The Head vs the Heart in Big Ten Country (with Tim Alberta)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I’m Sarah Longwell, Publisher of The Bullwork. And this week, we’ve got a big ten Focus Group Matchup with swing groups in swing states, Ohio and Michigan. In Michigan, we have a group of swing voters. The people who voted for Trump in twenty sixteen, but not in twenty twenty, talking about the governor’s race between incumbent Gretchen Whitmer and Republican tutor Dixon.

And in Ohio, we’ve got a very interesting group, all women that voted for Donald Trump in twenty twenty, but they also voted for Democratic senator, Sherritt Brown, in twenty eighteen just two years earlier. And if Tim Ryan is gonna pull off a big Buckeye upset, J. D. Vance and the senate race, those are the voters he needs to and over. There have been a lot of summer polls with Tim Ryan leading Vance, sometimes by large margins, but as we will discuss elections are not decided in August.

We’ll also hit a couple big topics like Biden’s student loan forgiveness and abortion. To do all of this, we’re going back to one of our favorite guests, the medium of the Midwest, Tim Alberta, Raider for the Atlantic. Hey, Tim. Thanks for being here.

Sarah, put that on my gravestone. Thank

you

for having me.

Did you like that? We actually talked about that in the office. I was like, you need, like, a name. I we came up with the medium of the Midwest. I was gonna call you the Midwest man, like Florida man, but

I love it. I I’ve been called a lot worse. So, really, this is I don’t have any tattoos, but where I to choose to go get one today, that would be the one seat.

Put it on your body. I like it. Okay. So we rarely do we have a guest come back as quickly as we have you come back, but whenever we’re gonna talk about Michigan, there’s really just nobody better. And so we wanted to do this Midwest episode.

So I appreciate you coming back so quickly. But one of the things you said when we talked last time is that you conduct your own kind of informal focus groups, like you walk around grocery stores, like a costing people with questions. Have you been doing that lately? Like, are you still talking to people? What do you just tell us overall?

What are you hearing out there?

Yeah. All the time, much to the chagrin of the people at my local Sam’s Club. I wouldn’t say that there’s anything super revelatory other than I think it just generally tracks with the sentiments that we’re picking up in public poll and and that you’re hearing from campaign consultants, you know, Republican Democrat alike over the last, I’d say, three to five months, which is just a sort of very steady, very gradual, but very discernible shifting of the tide here, whereas five, six months ago, this looked to be a Republican wipeout election where Democrats were going to be lucky to salvage a thirty five to forty seat minority in the House and a five to seven seat minority in the Senate. They are now, I think, very much in a position to hang out of the senate potentially and to potentially limit their losses to the single digits in the House, which would effectively, you know, given Kevin McCarthy’s problems in the House GOP not to get deep into the weeds there on inter conference politics on the Republican side, but if Democrats only lose you know, six, seven seats in the house, then effectively, that’s that’s not even a real majority for the Republicans because of some of the problems they have on their side of the aisle.

So if you had told any Democrat this five months ago, they would have told you you were crazy. And there’s obviously the Dobbs decision and the abortion issue at play but there’s a whole constellation of sort of issue sets and of market fundamentals and political fundamentals here that are all kind of converging in the Democrat favor in a way, Sarah, that I would say that we haven’t seen in any midterm election at least in our in our lifetimes. I can’t think of a comparable situation here where you have a relatively unpopular first term president party facing step headwinds, sort of all the fundamentals working against them heading into the summer. Of, you know, midterm election year. And then suddenly, sort of everything turns at once and the stars align.

And that is to make a long answer, just to sign a bit longer. That is what you pick up constantly just in the vibe conversations with people, folks who were super down on the economy, super down on gas prices, super down on all things Democratic just a few months ago. They’re still not raiding about Biden, but they are not slamming the door in Democrats face the way that they were earlier this year. And that’s that’s very discernible. Yeah.

And if I could just take host privilege for one second and and offer one other thing that I think is sort of under discussed in the VIBE shift, which is just the candidates. Like, you know, we got out a primary season and people looked around and said, oh, so we got doctor Oz and Doug Mastriano and J. D. Vance. And Hershel Walker and look at all these stinkers like they’re either sort of election denial coaks or they’re anti abortion extremist or they’re extremist in general or they’re trumpy or they’re weird television doctor that has, like, reams of footage available to make fun of them with who’s not from the state.

