What motivates American voters?

Trump won the presidency, but down ballot votes didn't always follow party.

How can we understand the conflicting and diverging values expressed in the 2024 election?

Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump. Founder and publisher of the center-right online publication The Bulwark. Host of the podcast "The Focus Group."

McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic. Author of "The Wilderness" and "Romney: A Reckoning."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The post-election analysis will go on for weeks, if not months, all asking a set of the same questions, including how did President-elect Trump win? He had his own answer in his victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

DONALD TRUMP: They came from all corners, union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American.

We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense. We're the party of common sense.

CHAKRABARTI: Latino and African American men voted in greater numbers for Trump in 2024 as compared to 2020. Young male voters skewed it for Trump as well.

Non college educated voters went for Trump too. But do those votes really signify a historic realignment of American values? What can we actually glean from how people voted, given how close the margins were in several swing states? And the outsized influence those swing states have, given the mechanics of the Electoral College.

Sarah Longwell is back with us. She's a Republican strategist and executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump. She's founder and publisher of the center right online publication, The Bulwark and host of the podcast, The Focus Group. And as Sarah has been running voter focus groups for a long time.

It's great to have you back, Sarah.

SARAH LONGWELL: Thanks so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Also with us today is McKay Coppins. He's author of The Wilderness and Romney: A Reckoning. He's staff writer at The Atlantic, where his two most recent articles in the past week are This Is Not the End of America and Triumph of the Cynics.

McKay, it's great to have you back as well.

McKAY COPPINS: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So here's what I want to do. I want to start with a significance check, and it comes from a bugbear of my own. And that is, in the aftermath of really big events like a presidential election, we in the media are seized by this paroxysm of trying to make sense of things, grasping for narratives.

We're hearing a lot of those narratives now, even just in the wee hours after the election. The problem I have with narrative seeking, though, is that a storyline, by definition, ignores all other possibilities, so I think what we're seeing is a vast oversimplification of a complex situation. So Sarah, here's the way I would frame it for you.

Thus far, I'm looking at vote totals. Okay, and there's still a bunch of outstanding votes in California, most conspicuously. Probably a couple of million out there. But so far, Donald Trump, in 2024, has received 73,468,444 votes. That could go up by a couple million. But in 2020, according to the FEC, he received 74,223,975.

So even with the California votes when they come in, I don't see actually a huge surge in the number of Americans overall who voted for Trump. Is this an historic realignment, as he put it?

LONGWELL: I'm not sure it's a historic realignment. I think that, look, you just said, there are so many factors. And I think that we should be careful about just looking in the aftermath at things like exit polls, and then forcing all of our conclusions into them. I actually prefer to go and think about what I was hearing in my focus groups for the last several years. Because I think that gives us a truer picture of what this was all about.

Now, I will say, if we are just thinking about things like, okay, why might more people have voted in 2020 than in 2024? I do think there's a relatively obvious answer, which is that we were in the middle of a pandemic, where, you know, the ability, we didn't have that many other things to do. We were highly motivated to go out and vote against, you know, how we felt things were going around the pandemic. And I just think that was like a really different environment. There were also, it was made vastly easier to vote in those moments. And so it doesn't shock me that in 2024 turnout might not be quite as high as in the middle of a massive exogenous event, where everybody ... had nothing to do but vote.

CHAKRABARTI: So then, okay. So McKay, let me then further refine it. If I hear Sarah saying there's significant things we should talk about, but this may not necessarily be the sweeping historical alignment that President-elect Trump is talking about.

But, okay, so looking at three states in particular, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and obviously I'm choosing those because they are utterly crucial to the electoral college count as swing states, looks like the vote difference between Trump and Harris in Wisconsin was 30,000.

Roughly 30,000 this time around. I believe in 2020 it was 22,000. Michigan, 80,000. Pennsylvania, 140,000. But we're still talking, like a tiny, we're still talking like at the margins. And what I find is that not only in like science and statistics, but also in just life, behavior at the margins is very noisy.

