to think that I'm just a normal liberal, meaning somebody who believes in liberal democracy, wants to preserve American liberal democracy.

And so much of what I do now, I've displaced my own personal sort of ideological leanings with much more sort of present day threats because it's fine for me to be somebody who is, and I am, obsessed with the national debt.

If you and I were to sit down and be like, "Sarah, what really lights you up?"

And be like, "Let's talk about education reform."

But these days, that's just not where the discourse is.

And for me, when Trump happened the first time, I was caught so off guard like so many people were.

And especially I realized sort of how detached I had become when you're just in think tank world, in DC or policy world talking about things, they really aren't that connected to regular people.

And so part of my... I mean, really, I started the focus groups because I wanted to primary Trump after he first got elected.

And I was still thinking, okay, as a Republican, how do you take back the Republican party from this authoritarian populist and what do you do?

And in my journey, I realized a whole bunch of things about Republican voters, namely that the things that animated me like individual freedom, personal liberty, American leadership in the world, those were just not the things that were animating voters.

And so I've been not even on a journey about my own political shifts, but trying to chronicle the country's political shifts and then understand how we mitigate the damage being done by what I think is a very dangerous version of Trump's Republican Party.

- Yeah.

I mean, it is fascinating because I do think you... I mean, obviously you published "The Bulwark," but you have moved into this more almost journalistic world where you do have to set aside your personal feelings and focus on the people that you, in this case, are studying through these focus groups.

And they're what really drive a lot of your analysis about the state of politics.

So explain what is a focus group exactly and why do you see them as so valuable?

- Well, I think part of it is all of us, and right now, I think we're all living with our polling PTSD, and I just can't live like that.

Because the polls will kind of tell you what, right?

Okay.

They might tell you who's up, who's down, and even that, we're not sure how accurate it is, but also it'll tell you things like, "Well, this is what voters care about."

And I'm like, "Okay, but that doesn't tell me the intensity with which they care about it.

It doesn't tell me - Their thought process for these things - Because sometimes they just read a list and then they're like, "Oh yeah, that," right?

That's a very different question.

Yeah.

- And so I find it much more valuable to... And this is how I start every single focus group.

And what we do is we screen for different groups.

So right now we're pretty obsessed with people who voted for Trump in 2024, but they rate him now as doing a very bad or somewhat bad job.

So we would call these Trump disapprovers.

Now, the Trump disapprovers, and I think the big question going into 2026 is, do those people potentially vote for Democrats?

Do they stay home?

Are they still willing to come out and defend Trump's agenda?

Will they turn out to vote because they want to make sure they're so threatened by, I don't know, trans stuff or socialism?

Is that going to motivate them?

And so for me, that's what I want.

I want to hear organically, because I start with the same question.

I'll say, "How do you think things are going in the country?"

And that is the most illuminating question from the entire group that you're going to do in two hours, because they're going to tell you organically in that question what matters to them up top, because it's what they sort of say.

So they'll say, "No, I don't think things are going well."

And then they'll mention the war or usually prices is really top of mind for people.

And they'll give you very specific things that they were going into the store and trying to buy or some way in which high gas prices impacted their lives or things that they can't afford for their family, trade-offs that they're making.

Or they'll talk about data centers.

And what they kind of bring up organically to me is always the most interesting because it's one thing to be like, okay, well, how do you feel about abortion?

Well, now you've introduced that and you can tell them, but you don't know if that's a super motivating issue for them.

And so you get much more from kind of the open-ended, tell us what's driving you in this moment.

- I mean, you started doing this as you kind of alluded to after Trump's first election.

Obviously, the politics has shifted over time.

Has your strategy changed over time?

- Yeah.

I mean, the world has changed so much in the last decade, and so there's been different moments.

I mean, there was a point going back in 2022 when obviously abortion was this really high salience issue.

But also, one of the things that I really learned, and I think you could see this from 2022 to 2024, abortion was a much more salient issue in local elections when people were voting for governors in 2022, in the midterms.

Those were really fresh for people.

But then in 2024, Democrats really leaned on that issue hard, and I was like, "Ooh."

Because in a national election, it didn't matter as much to them.

