For the first 17 months following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, Sarah Longwell has been conducting focus groups with Donald Trump voters from the 2020 election. During that time, she found that “at least half of the respondents” wanted Trump to run again in 2024 and they even believed his “Big Lie” about the election being stolen. However, following the start of the January 6 hearings in June, Longwell observed a noticeable “shift” as support for Trump plummeted.
Writing for The Atlantic, Longwell noted that “only 14 percent of Trump 2020 voters wanted him to run in 2024,” and in four of the nine focus groups she’s held since the start of the January 6 hearings, “zero people wanted Trump to run again.”
According to Longwell, the 2020 Trump voters don’t think he can win, and frankly, they’re tired of dealing with him:
“He’s just too divisive and controversial,” a participant in Washington State said about Trump. “There are good candidates out there waiting to shine.”
A participant in Wyoming said, “I feel like there’s too many people against him right now. He’s never gonna make it … So I feel like somebody else needs to step in that has similar views, but not as big of an ego—who people like, I guess.”
“At first I thought I would” want him to run again, an Arizona participant said. “I think it’s time to move on.”
During a focus group in Ohio, one participant noted that if Trump won, his Twitter account would be reactivated, causing even more headaches.
“I do not want four more years of ‘orange man bad’ and everybody screaming about every time he tweets — and believe me, he did some really bad tweets,” the participant said. “I don’t want four more years of that.”
(Via The Atlantic)