Like, that, to me, is the other piece of this, is now that the picture’s in play. And, like, this is the thing that I’ve been arguing sort of for a long time is that the two thousand ten opportunity to look around and be like the Sharon Angle, the Christina Donald, that they’re just it’s all over the map, those kinds of candidates. Do you agree or disagree with that?

One thousand percent agree. And that’s exactly what I mean by the raw political fundamentals is that in any election environment, there are some things that just sort of transcend what the kind of economic fundamentals are. So, you know, you’ve got inflation, you’ve got food prices up, you had gas prices way up, you’ve got just this general fear, a couple of the panelists near Ohio group were talking about how afraid they are of a deep recession right around the corner. And of course, we did have that in twenty ten to the parallel you were just making. And yet, even with all of the economic fundamentals at their back, Republicans still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a handful of races because of the political fundamentals.

And the political fundamental was we nominated really bad candidates. Right? We we nominated candidates who were uniquely ill equipped to run and win even in this incredibly favorable environment. And I think the last time we talked, we touched on a couple of those folks. I think we talked about the Arizona group that you had, the Michigan group you had.

And in both of those states, Republicans are in very real danger of repeating history in that sense where Had they nominated more mainstream center right, generally acceptable candidates, they would be in a position to run the tables in in those states potentially. And instead, they’re looking at having the tables run on them. And that’s that’s a pretty remarkable swing to to take into consideration. Totally.

Okay. So obviously, a week or two ago, Joe Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan. I think it’s an open question whether this is something that even ranks among the issues going into November one way or the other. The GOP is certainly hoping to use it to sort of generate resentment. DEMS hope that it helps them with the kids.

But listen to our group of Trump voters from Ohio, they were skeptical, but sort of sympathetic and even supportive to some degree of the loan forgiveness. And it didn’t seem to be a massive resentment generator among these swing voters that the Republicans wanted to be. Let’s listen. I’m kind of on the fence. I think that it

is good. People that need it. But, you know, like, let’s say there’s somebody who’s already making, you know, a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars a year and they still have student loan debt. And now they’re given ten thousand dollars when they can, I would say, afford it. I think that that’s ten thousand.

Coulda went to somebody else and giving them more to be able to help them versus somebody who can’t afford it.

You

know, my husband has So I’ve been working all these jobs and trying to take care of my two little kids. I have a older son too that’s my thing. But I’m saying it it will help me a lot because that was, like, putting me a debt. So when people see the stories, I’m a story that I’m working and I was going to school and I have these kids to take care I mean, I’m supposed to take care of my kids anyway. But I’m saying it helped me, you know, far as it was a burden on me.

What ought to financial problems. I

see

the frustration in those people who worked their asses off to not have loans or to pay them off. I worked hard that I could avoid alone and I was successful, but I also had some support and help and I recognize that. And so I think, especially for a lot of my friends, They have loans because they thought that they didn’t have another option. And because all of our parents told us, you have to go to college here, you’ll never become anything. So I do feel a lot of sympathy for the people who have loans who are celebrating right now because it’s wiping their debt.

It’s wiping my husband’s spends. And that’s a really big change for us. We’re twenty seven. We wanna have a family and buy a house and that’s a lot of money. But it still kind of makes me uncomfortable that they are wiping it because I feel like it’s our job to pay it.

So,

Tim, obviously, it was controversial. It was controversial for me. I never I don’t like executive orders one bit. And so there was that element of it. But just in general, some people loved this, some people didn’t.

Do you think it’s gonna play at all in November? Do you think it matters? Not

really. No, that’s sort of an anti climatic answer. I I think to the extent that it does play, Sarah, my sort of informed hunch here is that it may, at the margins, motivate some of those youngsters on the Democratic side some people who are generally quite low propensity and midterm elections to turn out. And again, even if it does, it would be really at the margins. But as far as the grievance, set, does it does it really agitate, does it irritate any voter enough who otherwise would not have been turning out.

Suddenly go out and vote because of this issue, it’s just very hard to imagine. So in that sense, you view it as sort of a very narrow political net positives for Biden and for the Democrats. But generally, what what I’ve picked up from from voters, from just anecdotal conversations, is much of what you’re just hearing there, which is that even the people who may be sort of philosophically opposed to it are almost emotionally okay with it. Which is kind of an interesting and, you know, pretty unique set of circumstances in our politics. I mean, when you’re running through the list on any given focus group in a given day with a set of voters and you’re running through all the standard subjects.

You’re not gonna come across that sort of conflict between head and heart very often. It doesn’t feel like you are anyway. And so even though it’s not a super high salability issue here, but just sort of picking up and observing some of that conflict that voters were giving voice to is in and of itself really interesting.