And I've seen people... So this is another thing that I think is a real evolution that is really important to how we understand this moment right now, and it's kind of a bummer of analysis, but Trump was very corrupt in his first term and nobody cared because as long as the economy was good, the voters kind of let Trump off the hook for so many things.

And so in my original years of doing focus groups, what I was listening for was, is it Trump's behavior, his tweeting, the racism, the sexism, the horrible un-presidential ways he talks, the cozying up to Putin?

Those were not the big motivators.

What is causing people to finally walk away from Trump is that he broke a bunch of his promises, the central promises of his 2024 campaign, which were basically in voters' minds.

It was, "We're going to release the Epstein files.

I'm going to lower grocery prices on day one," which is really the most important one.

"Not going to get into any stupid wars.

I'm going to be really transparent, drain the swamp."

And everybody's like, "You're not doing any of those things."

Even on immigration, which is his strongest issue, you get voters saying, "Well, I thought he was just going to deport criminals, people who were dangerous criminals or violent criminals, gangs.

I didn't think he was going to go after the abuela down the street."

And so I think watching how people's relationship to Trump changes based on the negative personal consequences for them has been a really interesting thing to watch evolve over time.

- Yeah.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the sort of current state of affairs.

So you kind of alluded to this, but I wonder what do you feel like has changed most dramatically among Trump voters and Republicans more broadly since you started these focus groups nearly a decade ago?

And is that driven by just the politics or is the media ecosystem other elements part of that?

- Yeah.

I mean, one of the chapters in the book that I like the most is where I talk about the way that voters get their information.

Because to me, this has been one of the big... It's not an imperceptible shift, but I think sometimes until you really lay it out for people, you're like... I've heard a lot of people talk to me about that chapter being like, "I hadn't really thought about it that way before."

And I'll give you an example, which is I talk about the difference now between news seekers and news receivers.

So those of us who are sort of - - Sick in the head.

- Sick in the head.

That right.

- Let's call a spade of spade.

- But it used to be that most Americans spent time with the news at some point.

They read the newspaper in the morning over breakfast or they watched the evening news or maybe they watched cable, but they had this time that they spent to gain information.

And over time, the amount of incoming for voters that is on their phones, that is just them scrolling, that is the extent to which politics permeates.

There's not specific time with the news, there's just an algorithm that washes over people.

And so we ask voters in the groups and have for years and years where they get their information.

And it used to be that people could tell you where they were seeing some information and now they say, "I don't know where I saw this."

The constant state of, "I heard this somewhere.

I saw this somewhere.

I have no idea."

Which means they had no way to adjudicate in their minds whether that information was correct.

It was a scrolling headline.

It was their favorite cooking influencer.

It was on TikTok.

It was on Instagram.

They heard a celebrity say it.

They don't know.

Totally.

And so we've always had this phrase called low information voters, and I don't have a new phrase exactly, but I sort of want it to be like information overwhelmed voters, which again is to say people who are not purposefully seeking out the news or information and their ability to adjudicate it, it's that it hits them from all these places and it kind of levels up to a thing that political scientists would never call it this, but I will, vibes.

And I talk a lot about the rise of the vibes voter.

And I think we used to have this... It used to be axiomatic that politics was downstream from culture.

And now I think culture and politics is just much more fused in part because of the way the information environment is hitting us all because it's changed so much.

- Well, it's also like social media sort of flattens everything.

This my husband's argument against putting our kids on social media or big life announcements.

Then it's basically at the same level as like the burrito somebody ate for lunch that they're posting about, right?

And you can't always kind of disentangle all of that.

But I mean, one thing we're hearing from both polls and from focus groups and from anecdotal conversations is just, as you mentioned earlier, how much the economy is really driving people's opinions of Trump of this election.

His approval ratings in the 30s in most polls.

It was as low as 32 in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

And I wonder when you think about all the things that sort of feed into that economic anxiety, Iran and gas prices, inflation, AI, immigration, inequality more broadly, are any of those rising to the top of the heap or is it just sort of all this anxious stew?

- I do think that the old saying it's the economy stupid is both very, very true but also sort of doesn't quite get at what is truly happening for voters.