It's highly variable. What significance can we put, if any, on the general narrative that Trump swept all seven swing states?

COPPINS: Yeah, I think a couple things are true. One is that after every presidential election, the Monday morning quarterbacking from people like us in the media and from partisans in both camps will point to the winning campaign and tend to say everything they did was right. And point to the losing campaign and say everything they did was wrong.

It also becomes a thing where people will latch on to their personal bugaboos, their personal pet ideological projects and say, if only the Democratic party had done X, and X is the thing that you care about most, they would have won. So I think we do have to be wary of all of that in these conversations, but it's also true that what you're noting is just a fact of the electoral college system that we're in.

In almost every presidential election, the winner is determined by a few hundred thousand swing state votes. And that if they had gone differently, the outcome would be different. I do think it's notable that Trump has the possibility and maybe even the probability of winning the popular vote for the first time. That has not, he's never done that.

And actually, if you look at the last 25 years of electoral history, Republican presidents have almost never done that. I think 2004 was the exception. So there are things to pull out here, but I do, I like that we're beginning with this note of caution, because I've now been doing this long enough.

I know Sarah certainly has, and you have, Meghna, that we all tend to over determine the kind of takeaways from presidential elections, when they're always relatively close because we are a very closely divided and polarized country. And I think that one reason that's important is that Donald Trump and his allies are going to try to claim a sweeping mandate coming out of this election.

And I think there is somewhat limited evidence for that, even as we can acknowledge that winning all the battleground states and possibly the popular vote, and improving on his vote share in all these different demographic groups is a pretty significant political accomplishment. I just don't think that we should let them say, and frankly, if Harris had won the same way, we shouldn't have let her say that they now have a mandate to do whatever they want from the country. We are still a very closely divided country. It is still the case that roughly half the country voted for the other side, and there is no sweeping conclusion we can draw about the American electorate as one giant monolith.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, 100% agree. In fact, later, I think sometime next week, I want to, we're going to try and do another show that looks at the vote count through a completely different lens about what Americans might be saying about in the fact that, as Sarah, as you pointed out, fewer people turned out to vote this time around so far as I can see, then in 2020.

Then, just to dovetail on what McKay was saying, Sarah, at the same time, sticking with these three swing states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and this is why I'm really excited to have both of you on. And Sarah, because you have been looking at swing state voters who themselves have voted both Democratic and Republican.

It is also true that in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump did actually pick up more votes than he had in 2020. And I don't think we should ignore that entirely. He was somehow successful in that all important margin that we've always been talking about for the past year. Given your long history with some of these voters, what do you think allowed him to be so successful there?

LONGWELL: Yeah, like I said at the top, instead of thinking about what we know from the last three days, let's look at what we've talked about now for several years, because there has been political realignment going on. And it is true in the swing states, but it's true in the entire country, which is that Donald Trump, because he has reshaped what the Republican party is, he has turned it into a much more economically populist party.

He has, and I think intentionally, the Republican party has tried to build itself into a multiracial, working-class party, which is different from the party as it used to be. It is no longer devoted to limited government, free markets and American leadership in the world. It is much more populist, much more nationalist, much more isolationist.

But where Trump has really made inroads, because white voters have, really, they held for Harris in a lot of ways, like that's what she did about as well as Biden, but they lost everywhere else, with Hispanics, it was a complete cratering. There was some backsliding with Black voters, with young voters, they didn't come anywhere close to hitting their marks and in the political realignment that's been happening.

There's been a bit of a trade going on, where Democrats are picking up more college educated, suburban voters that might've been McCain, Romney voters back in the day. That's where you see these collar counties, like in Wisconsin, for instance, you have in the WOW counties, Harris did do better in those suburban, more high-income places.

But it all fell apart in the more rural areas, but also in the urban areas. Because in those urban areas, there's a slide with Hispanic and Black voters and with young voters. And that was a big part of it. And I think that what's happening overall is that in a trade between college educated voters and non-college voters, of all races, Republicans are on the winning end of that in general elections. Because there are simply more of those people, whereas in off year elections, that helps Democrats a little bit more, which can explain 2022.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah Longwell and McKay Coppins join us and we're talking about, or trying to think through, how to understand what values Americans may have been transmitting as they made their votes for the 2024 election. Here's a couple of Michigan voters.