It is. I actually thought their conversation was very interesting. And one of the things that struck me was at some point, one of the women’s just said, can somebody just tell me why college costs so much? And everybody was like, yeah, why? And I do think this is one of those issues where people actually are able to zoom out and, like, not quite get as caught up in the, should we forgive this?

Should we not forgive this? But people are like, why is it like this? Like, it shouldn’t be like this. People do think colleges too expensive. And so I think you are right.

I don’t think it gives Republicans the resentment use that they’re hoping for and on the margins, maybe for dams. Alright. So I wanna go to your home state. I wanna talk about the Michigan governor’s race. Since we last spoke, tutor Dixon, has won the primary.

I would say our focus group was very on target. Last time we talked, they said she was gonna win, she did. She was kind of dubbed the moderate in that race because, you know, she wasn’t arrested by the FBI for storming the capital. I’m like one of her primary opponents. But she also said that it can be quote unquote, healing for women to give birth to their rapist child and six out of eight in this group of swing voters.

Again, these were Trump twenty sixteen voters, not Trump in twenty twenty or the other one third party your vote to provide. But six out of eight of this group planned to vote for Whitmer when asked, like, hey, if the election were held today, who are you gonna vote for? And Whitmer kinda looks to be the favorite in this race. I mean, I don’t the polling’s gotta be sketchy coming out of these states right now. But to the extent there was sort of like criticism of Whitmer really around her handling of COVID, which we heard before.

One thing that I thought was funny about this group is that sometimes we think of Whitmer as like people in the Beltway talk about her as a potential presidential candidate. But even though all these people who were gonna vote for six out of eight of these voters, they were an absolute though on that. So let’s listen to this swing better group and how they think about Whittler and Dixon.

I think Whittler did a pretty good job with the pandemic And I think she did a pretty good job with everything except fixing the roads. But, I mean, we’ve had a lot other candidates promise more than that and not come through with as much. So But I really don’t like Tudor Dixon because of the abortion thing as well as her being a Trump supporter. So I said I was on the fence, but I’m leaning more towards Gretchen. You know, she

locked the state down early, but then kinda restrictions kinda just went away, and there was really no explanation, you know, of opening up or while we were shut down for so long. And over time, I’ve now seen different ad and campaigns for Tudo or Dixon, you know, I kinda disagree with her stance on abortion and things like that. So that’s where I kinda, like, in the middle of which another candidate would stand out. But right now, that’s probably not two choices I’m leaning more towards. Correct.

Even with tutor, I’m anxious to hear. We really, you know, we’ve seen the ads play. And again, historically, we’ve all said things we wish we hadn’t. At least I speak to myself, maybe nobody else here has been in that position, but I know there’s many things I wish I could take back and redo. I’d like to hear a more current interview with her.

I’d certainly am interested to learn a little bit more about her running mate. I know very little about the gentleman that she’s running on the ticket with. There’s still a lot more. I feel like I have to find out about her before I can, like, at least say I won’t vote for anybody but Whitmer’s been, again, a disappointment. She’s a beautiful woman.

She’s a very intelligent woman. I can’t fault her. And I think she’s done so good. But again, when you start peeling back the layers, to me, there’s no quality there. By holding today, I’d probably go with the unknown.

You gotta pick your poison. I don’t know. Again, it’s the integrity thing. It’s that whole sense of I think she has betrayed us. Alright, Tim.

I have two Michigan questions. One is, are the roads in fact terrible because people were upset about the roads in this focus group? And the second thing is is so the woman who was there at the end, she was talking about Whitmer, apparently she chartered her private jet, went and visited her her father at a time when everybody else was locked down, couldn’t see their sick parents, couldn’t get into nursing homes. And like, that is the thing that seems to be sticking with voters. When they don’t like Whitmer, it has to do with the pandemic and feeling this sense of, like, you had the rules were different for you than they were for me.

That’s like what sticks in people’s crop. But are the roads terrible?

They are, in fact, terrible. I choose to drive my children on a dirt road to school rather than taking the main road, that that is how terrible the roads actually are. Is that ID tour around them to take a dirt road? Wow. So, yes, the roads are terrible.

They always have been. It’s just the issue is that Whitmer promised to fix the dam roads, quote unquote, and has not entirely gotten around to doing so. And of course, part of the reason is COVID, and that gets to your second question there. And I think we chatted a little bit about this last time I was on with you. I mean, there there’s just no question that and I think I got some nasty grams in my email afterwards for my assessment of Whittler which is, you know, I I think not that controversial.