Because part of what it is, is when things kind of fuse together in one big ball of economic anxiety as you put it, because there is a lot of anxiety, but that is everything from, because some ways I think almost everything is the economy and costs, but people know we're talking about grocery prices and they know we're talking about gas prices.

But also the things that come up all the time in focus groups is the cost of childcare and the trade-offs that especially women are making because they're like, "Well, I could work, but I'm working just to pay my childcare costs," is a thing we hear a lot.

We hear a ton about healthcare and people feeling like not only is it's too complicated and also it's so expensive.

So all of those things come together and make up people's particular economic situation.

It's also just a general feeling of my kids aren't getting as good an education as I feel like I got is something that we hear about a lot.

- Are they going to have jobs because of AI?

- Are they going to have jobs and then AI, and there's a ton of AI anxiety.

And I would say I have a theory of the case that I'm going to say and may or may not bear out in 2026, but I think that the voters that you are going to see stay home are the rural voters who often provide Donald Trump his biggest margins.

One of the reasons that Donald Trump is such a potent political figure is that he brought all of these new people into... I mean, this is something that I think sometimes people forget is we've had over our recent elections, the highest levels of participation in American history.

And it's not because our democracy is thriving, it is because people on both sides are deeply polarized, deeply anxious about the threat of the other side.

And I just think that these rural voters who turn out at these high levels for Trump that are new to the political system, I hear them from them in focus groups all the time say, "I came because of Trump because he was not a regular politician.

He was doing something different."

I suspect that those voters are the ones where you see turnout collapse in 2026.

The reason being that if you're one of the people who's like a Trump boat person, do you ever see the Trump boat parades in Florida or whatever?

Well, if you own a boat, then you're surviving in this economy just fine.

But for a lot of those rural white collar voters, they are dealing with the fact that their prices are now prohibitive for their lives.

Gas prices, they often have to drive further than other people to live their lives.

So gas prices really inhibit - - We're seeing that in the swing congressional districts here in California.

- I believe it.

I hear about it all the time.

And then there's the AI.

Those voters are the ones that are most worried both about AI taking their jobs, and also they're the ones who live in the places where the AI facilities are being built and they are fighting.

The data centers are something where they're upset that they're being built where there's lots of land, which means in the rural areas and it's driving up their energy prices.

They think it has... They talk about environmental impacts.

And so I suspect that those voters are actually the most frustrated with Trump and that they're the ones who don't turn out.

That's my personal pet theory.

- I mean, it's interesting because you kind of talked about this with the corruption being something that's actually resonating with folks because of the economic situation.

And it strikes me like that's probably true around this... Another thing I think Democrats kind of swung and missed on in 22 and 24, which was corrupt or sorry, democracy.

This idea of people being anxious about whether democracy is under attack.

I mean, I know you've pointed out and I've also noticed that also really depends on what that means to voters depends on where they sit in the political spectrum, right?

So Republicans are worried about democracy in a totally different way than Republicans, but we do have some tape of some of your focus group folks talking about this whole corruption issue, and I just want to play it and have you react here.

- What everyone else was saying is it's pretty blatant right now.

There's no hiding it.

It's just happening.

And Trump says, "I don't care.

This is how we're going to do it.

It's me and that's how we're doing it."

- The buck stops with him if he's condoning it, if he's doing it himself, if he's turning a blind eye to it, while at the same time JD Vance is supposedly on the anti-fraud task force, it's a bit ironic.

- I mean, it's so fascinating to me because the level of sort of blatant grift by this administration is something we've never seen before in American history.

And I want to talk about some of the individual races.

So let's just jump into the Senate.

I know you kind of have a crush on Jon Ossoff.

- I do, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

- Well, talk about him because he's done a really interesting job of tying the corruption and laying it out in a way, tying the corruption to you and how you are being affected by this administration, but also doing it in a way that I think people can actually understand.

- Yeah.

I mean, I have a communications crush on Jon Ossoff.

And the reason I wrote the book in part was because I was so deeply frustrated with the way that Democrats did their communications.

Joe Biden obviously was a pretty elderly guy, and so he wasn't able to go out there and give these barn burner speeches, wasn't able to really explain his thought process all the time.

And I think Democrats kind of ran from him because he wasn't thriving during his term.