This is Deadline Detroit reporter Allan Lengel speaking to voters in Detroit. And 69-year-old Danny Jay Walker talked to Lengel. And Walker voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.

ALLAN LENGEL: Could I ask what motivated you to come out here today?

DANNY JAY WALKER: Because democracy matters. One is for democracy and the other one is not.

I voted for Kamala Harris.

LENGEL: Kamala Harris. Are you excited about a woman, the possibility of a woman being president or?

WALKER: I am, because I tend to have more trust in women.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Danny J. Walker in Detroit. Also in Detroit, 50 year old Anthony McClendon voted for Trump. And here's why.

ANTHONY MCCLENDON: I'm hoping for a better situation for the community.

Everything is being built up downtown and instead of the real outside and the outskirts of the community, the violence, I want a lot of change. You know what I'm saying?

CHAKRABARTI: That's Anthony McClendon in Detroit. McKay, I have to say, Anthony's voice and thought there took my mind straight back to something Sarah said before the break, which kind of stopped me in my tracks, about Donald Trump reshaping the Republican Party into a, yes, a nationalist and isolationist one, but a multiethnic working-class party. Now, the white working-class part, I get, we've been seeing that for a while, but I'm old enough to remember when multiethnic working-class party would have been the one, the phrase you used to describe the Democratic Party.

COPPINS: That's right. In some ways I feel like this has been the holy grail of both political parties for decades and decades in America. This idea that one party or the other could bring together workers from across the geographic spectrum of all races, that is a winning coalition.

As you mentioned, that's probably a closer description of the Democratic Party, in kind of the Obama era, for example. But even then, there were white working-class voters who would still vote for Republicans, largely because of cultural wedge issues, social issues. What Trump is doing is trying to build, to make good on this goal, for that both parties have had for so long.

By bringing together the white working-class voters that he started to make inroads with in 2016. Now with other working-class voters. And if it could sustain as a Republican coalition, long term, that would make this a realignment election. One of the problems with calling this a realignment election is that first of all, the electorate is still so closely divided that it's hard to say that this is a permanent realignment.

It's also true that it's almost impossible to know if something is a realignment until you're 10, 20 years down the road, and you can pinpoint a certain election like we can, for example, with 1980 and the Reagan landslide as something that actually changed the trajectory of the two parties.

But this is the beginnings of a realignment. And I think that some of that audio you just played gets at the fact that Trump is winning voters that Republicans in 2000, 2008, 2012, would never have dreamed of being able to win over.

CHAKRABARTI: So Sarah, on that point I also just want to observe that yes, as we've all discussed here, Trump definitely made inroads amongst Latino voters and African American voter in roads, but still, especially amongst Black voters, they still overwhelmingly voted for Harris.

So if we're at the beginnings of a multiethnic working-class party as the GOP, it still is only in the beginnings. Is there anything in these longer-term trends that you think may be attributable to an overall change in the Republican Party, or is it just Trump, right? I guess what I'm saying is, if we had a crystal ball, and we look to whoever the next GOP headliner would be, would that be a person that folks would follow?

If he's not here, if he's not Donald Trump.

LONGWELL: Look, it's really unclear. Donald Trump does have unique elements to him. When we do the focus groups for years and years now, I've been doing them and you ask people why Trump, and they'll tell you a couple of things over and over again.

And one is he's not a regular politician, which is a thing that people have liked about him. Also, this is a guy who was famous, just imprinted on our culture, for being rich and for being a quote unquote good businessman, which is what you hear from everybody. It's one of the reasons that amid broad dissatisfaction with the current state of economics, really cost of living, especially housing costs.