The sense was that she overplayed her hand a little bit on COVID that it was one thing to go really, really super cautious and and super super conservative, small c conservative on the shutdown side of things. But while doing so, you know, slipping out of state and then sort of getting caught red hand doing so, going to a bar with a bunch of people unmasked when, you know, nobody’s supposed to be at bars. Her husband trying to get his boat on the water when nobody else had their boat on the water. I mean, like, I think a politician can sort of afford to have one of those kinds of screw ups. But when you have a handful of them and it becomes a pattern, then it really gets into the bloodstream.

And this is not some like vast right wing conspiracy to paint question Whitmer as the villain of COVID. It’s just like that these were self inflicted wounds. I mean, people close to her acknowledged it, and it’s some real harm. And to the extent that Whitmer entered this reelection season of hers with some vulnerability. I think it owed almost exclusively to that.

I mean, Michigan’s economy has been in pretty decent shape. There hasn’t been a Flint water crisis. There’s no other, like, massive political Albatross around her neck. It really is that accusation from the COVID era of kind of do as I say, not as I do, that Whitmer was sort of setting down these very, very strict guidelines that a lot of people didn’t like to begin with, and then she was seen as sort of being above those guidelines herself. And and that is one of the worst things for any politician.

To be perceived as playing by a different set of rules than the ones that you lay down for your constituents. And so there’s no question that that didn’t real damage to her.

But it seems that Tudor Dixon’s position on abortion access or her interested lack thereof, she’s got kind of famous for these comments around, you know, if a ten year old or twelve year old is raped, that they should have to carry the baby to term. That’s in these answers from people. Like, do you think that because abortion is now such a central issue and because Tudor Dixon is pretty far on the extreme, that that turns things around for Whitmer? You know,

when it was pretty clear that Tudor Dixon was gonna win, I said, look, the playbook here, if you’re running against touter Dixon is pretty obvious. And and this was before it became super duper clear that there was this mounting evidence suggest that abortion was going to be mobilizing historic numbers of women this fall. And I said, look, Tudor Dixon is gonna be hard to define because she’s so new. She’s a fresh face. She’s, you know, got a beautiful family.

She’s got a you know, personal story of overcoming cancer, all these things. Right? But, like, if you’re the whittler can’t, you will be airing ads like within forty eight hours of her winning the primary, you’ll be airing ads about her stands on abortion. Right? And sure enough, they were.

I think it was actually within like twenty four hours. They were up with those ads. And I think they’ve already done a lot of damage, and I think they’ll probably continue to do damage. You know, this is not your classic center right pro life with exceptions republican candidate getting beat up by the left because they’re desperate to find a wedge issue to mobilize some voters. Like remember, like, in the Colorado Senate race for the Denver Post endorsed Corey Gardner because they said, Senator Youdall was Senator uterus that, like, all he was talking about was abortion and it just wasn’t really resonating with voters.

Like, this is not that. Right? Like, two per Dixon legitimately has a position here that is way outside the mainstream. And she’s talked about it in ways that, you know, frankly, it hasn’t she hasn’t seems terribly self aware with regard to sort of the political vulnerability that exists there. Now if that’s her conviction, fine.

I’m not criticizing that. But I think that just politically, there’s an assessment made by a lot of these candidates that if you’re gonna hold a certain policy stance, you’ve got a really massage your rhetoric around it and be careful with how you message it, how you talk about it. And she hasn’t necessarily done that either. So it’s sort of the worst of both worlds for her. So to the extent that Whitmer has found a vulnerability and has started attacking it and kept attacking it and will continue to attack it that’s where it is.

And it’s not hard to see. This one isn’t rocket science. It’s been pretty effective. And for that reason, I think Dixon’s probably gonna really struggle to try and make up that ground here in the home stretch. Trump

lost Michigan, not by a ton, But the polling coming out has been pretty lopsided. Like, does that feel right to you? So

it’s such a hard state to poll. I really expected in twenty twenty that we’d see a bit of a snapback. I wrote about this a lot that I thought Biden would win Michigan, but I wasn’t sure it would be by a significant margin. I mean, it’s it’s easy to forget that, you know, Obama beat Romney here by ten points and that the state was not super competitive in the previous couple of presidential elections. Biden winning here by three points was actually a bit of a surprise because I affected that he would win by maybe in the five to six point range.