And as a result, that's a big part of the reason we got Trump again, is because people felt like inflation was too high.

They didn't have a sense of what Biden's economic strategy was, even though they were recovering.

We were in the middle of a recovery from the pandemic and there was lots of positive things to say, but I think that the Biden administration kind of just said, "No, it's good.

The economy's good."

And voters were like - - Which we're kind of saying happen now.

- No, it's not.

- Yeah.

- No, it's not.

Well, this is what Trump does now.

Trump's getting hit with the same thing, which is Trump's just like, "No, it's fine."

- I'm getting rich.

He's like... - Yeah.

- Yeah.

- No.

And so for voters, the affordability issue is the lead into the corruption issue, but I've been frustrated with Democrats' inability to tie them together.

And Jon Ossoff is one of the first people to stand up in stage and walk people through it.

And it shows you the value of a leader with strong communications capabilities.

I also like Pete Buttigieg a great deal for a similar reason, which is he just released this video where he sat down at a Waffle House and he walked through the menu of everything he ordered and explained why the tariffs and the war, why they were driving up the prices of their food.

And I was like, "Where was all of that in 2024?"

And this sort of ability to go on offense against Trump and also connect it to the things people are feeling in their lives had really been missing for a while.

And now we've got it.

And so I'm thrilled by that.

- Yeah.

Well, as we kind of established, I mean, you were a Republican, you're still, I would sort of assume, center right in your politics.

You've also had really kind words though for some of the more high profile progressives who have emerged.

And these are folks who often give the kind of more moderate Democrats some heartburn, but I think they share Ossoff's communication skill.

I'm thinking about New York City mayors around Mamdani, AOC, of course, and then Abdul El-Sayed, who's running for Senate in Michigan.

I mean, sticking with him, El-Sayed, what do you see about his political talent?

Because I think a lot of folks who are skeptical of him in the Democratic Party are like, "Oh, he's too aggressive.

He hasn't always been communicated the way they would like to see him do it."

- Yeah.

And I would say I share.

I think El-Sayed can be a little hit or miss on some of this, but I do, again, sometimes now my ideology tends to be subservient to both my desperate desire to stave off the authoritarians who I think are already in the gate, inside the gates of America, and then also just like my nerd dumb about what is happening with voters.

And so El-Sayed is interesting to me because he's trying to put together actually a different coalition.

So Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, James Talarico in Texas, and there's a lot of other examples of this.

They're kind of putting together a coalition of voters that are swingy independence and the base of their party, right?

Sort of the broad base of their party swingy independence.

- Kind of the same playbook we've seen in swing states in past cycles.

- That's right.

And this would be like a Joe Biden coalition.

I mean, you've got Josh Shapiro who's going to just absolutely annihilate his Republican opponent in Pennsylvania.

And in doing that, they tend to be sort of winning over these just kind of like moderate swingy voters.

El-Sayed is kind of trying to take the Tucker Carlson America first right, Marjorie Taylor Greene, people who are mad about Israel, who want healthcare for all, who kind of want to do economic populism, and taking some of the economic populism of the right and fusing that with his particular progressive vision.

And I'm interested to see how that works.

Does he wildly underperform some of these other candidates or does that work?

- Does he bring out new voters?

I mean, we're seeing that here in one of the congressional races, the David Valadao seat, Randy Villegas is kind of trying the same theory of the case.

As Democrats, we failed repeatedly to get out these voters who just don't vote, so we might as well try to get out a new group of folks.

I mean, I do wonder, just because you do so many of these focus groups, how are you looking at the Senate math at this point?

Do you think Democrats could take the Senate?

And we're seeing money flow to states that Iowa, Kansas, places we didn't even think would be in play a year ago.

- Yeah.

I mean, look, I'm vibrating with excitement going into this, but I also have, like I've said before, a lot of polling PTSD.

The thing that gives me the most optimism, it's the reason I like supplementing.

I would never do focus groups as the only mechanism for understanding the political environment, but when you take the polls and then you do as much qualitative stuff as I do, because I do multiple groups a week from multiple states, and you start to see a lot of patterns.

And one of the big things I'm seeing, and again, it goes to my theory about rural voters, is just Republican voters are depressed right now.

