Transcript
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:
It’s ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. Since January, NPR political correspondent Ashley Lopez has been listening in on focus groups of swing voters who voted for President Biden in the 2020 election and then switched to President Trump in 2024. Here’s Ashley reporting for Morning Edition in May about a group of 12 North Carolina swing voters.
ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: What most of these voters expressed was a deep frustration that Trump is out of touch when it comes to the economy.
VIKKI: ‘Cause he’s laser-focused on just the war, he’s not thinking that a hundred in groceries only gives me two bags of food doesn’t even last me a week.
LOPEZ: That’s Vikki. She, like all participants, took part in these focus groups under the condition that her last name wouldn’t be used. Vikki’s frustration was shared by a lot of these voters. In fact, nine of the 12 said they feel more economically anxious than they did before Trump took office again.
KURTZLEBEN: For this week’s Reporter’s Notebook, I wanted to hear about the larger takeaways from NPR’s Swing Voter Project. I started by asking Ashley what got her most excited about the project.
LOPEZ: Well, mostly that this group of voters, this very small sliver of the electorate, I should say, which are swing voters in battleground states, are some of the most powerful voters in America. These people have a real outsized influence, particularly in presidential elections. The other thing that is really helpful about this is that we work with a messaging firm and a marketing research firm – Engages (ph) and Nelson Recruiting – and they do the hard work of finding these people. It is really hard as a journalist to track down, like, this very small sliver of people that exist in the electorate. And every month, 12 or so of them appear on a screen in front of me, and I get to hear from them, and it’s, like, very, very useful.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. When I hear your stories about this, I think, like, man, Ashley got a room full of unicorns…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: …In front of her. ‘Cause you and I, we go out to a political event, it is rare, and it’s a rare find and a great find when you can find someone who voted for this party and then for that party and will tell you about it.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And it’s a room of 12 people who, I mean, they are people who are, for the most part, not super political, not super engaged. They’re low-information voters. Not all of them are likely to vote even these midterms. Like, they tend to only pay attention every four years. Those are not the people we come across at rallies. It is usually the diehards, the people who are already plugged in, the people who already care. It is a very different group of people here, but it’s – they are – they make up the median voter in a lot of ways. So it’s endlessly useful as a political reporter to hear what these folks have to say.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. I mean, how has listening to them changed or influenced your thinking on politics? I mean in this particular year?
LOPEZ: I think it’s particularly important to hear the people who do not listen to all of the news the way I do.
KURTZLEBEN: Mmm-hm.
LOPEZ: I’m surrounded. I mean, I’m in a newsroom. I’m surrounded by news junkies and nerds, people who know what’s going on. Most of America doesn’t.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
LOPEZ: And it’s really useful as a political reporter to be like, oh, this is what breaks through. This is what people care about. I mean, telling people what is important from your perspective, from the perspective of, like, what is important for a democracy, blah, blah, blah, is one thing, but, like, I think another important tool for journalists to keep in mind is, like, what do people already care about? Because if you’re giving them information that they’re not all that invested in, it’s fine. Sometimes people need to eat their broccoli, news-wise. But things that they do care about I think are more salient. I think as journalists, there are sometimes more interesting stories to tell because otherwise, you’re just, like, living in your own head and, like, in your own priorities.
KURTZLEBEN: I’m curious hearing you talk about that. Can you give an example of something that really is breaking through with these voters and maybe an example of something you expected to break through that people just haven’t really heard about or aren’t thinking about?
LOPEZ: So definitely the mismanagement of the economy, particularly gas prices. I’m not surprised by that, but I am surprised at, like, how much people blame Trump for this because for a long time, especially the first year Trump won, it was very unlikely to hear a voter say the economic problems we’re facing are not Joe Biden’s fault. But then the war in Iran happened. And it was really interesting to see that switchover and everyone be like, OK, this is officially Trump’s economy now and to see how angry voters are. A lot of voters also said that they felt lied to by Trump because he said that he was – during his campaign that he would not be starting new wars. So that was one – another one I’m surprised by. And I’m surprised that they’re tying those decisions to the state of the economy.