And so it was a healthy victory for Biden certainly relative to places like Arizona and Wisconsin, even Nevada, some places where the margins were much tighter. But a hundred and fifty four thousand votes is he’s still kind of tight in a state of ten million people. And I don’t know that anybody in the Whitmer camp is feeling comfortable right now. I think there’s still quite a ways to go here. The one thing that you would look at just in terms of the political fundamentals going back to that clunky phrase of mine is, like, you cannot look at the financial advantage Bitmer has here.

Down the, you know, two and a half month stretch of this election and not consider her to be a pretty overwhelming favorite just because, I mean, I think I would have to go back and look at the most recent numbers, but I think she’s got something close to, like, a fifteen to one cash advantage. Might even be more than that. And so she’s all over the airwaves already, digital, mail, texts, phone, everything. I mean, she’s it’s just so it’s gonna be very difficult for Tudor Dixon to sort of out message Whitmer down the stretch here. So it almost feels like this is

something

If this were going to break the Republican’s way, it almost feels like a race that Whitmer would have to lose rather than one that Dixon would have to win.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep. Were you surprised that none of them wanted her to run for president? No. Not

really. I did I really did get some nasty grams people who are

all like I gotta

just stop. Please do not send my guests angry emails. Oh, so

do you want us

if you’re

angry, send

them to me. That just said it’s not nice.

Oh, I love I love you. They get me through the day. I actually keep every every angry email I’ve ever gotten, I keep in a folder, and it’s like the water boys tackle in fuel. I, you know, I tell you though, Sarah, the nasty grams were about some of my remarks about Whitmer and COVID. You know, I’ve talked about this on cable news a couple times, and it’s the same thing.

I just don’t think people appreciate how polarizing she was during COVID. And even, again, even people who were on board with some of the restrictions when the pictures are circulating of her at the bar with friends, people were pissed. It’s just like it did not go over well. And so I think whatever trial balloon Biden had floated for a minute there about her joining the ticket or then potentially her joining the cabinet, it got popped pretty quick. And I don’t think there’s any invading though.

Got it.

Okay. So let’s move to Ohio. Because this is a different one. We’re like, we probably shouldn’t be doing Ohio. Like, I had been skeptical early on about, like, Ohio being in play.

And look, I think J. D. Vance is probably still the favorite in the Ohio Senate race. It was r plus eight in twenty twenty. But his campaign could be going, let’s say, like, a lot better.

Like, right now, it is running a terrible campaign. He’s currently trying to smooth over his image with Ohio voters. Natalie Allison and political wrote about how these Republican senate candidates particularly those with pretty extreme positions on abortion. They’re all running ads featuring their wives, like their wives alone. Avance did one of those.

Because vets not only doesn’t believe in exceptions for rape and incest, I think they’ve got a clip of heavy called pregnancy from rape, inconvenience. Now, as if to prove the necessity of the ads featuring the wives, there were two women in the focus group who both voted for Vance in the primary but who now had strong reservations about Vance’s position on abortion and are leaning toward Ryan in the general. So let’s listen to that.

I could be

real life and not want it to be a government issue. I mean, nobody’d like to be baby subordinate, but whether we’d have to have a government telling women that just seems wrong.

I really

think it’s, you know, really up to the female one. It should be their decision there’s a lot of things that play into it. It could be, like you said, a rape. It could be something that, you know, I don’t think it’s that they don’t want the child. It’s the situation of how did it happen?

Let’s just look at rate, for example, unwillingly, they were impregnated with, you know, a baby that they weren’t planning on having so I feel that they should be, you know, given a choice. We should be given a choice, I should say, and shouldn’t have the government to dictate that. So now let’s listen to the ad from

Vance featuring his wife, which is clearly geared toward bolstering his ties to Ohio and softening his image with

women.

Our family story is an Ohio story. My husband, JD, grew up in middletown. And things weren’t easy. His mom struggled with addiction and his dad wasn’t there. But JD was lucky.

He was raised by his loving grandmother and he served his country as a marine in Iraq. He’s an incredible father and he’s my best friend. Katie shared family story in Hillbelly allergy. And he wants for Ohio what Ohio gave him. A fighting chance.

I’m JD Vance,

and I approve this message. So this

group, when we ask them, election held today. Who do you wanna vote for? This group had four votes for Ryan, two for Vance, although they were not the two women who voted for him the primary. And another who refused to commit either way, because some people just won’t play the game. And, you know, we asked them if they trust Advance, no one did.

Tim Alberta, Yes or no? Is Ohio really in play?

