GOP strategist finds a 'stunning turnaround' as more Republican voters want an alternative to Trump

25 July 2022

Sarah Longwell, a Never Trump conservative and Republican strategist who supported President Joe Biden in 2020, has been hoping that former President Donald Trump would lose his iron grip on the Republican Party. When Longwell made a CNN appearance on Sunday, July 24, she sounded optimistic — telling host Brian Stelter that recent focus groups have found GOP voters losing their enthusiasm for a Trump presidential run in 2024.

“We’ve done nine focus groups of Trump voters since the (January 6) hearings began, and it’s really been a stunning turnaround to focus groups that we were doing prior to the hearings,” Longwell told Stelter. “Prior to the hearings, we were seeing usually about half of any group of Trump voters would want to see him run again in 2024. But since the hearings have been going on, in four of those nine groups, zero of the respondents wanted him to run again.”

Longwell continued, “In fact, we ran an analysis — and in those nine groups, there was only 15 percent of the Trump-voting respondents that wanted to see him run. And the main reason that they give is actually a pure political calculation. It is not that they don’t like Donald Trump; they still do. If he is the nominee, they will happily vote for him. But they are starting to worry that he can’t be elected again — that he has too much baggage.”

The Republican voters Longwell has been talking to, she told Stelter, are reaching the conclusion that “there’s other people that have a better chance of beating (President Joe Biden).”

“These voters talk about a lot,” Longwell told Stelter. “They say: You know, if Donald Trump is the nominee, he only gets four years. But if it’s Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem, they get eight years. And that sounds obvious, but when you think about it from a Republican voter’s perspective —who really wants to vote out Joe Biden — it makes a lot of sense.”

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