S4 Ep42: The 'Jekyll and Hyde' Running Mate (with Marc Caputo)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, and this week we are going to take a break from talking about the Democrats and instead talk about the Republican National Convention.

Obviously, the convention took place just after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and we are going to discuss that as well. And an old foe of this podcast got introduced back into the mix this week, J.D. Vance. We'll hear swing voters' reactions to his nomination for vice president.

My guest today is the Bulwark's national political reporter and expert on Megaworld. Joining us from Milwaukee, Mark Caputo. What's up, Mark? Hey, what's happening, Sarah? Where is that that you're in? Is that the bullpen or what? Kind of. So there are like, I could actually show you what a tremendous waste of money so much of this is. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there's basically just an entire one, two, three, maybe four city blocks that are completely blocked off.

I'm in what's called the Baird Center, which is like a convention center. So where I am is lots of media, especially print media. Why are you the only one doing your job? It's completely empty. Is nobody else reporting on this thing?

No, no, no. This place is so huge. It's like designed for, I don't know, huge exhibitions. And they have all of this area for media. Like CBS has a place where you can easily sit like 500 people. They got like 20 people there. Anyway, so then to the north is a Panther Center, which is like more media row, you know. And then to the north of there is the Fiserv Center. And that's where the convention hall is. Got it. So you're in the Bulwark Center right now. Yes, the Bulwark Center. You and Joe Perticone are men on the ground.

So, hey, listen, you've been like a national political reporter for a good bit of time. Yeah. I don't know how many conventions you've been to on the Republican side, but I'm interested in how this one compares to the others that you've been to. Third, I would have done four, but, you know, in 2020, COVID got them. We never really see anything like this. You know, it's Trumpy. You know, unlike 2012, which is my first convention with Romney.

You know, that was like he was a traditional Republican where it was like, oh, I'm a Republican who embraces Republican ideals. You know, this is the Trump party. Yeah. You know, so there's that kind of complete takeover. But unlike in 2016, which was just a shit show, you know, you had like Mike Lee on the floor trying to nominate someone else. Like there's no opposition. This is completely the Trump party. And people are happy. Like very often, you know, you get enough Republicans involved.

In an area, it's like everybody hates the media. Here, everyone's just happy to talk to you because you ask them on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the likeliest that Trump's going to win and one being the likeliest he's going to lose, what do you think? And the lowest number you get from these people is an eight. They are supremely confident.

And like any sports fan, any fan whose team is doing well, there's like a certain general bonhomie that these folks have. Yeah, so it's just like one big Trump rally. Giant Trump rally, yeah. Giant Trump rally that goes on for days. I got to say, when I do the focus groups, oftentimes there are people who've been to the rallies, if you're talking to two-time Trump voters, and they talk about it like it's the best party they've been to in years. And I think that this is one of the underrated things about the Trump rally

the Trump gestalt is that people are having fun when they're in the in-group. They have fun making fun of the out-group. They're having a good time. It's also like in a society where faith and trust and institutions, you know, whether it's church, schools, the media or whatever, are in rapid decline. This gives people kind of a sense of identity in place. Sure. Like the Trump party does. Yeah. And I guess I was thinking about the assassination attempt. One of the

sort of images that got reported pretty quickly was the way that the people who were at that rally turned to the media and said, like, you did this. This is on you. Yeah, you bastards. Yeah. But you're not detecting that hostility from them. Oh, no. No, no. Yeah. No one's like, yeah, you killed our savior or whatever. Can I ask you something? I brought this up on The Next Level and we all kind of agreed that it was part of the vibe, but none of us have a good reason why, which is this.

Trump's assassination attempt, so we're taping this on Thursday, Trump's assassination attempt was on Saturday. It's like super recent. And yet...

It's so weird. It feels like it's so long. Doesn't it feel like people have moved on from it? I would have said like, OK, Trump has been shot at. Somebody died like this will be the only thing of the convention. And like Trump will make this just essential. And it's sort of not right. I mean, it's there. But well, he decided not to do it. That was his decision.

There was talk of kind of weaving it in more. Now, the only thing that he did, allegedly, was rewrite his speech. You know, we'll see. Otherwise, what we have seen here is the convention as planned. Now, yeah, some people have added some riffs to their speeches, but they've decided not to do it. My armchair psychologist said,

in me tells me that Donald Trump doesn't want to make this about him being an assassination target because there's a lot of victimhood that goes and that's not the kind of victim he wants to be. And I don't get me wrong. He certainly can play and discuss the victim card and discuss being a victim. But he loves being a victim. But maybe in this context, he feels like

He came off really well in terms of being able to sort of jump off with his fist in the air. Now he doesn't want to have the conversation about guns. He just wants to like let it be what it was. Correct. And, you know, meanwhile, the MSNBC is doing like bullet trutherism and stuff like that. So I think they're so far happy to let the sort of left engage in the conspiracy mongering for a while, which at times is more of a purview of the right.