So I’ll give you a really squirmy politician answer like, it’s in play, yes. But would we be surprised if Vance ultimately won and it wasn’t super close. No, not really. And that’s

not

to say that Ryan can’t win either. It’s just that Ohio is one of these places. Like, You know how when Obama won Virginia in two thousand and eight, everybody kind of snapped, like, whoa, really, Virginia. Okay? And then he won begin in twenty twelve.

And then suddenly by twenty sixteen, nobody can talk about Virginia anymore. It’s off the board. Same with Colorado. Right? Like, these were states that Republicans had won and won pretty consistently.

And then suddenly, they’re just off the board. They’re not competitive anymore. Ohio is that state on the Republican side. I mean, Ohio is now a safer Republican state than is Texas, and that’s pretty astonishing. If you said that to somebody, you know, five or six years ago, they would have told you to get your head check.

So Ryan is running a really good campaign. And JD Vance is running a good, bad campaign. And you combine the two of those and you are sort of in this situation where it looks like a dead heat. It’s really, really close. The problem with that is, like, I would equate it almost to thank God for all seasons back.

Like you said, we’re here in Big Ten country. If you’re watching a game where the team that’s favorite or the better team is playing really, really poorly, and the underdog team is playing absolutely out of their mind. They’re killing it. They’re doing everything right. And yet despite that, the game is tied heading into the fourth quarter.

Your gut just sort of tells you, like, eventually the talent wins out. And, you know, it’s a crude analogy. I’m not saying that David grants more talented than Tim Ryan, but in a state like Ohio for the two of them to be running neck and neck this long, I actually would say that that’s an advantage to Vance. You know, a few months ago, it actually there was some polling that suggested that Ryan might be pulling away, that he might be putting some distance between him and Vance. And the strangest thing has happened even as nationally the Democrats’ fortunes have improved.

That particular race has, in fact, tightened a bit. So Ohio is probably going to have I would guess that if you were going to rank all fifty states as far as raw voter turnout one to fifty this fall, I would think that Ohio is probably a top ten state. And because of that, I think J. D. Vance has better than a fighter chance to pull this off even though he has run a terrible campaign.

So you think that

he’s more likely to win because people are paying so much attention to Ohio now? No.

Not necessarily because people are paying more attention, but because I think when you have a state now that’s so safely Republican, And frankly, a state where you’re not dealing with any major sort of demographic influx like Texas is. For example, where, you know, you can look at the trajectory of Texas and chalk it up not only to rising Hispanic population, but to a boom of white college educated suburbanites moving in from California, New York, and elsewhere. Like, Ohio doesn’t have any, like, tremendous political demographic volatility to it. It’s now, I think, relatively stable in terms of its political profile. So what I’m saying is that if in fact, Ohio sees massive turnout this November, relative to other states.

I think that that helps Vance just as a numbers game because there are more Republicans in Ohio than there are crabs. Okay. If that makes sense. It makes

sense. Okay. But let me push back on this. Because the reason we constructed this group the way that they did, Trump twenty twenty voters, Sherrod Brown twenty eighteen voters. Sherrod Brown won by what?

Six Points in twenty eighteen. Now Granite, big damn year. Some people looking to to crack back on Trump. But let me just throw this at you. Is it possible that Ohio is not become necessarily a deep red state?

Like, it’s not a r plus eight state? What if it was a Trump plus eight state? What if Trump was uniquely suited to a place like Ohio? These Trump voters in this focus group, this group went in. And they love Trump.

They thought he told it like it was and he was a businessman and he could get people to listen and he kept his promises and he told the truth. But more than half the group was gonna vote for Tim Ryan. So, like, what about the Sherritt Brown, Tim Ryan? That kind of voter? It’s

a really good question, and I think you’re spot on and asking. And and is there a chance that that’s dead on? That that it is a Trump plus eight state, not a Republican plus eight state. Sure. I think that’s possible.

But I will say, like, I’ve covered some elections in Ohio more than a few. And I was just there a couple weeks ago on a four day reporting trip. I’ve just really learned in the last bunch of years here to trust my gut and my gut every time I’m in Ohio these last four or five years is like Ohio now profiles closer to West Virginia than it does the Pennsylvania. Yeah. Like and that’s that’s a hard thing to quantify.

Obviously, you know, West Virginia is a, you know, Trump won it by a million points. Right? It’s it’s not meant to statistically compare the two necessarily, but let’s sort of the culture and the kind of vibe you get in party circles. It’s not a state that feels kind of fundamentally curious about Democrats. Now Sherritt Brown You know, you’ve got these rare examples where, obviously, you know, like, National West Virginia, that’s one extreme.

