I’m Patrick Healy, I’m the deputy opinion editor at The Times, and as part of my job I help moderate focus groups that The Times does with average Americans. So this month, my co-moderator, Margie and I, organized a focus group of 13 Republican primary voters.
Hi.
Hello.
Good afternoon.
Let me just make sure everybody’s on video.
These are really committed Republicans. They’re planning to vote in the primaries and caucuses. And they are looking for a candidate who can beat Joe Biden next November.
With all that said, we’re going to do an icebreaker.
So these 13 Republicans came from all over the country.
My partner and I live in South Carolina with our dog, Tater.
Live outside Detroit with my husband. I have four kids who are out of the house.
I’m in downtown Detroit. Go Lions.
I live in South Carolina as well, and I’m a Clemson fan, so don’t hold that against me.
OK.
They looked a lot like the typical Republican primary demographics. So they were chiefly white. They were coming from suburbs, from rural areas. We chose these 13 specific Republicans because we wanted to explore the one thing that they all had in common.
What’s the one word you would use to describe how you feel about former President Trump?
Go away.
Immoral.
Same thing, immoral.
Betrayed
Disappointed.
That was going to be my word, yeah, disappointed.
Power trip and insane.
So these are clearly not Trump voters. These are Republicans who are looking for an alternative candidate. And one of the frustrating things to them is they don’t understand why aren’t all Republicans looking for an alternative. Why does the party keep going back to Donald Trump?
I was exhausted at the end of his first term. I voted for him, but it’s just like, I thought this was all over, and now it’s like, this, and then Joe Biden — Oh my God. I’m like, what’s going to happen to our country?
I can’t believe that they can’t find a better candidate.
Over the course of the evening, I realized what I was hearing was a kind of identity crisis in the Republican Party. These were people who cared deeply about being Republicans, but felt like it wasn’t representing the urgent needs that a lot of Americans have. One woman in the focus group really stood out to me, because her life captured the pressures and dynamics that’s driving that Republican identity crisis. Her name is Sharla.
I’m a single parent. My older son, who’s 40, his wife, and their daughter that’s 10, my son’s handicap, and then my sister, who’s also handicapped, they all live with me.
Sharla is a white woman in her 60s from Texas. That night she told us that even though she’s been working for decades, she has her kids, a sibling, and a grandkid all living under her roof, and they’re really struggling to pay the bills.
I mean, we have to be able to survive, and be able to pay our bills, and have a house that we can raise our families in. And that’s where the bottom line hits for me. I’ve had my job for 26 years, and I think I do fairly good at my job. But I’m still having three generations living in our household just to survive. How are they going to fix that?
But instead of hearing solutions about how Republicans are going to fix the economy and alleviate some of these pressures on her and other families like her, she feels like too many Republican candidates are focused on the wrong issues. I was really struck by what she said about Governor DeSantis and his focus on these culture war issues, about looking at LGBTQ families, and assessing what he thinks those families should be.
I’ve heard so many things about him trying to take kids and split up families just because he doesn’t agree with the way that they are doing their particular household. It’s their household. Leave them alone. They’re not hurting the kids, therefore, why are you trying to separate families? I just — there’s so many things that he has done in the state of Florida that I just shake my head at. He’s acting crazy like Trump.
So as we watch Republican candidates try to repackage some of the appeals and some of the cultural issues that Trump has raised, you’re finding voters, like Sharla, who feel really abandoned by their party. I was raised as a Republican. I was always a very proud Republican. And with the crap that’s happened in the last few years, I’m not. Trump has put such a divide in the Republican Party itself, much less the whole country. And then if he’s reelected, it’s just going to continue to destroy the country. It’s all about him, and look at me, look at me. Well, that’s not what the country should be. It should be what we can do as a people to further everybody, to where everybody’s doing better. I’m looking for other alternatives. And I’m not a proud Republican anymore.
I’ve been covering politics as a reporter and editor for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen a moment quite like this where so many people who feel deeply committed to and they identify with a particular party, feel that party is so unaligned with what their immediate interests are. They look around and they see a country that is struggling with affordability, and inflation, and debt, and they feel like those conditions are ready made for a Republican candidate who has a fiscally conservative program or set of solutions, that could win over a lot of voters. But instead they hear these culture war issues, or they hear these repackaged appeals that are familiar with Trump, but now other candidates are making. And they don’t feel like that they’re getting a message that’s really persuasive to them about what the country needs. And for the third of Republicans who are in the same boat as these focus group voters, they really feel like the party is leaving them behind.
So it’s September 2023 right now, four months before these Republicans are going to start voting in the presidential nomination contests. And right now, they don’t see a candidate who can really beat Donald Trump. It totally confuses them. They feel like there absolutely should be such a candidate. But mostly, they’re feeling a certain despondency that there aren’t more Americans willing to say, hey, we can do better than Donald Trump.