You know, when you listen to the groups, you did hear a fair amount of that. Like, and these were swing voters. These are not like the MSNBC devotees. These are like Trump to Biden voters. And there was a fair amount of like, I don't know, I think this might have been something he set up. Well, one of the guys had said something that was kind of crazy, which I was with him because like, man, it's really suspicious. Like how the guy got up there, how he was allowed to stay up there with a gun, got the shot off. But then he said they found some sort of expert marksman

And he suggested that the guy actually planned to only shoot and nick the president in the ear. Like, that's impossible. Like, you can't plan that, you know? Well, part of it, too, is, like, you see, if you've watched the video of it, Trump moves his head almost, like, at the last minute in a very natural movement that was the inch between it hitting him and not hitting him. I understand people...

filling what I think feels like a bit of a void of information about the shooter and what was happening with Secret Service. And maybe this just goes to people's perception of Donald Trump is that he is a showman liar performer. And so they're like throwing it out there that maybe he did this. But I was like, ooh, this is some conspiracy stuff just breeding on this topic. Yeah.

Number one, I think just the facts of this case, I cannot blame people. And then like, if you're at the RNC here, secret service, like they have confiscated cigar cutters from people. Okay. Cigar cutters. But their agency saw some like lunatic climbing on a roof with a rifle and no one did anything about it. So yeah, I mean, you're going to have conspiracy theories. Certainly here, there's a lot of people who share that opinion as well. The only thing that doesn't make sense about the conspiracy theory is that they

They hired a guy with the intention of shooting really close to Trump's head, but not hitting him like that dog don't hunt. But otherwise, I can certainly understand people's sense of that. I do think there is a good story to do. And I know we're off topic. James Comer's House Oversight Committee is probably going to be investigating this. And it's like, talk about the worst guy possible to rise to the moment and find facts. Is that next thing you know, he's going to talk about like DEI and Hunter Biden. It's like, no, let's just find out what happened, dude.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's get to some of this so we can, we can, no, that's good. That's good. I'm interested in what's happening there. You got all the color. You're right in the middle of it, but we can be in these focus groups that we're going to listen to just a couple of days after the assassination attempt. And there were reports like the way that people were talking to it is like, okay, maybe this event will move Trump.

to strike a more unifying tone, right? Like the tenor of political violence is high. This is freaking everybody out. But it was clear from the voters that we talked to that they were not adjusting their priors about Trump too much based on these events. The first guy you're going to hear is a two-time Trump voter who's no longer a big fan of Trump. And the rest are the flipper Trump to Biden voters. Let's listen.

maybe a bullet coming an inch from your head maybe changes a guy and there's part of me that's hoping or wishing that maybe trump's gonna uh turn a new leaf here on this i doubt it but i guess anything's possible so i don't think trump will be able to tamp down his own rhetoric it's just a short-term thing

when Pelosi's husband got attacked, you know, mocking that whole thing. And I had to think, you know, over the weekend, geez, if it had been reversed, how would have Trump reacted? He would have called him an old broken down man and so on and so forth. So it'd be interesting to see if he makes any changes. I'm curious to see like what he has to say and how he positions himself.

because i don't believe it's going to last very long or whether it's going to sound very sincere if the message is more professional for lack of a better word i think he knows that he's winning right now and i think he knows to keep quiet about certain things right now and i think he's smart and he knows like what to say and what not to say i think right now he's just trying you know to get more people who are not sure who they're going to vote for to vote to him

So it was interesting to me, the immediate reaction from anybody who does sort of analysis, I think, is to be like, man, if you have an assassination attempt and you respond to it with the kind of way Trump responded to it, that is pretty helpful from a re-election standpoint. Like that is going to endear voters to you. It's just natural, right? Like an attack on a presidential candidate feels like an attack on American democracy and we don't like the political violence. It

But the swing voters were just like, it like made no difference. Is this stuff so baked in that literally they still disliked him so much that they thought that the thing might be staged? Actually, I'm going to hit you with a quick theory of mine on this. I think that people, when they see Donald Trump, remember how much they dislike him.

And, like, no matter what context. And one of the things that's really been helping him is whether it's the court case or whether it's the fact that people have been focused on Joe Biden, people aren't really taking a hard look at Trump. And so, like, even in a moment that seemed like it would be a positive for him, I wonder if...

the voters, when they saw him again, were just like, oh yeah, gosh, not this guy with the chaos. The idea that Trump created the environment for this, right? That he creates through his toxic rhetoric, the world of political violence that we now live in. Anyway, what do you make of the fact that it doesn't seem to have made people warm up to him? Yeah, I think that's true. I think these are highly polarized times.