They don't like their candidates.

They don't think their candidates are good.

If you talk to voters, Republican voters in Georgia, they're like, "Ugh, I don't like Jon Ossoff, but everyone I know is voting for him because our candidate sucks."

And there's a lot of that in Kansas where they're like, "This guy doesn't even live here."

And even in Maine, Susan Collins, one of the things I've been seeing in Maine that's really interesting is a sense of people who say, "I voted for her all these past elections, but she's no longer independent from Trump."

And if you puncture Susan Collins' sense of being an independent, that is a real liability for her in Maine.

Now, am I sure she's going to win Maine?

I am not sure she's going to win Maine.

Susan Collins sits on a throne of skulls of her opponents.

She's tough to beat.

And voters are super lukewarm in Maine on Troy Jackson.

They think he is a warm body, but also a lot of them are like, "And I'm fine with that this cycle."

But that to me is really illustrative, this sense of Republican voters just feeling like why show up?

There's nothing to defend in this administration.

Unless you're really animated about the perceived threat of socialism or trans kids in sports or whatever it is that the Trump people are trying to say is something that they can do, there's just not a lot of enthusiasm for the Trump agenda right now.

- Yeah.

Well, since I have you, I'd love to look a bit ahead from next Tuesday and think about 2028 and beyond.

And I guess to start, I'm just curious, do you feel like looking back, you misread anything in 2024?

- Well, one thing that I guess haunts me a little bit with Kamala Harris is one thing I read very clearly was how much voters didn't want Joe Biden to be the nominee Democratic voter.

- Yes, you were prescient in that.

I want to give you credit here.

- Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, and sometimes people are like... I don't know.

They think that because Kamala, in that hundred days that she ran for president, she tried to run kind of a moderate campaign, people are like, "See, she tried to run a centrist campaign and she didn't win."

And I was like, "Yeah, guys, that's not a real campaign."

That was like this truncated short thing where - - Although we can have a whole conversation about who is she actually politically and would that have been a similar campaign if she had had longer?

Because I do think one thing she struggled with having covered her for 20 years is where is she on a lot of this stuff?

- Oh, no, 100%.

Well, this is - - And that's an authenticity problem too.

- And I have a whole chapter on this in the book because I was there when she did... I moderated one of those Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris events.

And so this is the thing that I think I would say is a bit of a misreading is people were so down on Joe Biden that when Kamala Harris became the nominee, the level of enthusiasm among Democrats went so high right out of the gate.

They were so thrilled to have somebody else there that they could pin their hopes on, that I think I did over read it a little bit in terms of... Because I was also hearing, and also full disclosure, I wanted her to win very, very badly.

And so their enthusiasm was the same enthusiasm that I shared.

And I think the thing that when I went back and really listened to them again, because I did, I went and listened to everything again.

And even at the time I saw it, but I under counted it a little bit, was this way that people are like, "But who is she?"

And people right now are trying to have this retro fit argument where they're like, "No, she lost because she was too progressive.

No, she lost because she was too moderate."

Well, it was kind of a little bit of both, right?

She was viewed as a California progressive.

That was hurting her with more centrist voters or swingier independent voters.

So she kind of ran hard to the center at the very end and it left people with this very muddled impression of her and she wasn't good enough.

She's not sort of enough of a political athlete to have been able to talk to everyone, go everywhere, really explain who she was, be super authentic, give people the sense of, "Here's my strategy.

He's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to break with Biden.

We did these things wrong."

So sometimes people think it's about the policies and it wasn't really.

And so I do think that that would be the thing that I... Because I don't even remember if I was on, but certainly at the time I was like, "Man, the world has changed."

- Right.

- And I think that it had, I just wasn't enough to get over.

- Right.

I mean, it was a very close election, to be fair.

- Yeah.

- And I do think I've heard you talk about this.

The authenticity question is so real now because we are so... Even though we're further away because of things like social media, we're closer to people too.

So there's this level of voters need to really feel like they understand and know you in a way that when we were all watching the evening news, maybe was not the case.

So given that, who do you see as the strongest Democratic contenders for 2028?

- I mean, my three personal preferences are the people that I'm watching.