Grocery costs, like they just see him as better than Democrats. And this, I just, we've been doing focus groups since the election, asking people, why people who voted for Biden and now have voted for Trump, why? And they just didn't feel like Democrats had a plan to address, like, the problems that they were feeling, the pinch at the grocery store. And so it makes sense that you have these more higher income voters voting for Democrats, whereas these lower income voters who are really feeling like they can't afford their cost of living, that they were the ones being like, I don't know, I felt like things were maybe better under Trump and he's a businessman.

And I don't like him. This is the thing. I'm just listening to voters over and over say they don't like him, but they still voted for him, which is what explains, I think, the gap between her having a more of favorable approval rating and maybe him not. These guys are like, yeah, no, he's a super jerk and I don't like his mouth, but I need to pay like Beyonce's not going to pay my bills, which is a direct quote from something that somebody said in a focus group yesterday.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow, Beyonce's not, wow, okay, I guess that is factually true, Beyonce will not pay the bills. But McKay, Sarah's hitting on something important here, because when it comes to perception, we did a show a while ago where I was asserting in the show that the so called felt economy is the real economy that matters to people, right?

And so even if the top line numbers were looking good over the past year, in terms of reduction in inflation, job creation, et cetera, it didn't really make much of a difference to people when they still had to spend much more at the grocery store than they did before. So I wonder though, do you see that?

In terms of the Democratic Party, and Harris in particular, connecting with things that really matter to voters, because that is how you win elections, that there were some missteps there.

COPPINS: I think so. I think that one of the mistakes that I saw a lot of Democratic surrogates make, and I don't want to pin this directly on Kamala Harris, because I don't think she really made this argument.

But I saw a lot of Democratic surrogates, and people in the Biden administration, continually try to convince voters that the economy was doing well, right? And you can talk to economists, and you can look at those top line numbers and you, as journalists or academics, we can point to all those numbers, but it's not really something you can convince individuals of, right?

People don't vote based on whether inflation is lower than it is in Germany. They vote based on whether groceries just cost more than they are able to spend, whether they're having to cancel vacations, whether they're having to, they're struggling to buy a house, or their rent is going up.

Those kind of prosaic kitchen table concerns that we hear about every election, it should not be a surprise that those are driving voters. I do think it's important that we hone in on this. I think that one of the risks of over reading the results of this election, like we were talking about earlier, is that people will say voters gave Trump a mandate to do whatever he wants. And whether that's using the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies or do mass deportations of millions and millions of undocumented immigrants and put them in detention camps.

All these things that he said he's going to do, pull out of NATO. I think that for a large segment of the electorate, they were voting on much smaller things that are more individual to their lived experience, which is stuff just costs too much. And I seem to remember five years ago, in 2019, stuff cost less.

And so maybe we should give Trump another chance. And I know that drives a lot of your listeners probably insane. I know it certainly drives probably a lot of readers of my publication insane. But we can't tell voters to feel a certain way about the economy if it doesn't jive with their own memory and their own experience.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Actually, McKay, this is an issue that I will never stop thinking about because I do think that American elites in the media, in politics, et cetera, dismiss how people feel. To our endless peril. I just don't understand why we do it. It's not some sort of vibes when someone's saying, I still have to pay too much at the grocery store.

And that is their number one concern. So I'm going to put that aside.

COPPINS: I agree. Amen. Amen. I agree with you.

CHAKRABARTI: But Sarah, I'm still wanting to hear more from you about the longitudinal sort of information about how people are thinking about this country that you've gleaned over since 2020. And these repeated focus groups, because there's also been all this exit polling data or even actually just before the election of people saying, overwhelmingly, that they do not, regardless of party, that they do not like the direction the country is going in.

Does that make this, just again, one of those sort of de facto change elections? That people just, they didn't like the direction the country is going. Harris is considered the incumbent, even though she's technically not the presidential incumbent. And so therefore, more folks voted for Trump.

LONGWELL: Yeah, look, I think that, we've been just, everything's a change election now. Every election is a change election. I think it is. And we haven't even gotten into this yet, but at some point, we're gonna have to talk about how different the information environment is that people are in, and how, look, Kamala Harris ran a really good technical campaign if she was running in 2004.