I think you're also right, and this is an opinion that has been shared in Trump's orbit. I think Tony Fabrizio has told others this, that whoever the election is a referendum on is going to be the one who loses. And then if you look, Trump this week has spent the entire time almost like a Roman emperor in a coliseum.

sitting in this upper wing of a box, leaning back as all of these people are sort of praising him, right? Yeah, he's pretty gross. Yeah, he had Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis sort of alternately auditioning. They're groveling.

He hasn't really spoken much. And then his statements on True Social, which don't get a lot of attention because no one's on True Social, have also been sort of that way. Whereas Biden now has to step out in public. And last night, like, you know, couldn't remember that black guy's name and stuff like that. I think that speaks to that kind of broader dynamic of sort of a frozen electorate. Yeah. Trump has lots of baked in negatives. I believe that his team certainly knows that. But

Yes, this is, I think, where most people are. These big shocking news events haven't really shifted the race against Trump, like when he got convicted and all that stuff, nor really toward him after an attempted assassination. And really, Biden's horrendous debate performance hasn't cratered him in the polls. It appears to have cost him, but it's not a lot.

Yeah, it has cost him and I think but yet not cratered him because the locked in polarization is what it is. Like there is clearly 43 percent of the electorate that will vote for Joe Biden if he is in a coma, which is why I believe that there's upside to other Democrats, because I think that

Joe Biden unable to perform is not ideal. But then there's the people for Trump, right? There's 43 percent for Trump that'll vote for Trump. If he's in jail, they'll cast their vote for him. So it's really about as it has been, but it's these marginal swing voters. And then who's got the energy, right? Who's turning people out?

I think the energy is on the Republican side, albeit if you look at the poll at this moment. Yeah, the energy is not necessarily will be. If you look at the polling, a plurality is not a majority of Donald Trump's voters say when asked, is your vote a vote for Donald Trump or a vote against Joe Biden? They say it's a vote for Donald Trump. Yeah. A majority, if not a plurality. And I think it's a majority of Joe Biden's voters when asked that question.

Is it a vote for Joe Biden or a vote against Donald Trump? It's a vote against Donald Trump. And, you know, there is the rub. The box that political reporters are in regarding covering this moment and this Trump campaign is you go back to 2016, a lot of idiots, you know, swallowed hook, line and sinker this idea like, oh, Trump's going to pivot, right? Trump doesn't pivot. He whirls like a dervish. You know, he's like the Tasmanian devil. But here, again,

We do have some evidence that he's being more disciplined for Trump. He is turning a little differently for Trump. And so he's doing that presumably because it's good politics and it might just work. There's not a lot of undecideds, but if he can get some of those undecideds either swing to him or some of those maybe Trump voters who are on the couch to get off the couch and vote for him, that's what he's looking for.

Yeah. You know, Trump's tone with these swing voters has been sort of like, F you, get on board, right? Like, that's how he's dealt with Nikki Haley's people. And I agree with you. It's not like I think that he'll pivot and change his tone so much as here's what Donald Trump seems to be doing that is disciplined. And it goes back to my earlier theory.

It's always been like this. When you see Donald Trump less, people's opinion of him go up. Like his approval ratings go up the less people see of him when he's not in their face. So the thing that he's doing, and it goes to the assassination attempt and it goes to the debate performance, is after these big events, he has said very little.

Now he's bleeding on Truth Social. You're right. Like it's almost like somebody did. You ever see the office where they gave Creed like a Word document and told him it was a real blog. It was like creed at blogspot.wordpress. And it's like, they let him put all of his thoughts there and like no one ever saw them. That's like what Truth Social is. He's getting it out of his system, but nobody is reading it. And so it's not hurting him the way it was on Twitter. 100%. And I remember last year,

There was a certain point, something went bad for him, and he went on like a 34-post rant on Truth Social. And some of the campaign were not happy with the person who was encouraging him to do this. I don't want to say who that person was because it might not be true who the identity was. But allegedly there was a person who was encouraging Trump to just shitpost. And people were like, what are you doing? And there was a joke among some like if we could only find a way to create an intranet system.

So that he was posting this stuff and, you know, getting it out of the system without it getting out to the public. It would be, you know, perfect. But true social serves a pretty good. It does. Yeah. And Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita know not to tell him, hey, you shouldn't post that. There's just no point.