You've got Jon Ossoff, who I think... Look, he's a breakout star.

I mean, a lot of the country still doesn't know him because they're not tapped into politics, so they're not watching the Georgia Senate race.

But he looks like a moment is choosing him even more than he's choosing a moment, because he has something that I think is sort of essential for a politician, which is he's at some remove.

People see him as being slightly... But he's not just any guy.

- He's got some Obama vibes in that way.

- Yeah.

There's a little bit of an, "I'm a serious person for a serious moment."

But also, he's got a real theory of the case about how he communicates, and he's not afraid to go hard.

And voters do want somebody who's going to go fight.

And I think that Gavin Newsom was doing something that looked like kind of a performance art, right?

He was kind of mimicking Trump back to himself, and that excited voters for a little bit, but I think that was kind of a sugar high because I actually think what Jon Ossoff is offering is a much more durable picture of what they might want.

But then there's also people, again, like Pete Buttigieg, who I think is an excellent communicator.

He's going into all the red places.

He's got a different theory.

Well, he's not running a Senate race right now, but what he does is he goes to Oklahoma, and he goes to Iowa, he goes to Kansas, he goes to all these red places, and he's going and helping every Democrat right now.

And you know what he does?

He tries to talk to Republicans.

- Yeah.

- And he goes on Fox News and he shows people that he can sit in those spaces and be an effective communicator the way a lot of their politicians can.

And then you get Josh Shapiro who... Josh Shapiro's going to run based on the fact that he won in the largest swing state by 20 points, and that is going to be compelling.

But then there's also, look, first of all, everyone and their mom is going to run in - A very crowded stage.

Talk about PTSD.

- Yeah.

To me, what's interesting is how if you end up with, let's just say the three that I mentioned, and then you've also got your John Kelly's and... I'm sorry, not John Kelly, your Mark Kelly's, you've got JB Pritzker.

I think that you kind of don't see as much in the hardcore progressive lane.

And so that's kind of wide open for if AOC doesn't run, and I assume Bernie is too old to run, you kind of end up in that lane with maybe a Ro Khanna, but I think there might be more space there.

So it'll be interesting.

I think Elissa Slotkin may very well run.

Gosh, there's so... I mean, I don't know that I think Gretchen Whitmer's going to run, but I think that she would want to be on people's short list for VP.

There's a lot of Democrats who are ready to come out and give it a swing.

But I would just say for me, and I think for a lot of voters, right now, they are going to want to see... It is going to matter who stood up to Trump in this moment and who is visible for standing up to him when people think about who they're going to vote for in 2028.

- But you do not see a path for a Californian, I think.

- So look, I don't think Kamala Harris should run again, and I know a lot of people do.

I think sometimes you don't get a second chance.

And that's just part of politics, right?

Yeah.

I think people are going to want to move on from that.

I think Newsom, look, he's on most people's short lists.

I found it really suspicious when he said he wouldn't run if Kamala did.

Maybe that's because they share a big donor base, but I also think it probably means he thinks she's not going to run and he wanted the cred that he gets from that.

I think Newsom... Here's what I think.

I think Democrats think that they definitely want a straight white man who is going to take on Trump and who's really smart, whatever.

And then I think they're going to see it in practice.

And with Gavin Newsom, him being sort of the most in that vein, and they're going to say, "You know what?

That's not what I want right now.

I want one of these young... Give me one of these young up and comer guys."

I'm not certain of that, but I'm not... Gavin Newsom doesn't light me up, but I'm not a great person.

I just feel like he had a moment.

Had a flare up with people.

- No - One mentions him anymore.

- Was last year's prop 50 social media war his high watermark?

- High water mark.

- We'll have to see.

- It might be.

- I've heard you say that we could see even Republican candidates talking about things like maybe not Medicare for all, but even more universal healthcare, that single payer will become less toxic perhaps.

We're about to head into an election here with this huge wealth tax on billionaires.

It is not looking great in polling, but it is a conversation that I think is going to be part of the Democratic 2020 conversation, whether it's that type of tax or something else, but just taxing billionaires more.

What do you think about those sort of populist type things and how they're going to play maybe on both sides of the aisle in some ways?

- So I do think that we are in a bit of a populist moment.