Another example of something that I’m surprised isn’t breaking through as much is corruption. You know, for so long, as reporters, we heard that a thing that voters really care about is, like, how their taxpayer money is spent, how their elected officials, the people they put in office, how they’re behaving and how they’re – what kind of custodian they are of this, like, power and money. And we learned recently – right? – that, like, Donald Trump made, like, about $2 billion since taking office again.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Last year.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And that is a staggering amount of money, sort of unheard of, you know, a president making while in office. And I was surprised by folks being like, yeah, you know, I don’t really care about this. Some folks said that, you know, I knew this about him. I made peace with this about Trump, that he’s a businessman before I voted for him. This is a story that I think, otherwise, if it was anyone else, would have mattered a lot more than it does to folks right now.
KURTZLEBEN: I mean, another big theme of your work in general is just people’s broader displeasure with the political system. Why is that a draw for you?
LOPEZ: Well, for one, because these are all choices. I do a lot of stories in the reform space of politics. And I also, like, look at the way other countries structure their democracies and also how much they change, like, the electoral systems they use. And in America, people are frustrated with things that are, like, fixable. It doesn’t have to be this way. Now, that’s hard, and the – like, structures in place also make reform hard. But yeah, my bigger analysis of, like, what ails America is, like, a lack of imagination.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
LOPEZ: Yeah. It’s just like everyone has sort of accepted that things are never not going to be this way and cannot be anything but this way. And it’s just not true. It’s just not true.
KURTZLEBEN: Do you feel like the displeasure has changed over time, though?
LOPEZ: Yeah. I think right now, it’s much more economic. People are much more pessimistic about their upward mobility in America, which was not true when, like, we were growing up. I feel like the myth of America is like you can be whatever you want. You can be a billionaire at the end of all this. That is not a thing I’m hearing reflected from people anymore.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
LOPEZ: I think – yeah, the view of the economy being the way it is and people being stuck in either, you know, a situation where they’re taking on more debt constantly or people just feeling like, you know, really anxious about what the future of their job is, like, people not knowing if their job is going to be around. That’s another particular sort of AI-based fear. But, yeah, I would say I don’t think people think broadly about electoral structures the way I do, which, good for them.
KURTZLEBEN: Why not?
LOPEZ: You know, it’s a (laughter) – it’s a very, like, esoteric thing to be, like, obsessed about, but I think they do notice that their experience of the economy as it is, as a structure…
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
LOPEZ: …I see that changing.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Alright, final question and a personal question. You’re from Miami. You’ve lived in Texas. Two states that loom very large in American politics, also just large states. How does your experience in those two states shape your reporting?
LOPEZ: This is going to sound like a downer, but I am who I am. It is what it is. But…
KURTZLEBEN: Great.
LOPEZ: …Mostly what I observed in Texas is something I’m observing in Florida now, which is one party being shut out of power for a long time and what that does to the voters in that party is really interesting. They’re very similar in the way I think people talk about politics in both states, which is, like, you know, it’s a big state that has all these, like, people of different demographic backgrounds there, but a lot of them are sort of shut out of politics mostly because there has been unified power, and both states have done a lot to make it harder to vote. They also – both states have a lot of, like, almost, like, policing around elections, too, that makes people new to politics a little nervous about voting. So – and that is because when you have a long scope of unified, political power, it’s a really hard cycle to break. I don’t know. It’s – there’s probably some things to take away that are cheerier, but I do think, like, in a two-party system, you know, when you have these kinds of structures, you can have a – it’s very common to have a situation like Texas and Florida where you’re just – one party’s sort of locked in to power for a long time, and it has an interesting effect on voters. I think an optimism about change is a little harder to find in places like that.
KURTZLEBEN: That is NPR’s Ashley Lopez.
Thank you for talking to me, Ashley.
LOPEZ: Thank you, Danielle.
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