It's have good ads, have a good turnout operation. Don't make any big blunders or mistakes, but that's not enough now. And I don't want to just be like, go on Joe Rogan. Because that's not it either. That's too reductive. But the idea of people, when they say, I don't want a regular politician.

And when she was a candidate who said, and again. I actually, I pointed, a bunch of recriminations are not that helpful, but I do think it's important to understand that the country did not want Joe Biden to run again in 2024. And that was just clear as day. I heard it in every focus group, where people didn't want him and then he came very late to dropping out. And she was the only option, and she got dropped into trying to make a case to the American people at a time where they were frustrated with the incumbent.

Joe Biden's approval ratings are lower than Donald Trump's. And so like she was put in a really tough position, and in a lot of ways, overperformed based on what she was. Because if you look at the entire country, moved about six and a half percent toward Trump. Just, I mean, in places like Illinois, places like New Jersey. You have a very good like control sample and then in the swing states, where there was a lot of advertising, a lot of education, Kamala Harris did about three and a half points better. And so if you were able to make the case to some people, but it wasn't enough, because there was such dissatisfaction in the country with a couple things.

I mean, look, I start every focus group the same way. So how do you think things are going in the country? And everybody would say bad. And then you'd say, why? And they would say, things cost too much, inflation. They would tell you the exact price of milk, the exact price of eggs. I do think it's very hard for people in D.C. and New York and LA to understand that an average voter might be able to tell you exactly how much that costs, and how much their grocery bill has gone up and why that matters to them. And the choices and the tradeoffs that it causes for them, and then, they would also say, immigration.

Because once people get into a place of scarcity, they feel like they don't have enough. Then suddenly they're also like, okay who else is getting what? And what is that? And that makes them angry. And that makes them also say, that's where you get your Ukraine frustrations where people like, why are we sending money over there? We're not doing enough.

And this is what America First is meant to do. Trump's America First agenda is about saying, we're not going to do things over there in these other countries. We're not going to give things to other people, like this is about you guys. We're going to do it for you. And I just think that really resonated at a moment where people were feeling pinched.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Let's hear from a couple of more voters. This is Emma Gallagher. She lives in Chicago. She told NBC that she's having a tough time understanding how people could overlook now President-elect Trump's convictions and character.

EMMA GALLAGHER: Just in being a moral person. I'm having a hard time accepting that people are more willing to accept a convicted felon and an accused rapist.

Can I say that? Over a person who doesn't have any convictions and also who has the experience of two branches of government.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's voter Emma Gallagher in Chicago. This is David Torres in Philadelphia. He voted for Trump. And he said why it's because he says Trump promised to help Latinos economically.

And interestingly, David says he's going to hold the president-elect to that promise.

DAVID TORRES: We got little barbershops, man, that the economy hurt them, little store owners that the economy hurt. And we need to surround these people and get our economy back. I will be the first one to go against Trump if he doesn't keep his promise.

CHAKRABARTI: That's David Torres in Philadelphia. That was so interesting to me, McKay. I wonder if you had some thoughts on that.

COPPINS: It was actually that first, the first woman that you played, that really stuck out to me. Because I hear that from a lot of people in my life. And even when I'm reporting out in the country and talking to voters, they will often bring up, Don't voters care about all this stuff that Donald Trump has said and done?

Don't they care that he's a convicted felon? Don't they care that he's been accused of sexual assault? Don't they care about the Access Hollywood tape? And you can run through all these lists. And I do think that, I wrote about this in the Atlantic this week, that one of Trump's most enduring legacies will be the way that he has lowered our collective expectation of presidential behavior.

I think that our national bar for outrage has gone up so much during the Trump era, our ability to be shocked has dwindled so much, and one of his greatest accomplishments, I don't know if you want to call it that, has been the ability to get voters to basically make peace with behavior that in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president.