It's a tough time for America to be in a big populist economic moment because we have $40 trillion in debt.

The bond market's looking real shaky.

Trump's been obviously running the economy how we got high inflation.

So it's a weird time to then try to do something like Medicare for All.

But also, I also do think that on the Republican side, there is an America first wing of the party that is kind of a Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And this is where I say that horseshoe with Abdul El-Sayed, where it is just populist economics all the way down.

It's a lot of promises.

But I do think that people want some kind of universal access to healthcare.

I think it's an interesting conversation though, because you have to sort of then parrot, this is the thing about Americans, the more they get from the government, the more benefits there are, the more restrictive they get about things like immigration.

So there will be interesting ways that they navigate this trade-off, but you do hear a lot of voters on both sides of the aisle kind of do a... And it tags into the no foreign wars, and even you see El-Sayed doing this with Israel, is it's all like, "Well, we should take care of people here first."

And that is the America first element that a lot of voters heard that they want.

They're like, "Why aren't you... Stop sending money over to this place or to this place and stop spending it on this thing.

Spend it on us here.

Spend it on our education system, our healthcare system."

And I think that is going to be... I think you're going to see candidates playing to that desire from both political parties.

- Yeah.

All right.

Before I let you go, we are heading into this midterm at a time where the president in unprecedented ways continues to attack the election system, right?

And I mean, this started with riot on the Capitol in 2020.

This week, the DOJ's in court trying to stop California from counting ballots.

They preemptively tried to contest the outcome of a Senate race in Alaska that hasn't happened yet.

There are concerns about federal monitors, about ICE agents, all leading through January 3rd, like, will the Republicans in Congress try to pull some shenanigans around not seeing a Democratic-led house if Democrats take it?

I guess from where you sit, how concerned are you about how things play out on Tuesday and beyond just from an election security standpoint?

- I mean, I'm always concerned because I don't think that anybody should pass this prologue here.

We know what Trump is willing to do.

We know that he's... We know that when or if the 2026 election goes overwhelmingly for Democrats, that Donald Trump is going to say that it was stolen.

He's going to say that it was rigged.

- I mean, he basically already is.

Yeah.

- Yeah, right?

Like this is his, this is his play.

I mean, and look, we saw Blanche open the door, Todd Blanche, the head of the DOJ, sort of say, "Well, yes, I will of course have to consider court cases."

And Trump saying, "Well, I'll accept the results of the election if it's fair."

You know, there's... This is not a group of people who is committed to ensuring that the Americans trust their election process.

And that's the world we live in now, and it is extremely distressing and sad.

But I also think in some ways, the shock of 2020 of Trump denying the election results, like subsequently he's done that constantly.

I mean, he goes around saying, "Well, if, if the election was fair, I would've won California."

Well, no one thinks that.

And so I do think the potency of his rigged claims, especially... And again, I will take you to the place of he is so much less popular right now and voters are just much less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on things.

And he loses in court on all of these.

Like there's almost never do they win in court on their election challenges because they're specious and and not real.

- Yeah.

- So I think although I don't know, this Alaska thing, this Alaska thing could end up being a problem because I, I... The, there's new reporting on this today.

It's, it's too new to comment on, but it's not... It does look like they're... And this is why, like, if it's close, so you could see a scenario where it's actually on a razor's edge, Alaska is the deciding Senate race, and you're in a Florida you know, 2004 situation where everyone's going to all the different places in Alaska to look for hanging chads or whatever, or looking at ranked choice voting, and there's a bunch of lawsuits.

That's kind of a worst case scenario.

My hope, and this is why everybody has to go vote, is that it's such a blowout.

It's such a thorough repudiation of Trump.

He, they win so many states that, like, it's kind of not worth them fighting because it's been determined.

- Yeah.

All right.

Well, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, definitely vote.

Election's Tuesday.

And here in California I know a lot of nonpartisan groups are urging folks to try to vote by Halloween, so we're not counting ballots up until Thanksgiving.

That would make me happy as a reporter, personally.

Sarah Longwell, she is author of "How to Eat an Elephant One Voter at a Time" and host of the Focus Group podcast.

Thank you so much.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- That is a wrap for Political Breakdown.

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