I don’t know that Sherrod Brown is quite in the same bucket. But like, Sherrod Brown has been around the block a bunch of times. He’s got such a strong brand in the state. Unlike fashion in West Virginia who, you know, he was really close to the center ideologically. What makes Sheraton so special is like that he’s an unabashed progressive in a state that is quite conservative and yet he still wins because his personal brand, his personal connection, his ties, his relationships are just that strong.

I don’t know that a first time statewide candidate can hope to replicate that. Like, we in the political class all know Tim Ryan because he’s been pretty high profile in the house, and of course, he ran for president. So we sort of know him. But it’s easy to forget that he is a first time candidate and even though he’s run a great campaign and raised some money and gotten on TV, I just don’t know that at the end of the day, it’s enough. I would like to say that he’s got the edge here, but there’s just something holding me back, and it’s certainly not the brilliance of the JD Vance campaign.

It’s just that Ohio feels less and less swingy than it ever has in my lifetime. Alright.

Well, let’s listen to what these voters had to say, both about Ryan and Vance.

One commercial that

Tim Ryan does is really effective where he says that JD Vance opened this corporation that was supposed to help people in — Oh, fifty. — the opioid crisis. Yeah. Mhmm. And now it turns out and I did a little reading on that, and I think that might be true.

I don’t I think that that was just, like, for show. I don’t think he really did anything effective with that money. So that’s that’s really disturbing. I like Tim Ryan. I mean, I guess my concern when I read his record, I think he’s extremely liberal in spending, you know.

And I do worry about the economy, but he seems like a really good guy. So I’m I’m not sure yet what I’m gonna do.

Tim Ryan, I mean, his name is so familiar. You know what I mean? He seems like a really good guy. The J. D.

Vance thing in the opioid commercial, my mother is an addictions counselor. My parents are both in recovery, so I’m very familiar with the opioid crisis, which is currently obviously one of the largest problems in our country. And I just don’t really like playing on something that, you know, takes people’s lives to obtain funds and not do what you said you were gonna do. You know, I mean, I guess there’s a point to that always in politics. It’s not always the way that it’s supposed to be.

But I just yeah. I really didn’t like that. I do feel

like what

we read and hear in the media is a lot of flossed action. So I’m

a Trump

fan. Have been since I was very young. And Vance is endorsed by Trump. But, I mean, who’s to say, I don’t know. And also, vance is for the blue collar, but also Ryan grew up in mid Ohio.

So I really don’t know. I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m also very, like, pro America, pro American advances too. But Ryan did grow up in this area and, you know, it’s so hard to you really can’t discern Republican, Democratic. It’s very hard to discern which side do you

want? So the thing

that jumped out to me from these groups was one everybody knew who Tim Ryan was and felt like they understood that, like, he was from around there. Like, there was much more of a disguise from around here than with

Vance. With

this thing, with that charity, and Ryan’s been hitting him with these ads, and and we’ll play it for you in just a second. But it’s basically the accusation is he had this opioid charity was collecting money and then spent zero of it on actual sort of addiction resources, spent money on pulling and some things. And when that woman said that opioids is like one of the biggest problems in America, I’m not sure if it’s one of the biggest problems in America. It’s one of the biggest problems in Ohio, though, for sure. And I wonder if that kind of thing with Vance.

I don’t know. Can that work? Oh,

no question. And this gets to know, I don’t think it’s overstating it to say kind of the tactical brilliance of Ryan’s campaign, which not to sound like a broken record, but, like, this is where I come back to sort of my head versus my heart. Like, my head is saying, gosh, this guy is executing at such a high level. He is running such an outstanding campaign. And yet, the vibe is generally that he’s not there.

He’s down a few points and he’s got brown to make up why. But the opioids, these ads are unbelievable. I mean, they’re they’re very, very effective, and they’re of a piece of an overall strategy. I would almost say, and I I made this remark to somebody a while back to smell test it, and they told me, no, that I wasn’t crazy. It’s a little bit reminiscent of the Obama campaign against Romney in the Midwest in twenty twelve.

It was not just on the policy front that this guy is not one of you, but it was on the sort of cultural experiential front. This guy is not one of you. The lifestyle front, like he is not one of you. He might try to put on a pair of blue jeans, but you can see how stiff they are because he just ironed them. Right?