But it is a political reality, that at least when it comes to Trump, and there's some debate about whether this is a Trump specific phenomenon or something that will extend to future presidential candidates. But at least when it comes to Trump, character does not seem to be a motivating factor for persuadable voters.

And I think that's one of the reasons that you saw the Harris campaign focused their closing argument not on Trump's character, and not even on his kind of more undemocratic, illiberal tendencies, but on economic messages and abortion and issues that they thought would move the needle. And I think that frustrates a lot of voters, and I think that zooming out and looking at the scope of American political history, I think it could be really damaging, but it does not seem to be a big factor in this election.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, let me circle back to something you said earlier, about we need to talk more about the information environment that we're all swimming in right now. And I wonder if this particular information environment, not just in the negativity bias that conventional media has always had, but of course, the algorithmically driven negativity bias that social media has, if that does two things, what would it be?

LONGWELL: One, it favors the character extravagances of a man like Donald Trump. And two, it shapes how people think about the country. That beyond their immediate pocketbook issues, which are real, the sense that the country's going down the drain, could that be because of the way the information environment we're all in is just a constant dumpster fire.

LONGWELL: Yeah, look, there's a lot of that. But let me give you just one other thought about how it might be affecting people's perceptions, which is, look, it used to be before social media that if you lived in a neighborhood, people had roughly the same things that you did, right? You didn't feel economically adrift from the people that you were surrounded by in a way that social media now distorts people's perceptions of what other people have, right?

There's this sense of, well, I don't have this and look at all these other people. They're rich. They're doing better than I am, which I think creates more of a sense of unhappiness than one might otherwise have. And then there's also the way in which ...  I'm going to talk a lot about this idea of people liking not a regular politician.

Like when Donald Trump goes on Joe Rogan and just talks for three hours about whatever, just messing around. I do think voters look at that and they're like, I don't know. I don't think that guy's Hitler. Like the ability to be able to go into all of these environments, non-traditional environments and feel like a regular person, feel like somebody who jokes around, is going to become increasingly important in our politics. Because everybody's got a phone now, everybody's used to being in each other's faces all the time. And so I think a lot of Joe Biden's difficulty with messaging is that he struggled, he had an older perception of how do things.

And so they never were able to really break through with what they were doing in the policy environment.

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, can I just jump in here? Because this idea of talking, I don't think Donald Trump actually talks like a regular person, but engaging, in a less, let's say, formal manner.

Woman to woman, Sarah, do you think a female candidate could do that, joking around on Joe Rogan and not come out being roundly criticized for being an unserious candidate?

LONGWELL: Yeah, that's a good question. I do think having, look, we're demanding a lot of people. You're demanding that they be both incredibly good at knowing policy, and be able to basically have a strong sense of what policies they want to see, people both want to feel like more than them on policy, but are also really, it's also extremely accessible to them as a human.

And so like I think that, I don't know, I mean I certainly think there's women who are capable of that. I think that we should not, I think it is okay to be like, Hey, it is tough for a woman to be, to like work in these same and that they are double standards. That's true. That also we should not say that racism and sexism are the only reasons this happened.

This has way more to do with the economic environment, the macro-economic environment. Like you're hearing this a lot, but it is really true. Every incumbent post pandemic has been thrown out by the voters, because people are mad about high prices. And in a big general election, when a lot of low propensity voters who didn't really hear her message, didn't even really hear his, they weren't engaged, like how did they, how do they deal with the fact that Trump is a convicted felon?

It's not that they don't know it. It's just they don't, it's not high salience to them. It's not important to them. They just, it floated by them at some point, which is part of this information environment issue. They're not digging deep on a lot of this stuff. They're just like, I don't know.

I think maybe he's going to be better on this. They don't, man, I'll tell you, you go into a focus group and you say, do you think Donald Trump's an authoritarian? The number one thing that people say back to you is, what's an authoritarian? And so you just have to accept that's a lot of the environment we're moving in here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I agree with you that racism or sexism isn't the only thing or aren't the only things, but I also, I still think that they're not insignificant things, given that the U.S. doesn't have a shining track record in terms of putting a person of color or a woman in the  highest office of the land.

