The Focus Group Method: How Listening to Voters Reveals What Polls Miss

Sarah Longwell, CEO of The Bulwark and host of The Focus Group Podcast, has conducted hundreds of focus groups since 2018—a scale of qualitative research she believes is unmatched during the Trump era. She started because she was caught off guard by Trump's 2016 win and never wanted to be wrong about voters again. "Listening to voters is like cheat code for politics," she told Dan Pfeiffer in a live conversation at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. "You're like, oh, this is why people did this thing."

Before COVID, focus groups required flying to swing states and sitting behind two-way mirrors. The pandemic forced everything onto Zoom, which paradoxically allowed Longwell to scale up dramatically: two groups a night, twice a week, for years. This scale matters because it protects against the danger of outliers. "I don't want to be like, well, one group said this, and therefore that's what I think about politics," she said. She also developed a "trapdoor policy" for the aggressive participant who dominates the conversation—the guy who watches Hannity every night and lectures everyone else. In person, she'd politely remove him; on Zoom, she'd simply cut his feed.