Like, that’s the vibe. That’s the play. And it’s pretty effective and it comes through in these ads and that’s why the ads work. It’s not just that they’re picking up this scab in a place like Ohio where it’s resonant. But it’s that it fits in with the broader messaging, like every tactical move that Ryan and his campaign have made is orchestrated and pretty tightly coordinated to be hitting these same vulnerabilities on Vans.

And it’s really impressive to watch My question is just, is it gonna be enough? Yeah. I guess, I don’t know either.

I know. Look, I’m again, I’m gonna stipulate my skepticism on this. I just I’ve now done a bunch of in Ohio. And I am sort of like, I listened to a group of Republicans’ back. It was for the primary, but, like, they didn’t like Vance at all.

And now a lot of them were gonna vote for him. Like, they were Republicans and they were like, oh, I’m not gonna vote for a Democrat. And so, like, there’s no doubt. There’s, like, a lot of those people and they’re gonna come home and so it’s got to go, but they also like no one likes this dude and they think that he’s a phony and to your point the opioid hit along with, like, him being backed by big tech money is flip flopping on Trump. Like, it all just kind of were down to the same big basic character flaw, which is this guy’s a phony.

He’s faking it. He’s not really from Ohio the way that, you know, Ryan’s from Ohio. Anyway, I think Ryan’s got a real punter’s chance and it’s and the the big thing though, I think has been the money race. And so the fact that McConnell has to go in there with twenty eight million bucks to try to bail Vance out. Like, that’s something.

Like, that’s thirty million that could be spent a lot of other places, you know, and a lot of tight races. And instead, they gotta go spend it there.

Howard Bauchner: Yeah. You know, it’s funny because we’ve spent a lot of time between the two podcast conversations, Sarah, talking about the you know, something has to give between on the one hand, this election climate that, in many ways, is so favorable to Republicans, at least on paper. And and certainly, up until a couple of months ago, where it looked just sort of dominant for Republicans. But reconciling that with the individual weaknesses of some of these Republican nominees. Right?

I mean, it’s a certainty. We don’t know the number and we don’t know exactly who and exactly where, but it is a certainty that Republicans are gonna wake up the day after the election, and they will be slamming their heads against desks because they will have given away a handful of super winnable seats. Just, you know, races that they absolutely should have won, that they did not have any business losing. And this could be one of them. There’s no question about it.

Like, I do not wanna sound certain for a minute here that Vance is gonna win this race because it does come down to candidate quality and it’s the single most important of any of these fundamentals we discussed. You know, we talked about Blake Masters, you know, emerging as the nominee in the Arizona a senate race. Right? And, like, that one feels a little bit different because he’s going up against an incumbent. He, like Vance, is a pretty bad candidate.

With some baggage and without a lot of local roots, without a lot of appeal, just somebody who’s generally unlikable. It’s not really working for him trying to connect with voters. But the difference being that in Arizona, you know, that’s a state that was decided by, like, you know, I think a third of a percentage point. And a state where he’s running against an incumbent democrat. So there are just some kind of foundational differences between a couple of these places where I don’t know that, like, Castoriano, blowing the governor’s razor, ah, blowing the senate race in Pennsylvania would necessarily be put in the same bucket as Vance potentially blowing the senate race in Ohio.

I just think they’re a little bit different, but I am not gonna rule it out by any stretch. Totally agree. In fact, it would just be a

much bigger upset. I mean, like, I think it it would be unbelievable. But I I do think, look, that twenty eight million is gonna go a long way to reminding people of every time he voted with Nancy Pelosi, and of the times that he positioned himself to the left of Bernie Sanders, I mean, he really has been running a very great campaign as a moderate built for Ohio, but he’s got a record that’s not quite quite that moderate, then I think SLF is is on its way in with the cavalry to try to make sure people know that. So we’ll see. Tim Alberta, another great episode about the Midwest.

Nobody knows more than you. You’re our medium of the Midwest. Thank you for being here. And thank all of you for subscribing to Bulwark Plus to hear this episode of the Focus Group. We promise we’re gonna keep them coming through the general election.

A lot of swing voters, a lot of undecided voters gonna be fun. And to close us out, let’s listen to that Ryan ad hitting JD Vance. On his opioid scam charity. Take care. First,

JD Vance promised to help fix the opioid crisis. Then we learned he didn’t fund a single addiction program. Instead, he used his sham nonprofit to launch his political career, even worse. Vance brought a big pharma funded mouthpiece to Ohio. She called Oxy a godsend.

She spread biased research and big pharma kept selling pills. J. D. Vance didn’t help. He made it worse.

I’m Tim Ryan, and I approve this

message.