But, McKay, I'm going to come to you in a second here, but let's hear from some more voters as they've been speaking over the course of the latter half of this week. This is Dana Eslava in Philadelphia, who voted for Kamala Harris. And she says Latino men voted for Trump in greater numbers than before because, according to Dana, culturally, it might be hard for them, apropos of what we were just talking about, to vote for a woman.

DANA ESLAVA: I think in Latino culture, machismo is really big, sexism. And a lot of people were struggling with the vision of a female president.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's over in Philly, in Dearborn, Michigan, at an election night party for Trump. The Guardian newspaper spoke to an Arab American Trump voter who was watching as votes were being tallied.

VOTER: They're talking about parts of Dearborn and Wayne County that are primarily Arab and Muslim that are already red. He promised that he's going to end the destruction and end the killing, he's going to end all wars. And you believe him? Oh, I believe him. I'll tell you why I believe him, because in the four years that he was president, we had no new wars under his presidency.

CHAKRABARTI: That's in Dearborn, Michigan. And one more, this is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Trump voter Gabby James spoke to CNN's Danny Freeman the day after the election.

INTERVIEWER: How are you feeling this morning?

GABBY JAMES: I'm feeling relieved that America came together and saved our democracy. I know the main concern here is women's rights. But strong women are always going to rally together and fight for our rights. And we need to vote and come together to make the right decision in the states. Unfortunately, it has come to that but that was not my deciding factor in voting for Donald Trump. 

CHAKRABARTI:  Okay, McKay, Gabby James there in Lancaster County clearly seems to, she's voicing support for women's rights, but then said she voted for Donald Trump because her overriding concern was democracy.

What do you hear in that?

COPPINS: I think that it's so interesting and I remember on election night when the first early exit started to trickle in that showed that a large share of voters were saying democracy was their top issue. A lot of pundits read that as good news for Kamala Harris, because in the framing that we, in the media, have presented, and I think there's a lot of evidence to back it up.

Donald Trump is the greater threat to democracy than Kamala Harris. If only in the sense that Trump has been far more resistant to, ignorant of, defiant against democratic norms. And we don't have to go through all the examples, but it is very clear that he does not have the same respect for democratic institutions that a politician like Kamala Harris does.

But once you actually started to see the votes come in, what you saw is that a lot of voters who said democracy was their top concern, that at least they were not breaking overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris or universally for Kamala Harris. And I think that it's worth considering why that is.

Sarah, I think, has probably heard this from her focus groups. I know I've spoken to Trump supporters who will say. And they've been saying it for the last year or so, Democrats and the media keep talking about Trump being a threat to democracy. You guys say that Trump is going to prosecute his political enemies.

Joe Biden's Justice Department is prosecuting Trump right now and putting his supporters in jail. The people who are at January 6th at the capitol. You say Donald Trump is going to cancel elections, or make it harder for certain people to vote, but Democrats, and this is a theory that you've seen people like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk advance, and it has some pretty racist roots, but they're bringing in millions of undocumented immigrants and want to turn them into American voters to permanently change the electorate.

There, at some point in the last couple of years, you saw Republicans, Trump allies, the conservative media, co-opt this democracy argument and say, it's actually Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are the real threats to democracy. And, regardless of how valid that is. It clearly resonated with enough voters that those who went to the polls to vote for Trump said democracy was one of their top issues.

And I think that's something we probably should wrap our heads around, because it's so contrary to, I think, the consensus in kind of political media circles.

CHAKRABARTI: So Sarah, it seems to me that McKay is spot on this, in that when Democrats talk about Trump being a threat to democracy, one of the things they're pointing to is the not just Democrats, but people who are opposed to Donald Trump, is that authoritarian issue, that he's going to actually change the functioning of a democratic government in this country.

That's one of the issues. But what McKay's pointing to is there's a whole lot of Americans who are, when they think of the word democracy, they're thinking of different things. And so you must have heard this in your focus groups.

LONGWELL: I absolutely heard it. And I gave a whole Ted talk about it. I gave a Ted talk a year ago on this exact issue, which is that democracy as a word.

It's an abstract word for people. It means a lot of different things. They fill it in, but it's also been completely polarized the same way many other issues have been polarized. Republicans think that Democrats are a threat to democracy because they stole the 2020 election. They are trying to prosecute Donald Trump.

Democrats think that Republicans and Donald Trump are a threat to democracy because they tried to, they refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power and tried to overturn the last election results. Donald Trump has always been very good at projection. And in fact, so much of what you hear out of him is projection, but if he understands anything as a lifelong salesman and liar it is how to turn the opposition's moral arguments against you back on them.

And so Trump basically turned himself into a political prisoner of the January 6th, the people who were arrested into political prisoners. And you hear it all the time from voters in the focus groups, to the point where I have been warning people for a long time that if you see a poll that says Americans are concerned about democracy and you interpret that as good for Democrats, like this is a high level concern, you're misreading it. And I'll also say, because democracy is abstract, one of the things that is the way that people think about it, is they just think democracy is like America, right?

It's just like the air you breathe. It's just America. And so if we want to tell a better story about democracy, we better find a better way to tell a better story about America to voters, because right now, I think for Democrats for a long time, they were hearing a pretty negative story about America.

And now, from Trump, they hear a very negative story about America. And so we are going to have to do something long term to reestablish a commitment to American liberal democracy.

CHAKRABARTI: Sarah, can I just --

COPPINS: Meghna, can I say --

CHAKRABARTI: Oh yeah, please.

COPPINS: Can I say something just really quickly?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, go ahead.

COPPINS: Just because I do think that just as an objective journalist, and this is not a partisan statement, I just want to point out that those two narratives are not equally valid.

It is factually true that Donald Trump refused to accept defeat and tried to stay in power after losing an election. It is not factually true that Democrats rigged that election. There is no evidence for that. And just to take one example, that's not to say that there aren't valid points about whether the Biden Justice Department should have been prosecuting Trump. There's a lot of valid debate to be had around stuff like that, but it is, I think, just as a factual matter, true that Trump has been much more hostile to democratic norms than any of his Democratic opponents.

CHAKRABARTI: McKay, I'm very grateful for you interjecting on that. Because that was actually, you said it more eloquently than I was, because it was the precise point I was going to make. So let me actually just evolve it a little, and because Sarah specifically regarding January 6th, you are so right that Trump managed to recast people who have been convicted in American courts of law by juries of their peers of having committed a crime, he recast them as political prisoners.

And for the Americans who believe that it's almost as if, I don't know, A, like the imagery from what we factually know happened on January 6th, this doesn't exist in their minds anymore. Or B, what they're saying is, no, the violent overrunning of Congress in order to stop the peaceful transition of power is actually not a crime in this country. That's a very different view of what democracy is.

COPPINS: Yeah, and again, I'm grateful for McKay saying, I think I'm just trying to explain what I hear from people. Obviously I agree that what Donald Trump did on January 6th was one of the worst things I've ever seen in this country. But I'll tell you what I heard from voters in the aftermath.

First, they denied that it was actually trump supporters. They said it was a false flag operation. But the other thing and the thing I heard most often, and one of the things that these voters really convinced themselves about was that the Black Lives Matter protests had happened before the January 6th protests.

And so there was this strong what about? And they were, again, they were misinformed. But I would hear voters say all the time in the focus groups, they would say nobody got arrested for that. So why did these people get arrested? Now, of course, people who broke the law during those protests did get arrested. But there is just, there is a story that Trump and his surrogates and his supporters told themselves to let themselves off the hook. And then ultimately it morphed, after years had gone by and it was low salience in people's minds. They'd forgotten about it. They managed to turn it into, no, these people are actually heroes.

It was actually good. And that is a function that Trump has, he's a deeply shameless sociopath. And as a result, that gives him a bit of a superpower in that he feels no fidelity to the truth whatsoever. And so he tells people lies and those lies take root.