There's no point. But what they do do is it seems to be like, here, sir, here's your phone. Go truth some things. Here's your golf clubs. Hit the golf course, man. Just stay out of people's way because things are working for you right now because you keep getting these maddening strokes of, and I'm not going to say use good luck in the term of the assassination attempt, but certainly like with the court case being dismissed, like he's just been catching W's left and right. I got to tell you, you are right. No.

not to call getting shot at or grazed by a bullet luck, but it is kind of lucky not to be killed if someone does that. However, everyone here will admit to you, whether on the record or off the record, whether a top RNC official or just one of the attendees, that this was a total benefit to him, the assassination attempt. So in that regard, it is kind of lucky.

The thing about the assassination attempt, I feel like it's weird how as a country we've sort of been like internalized it and moved on. Similarly, frankly, to how it seems like people have pretty much moved on from January 6th. Like we have these incredibly shocking events that in different historical times I feel like would be like the central thing that today, whether it's because of the news cycles and the way that we do things, it's like people kind of process it and move on. But

People do have like overarching fears about political violence. I want to get into how these Trump to Biden voters talked about their fears of political violence in this country and where they think the threats come from.

It's just a scary time right now. Even my son is like, I'd rather just live in another country. Like, he just doesn't feel safe in raising his family here. And that's kind of scary that people are going to leave our country because they don't want to be here. People are so upset that...

So many things are not being met. So many concerns are not being heard. And so because of that, you have people being extreme, people taking extreme action because nobody feels listened to in their states. Nobody feels comfortable. Nobody feels safe. And I don't think it's just at political elections. I don't think anybody feels safe anywhere.

Because everyone is so upset about where things are going that nothing is being done. And then the stuff that's being done, one side or the other is upset about it. So many of our friends, people keep talking about civil war in America. And that's where they all think this is going. And that's scary. It's really, really scary.

I've seen the violence on both sides. Even when Trump was elected the first time, first thing that happened, there was a, what bank was that? First thing he did is started throwing rocks and bricks at it and started destroying it. And there's other phases through it from the left that things were happening.

and when covet happened it kind of brought out how people truly feel about everything and i mean when you go to the grocery store and people were you know threatening violence because you had to you know took the last loaf of bread which happened to me and stuff like that i'm sure there's extremes on each side but where i live is very conservative and those certain individuals have actually threatened violence if he doesn't win there's definitely gonna be violence but

He's so polarizing that because of his presence, there's the potential on the left as well. And if Donald Trump wasn't in this whole mix, I feel like that would solve a lot of problems. But he is here. And so he's just so polarizing that that's really where it all comes back to Donald Trump.

I can't in a million years picture Joe Biden as much as he's out of it inciting a riot. It's unimaginable. The fact that people on the right made fun of the Paul Pelosi incident as if it was some big joke. And meanwhile, the guy was violently mugged in his home, stuff like that. I just don't see that sort of messaging coming from the mainstream left.

So this is very representative of how the swing voters think about our political divisions, right? So people occasionally nod to violence on the left, but it is the MAGA extremism that people are really worried about. And even these former Trump voters will say like, yeah, like this guy is the one ramping people up and like we are so divided. And maybe this is sort of my question for you is that

Joe Biden is not a formidable opponent at this point. But the reason that Donald Trump isn't winning, you know, 350, 400 electoral votes, like, is because there's still a pretty baked in sense that Donald Trump's a bad person who sort of foments this stuff. And do they recognize on his team? I mean, it sounds like they think.

that they can win in a landslide against Joe Biden. Do they think that they can win in a landslide against anybody, though? Any Democrat? I mean, I would imagine that if you asked them, they would say yes. But if you gave them sodium pentothal, maybe no. They do seem to think that Kamala Harris is going to be a much easier opponent to beat than the polling currently suggests. And they do think that

If she is not the automatic successor, it could lead to a kind of just a messy Democratic convention and just cause more problems for them. And whoever comes out of there will be hobbled and bloodied. That is the Trump campaign's posture. There's a division in the Trump campaign about whether or not Biden is still going to stay. But they do think that.

All the trends are with Donald Trump and he just needs to not screw it up. I did talk to one person, not a campaign advisor, but someone who does talk to Trump and does say, look, in addition to Trump having four years of wanting to get back in the White House, wanting to prove that Joe Biden didn't really beat him and that he could be Joe Biden.

is, you know, he wants to stay out of prison and he knows if he's president that that'll stop it. That has a tendency to focus a man's mind. Yeah.

All right. I want to get into the J.D. Vance of it all, because in spite of your reporting that Trump didn't like his facial hair, I think it's fair to say he was the most MAGA true believer of the bunch. I want to talk about that a little bit with you, whether or not that's true. You've also written that Vance was chosen. You just have a new piece up that's really good. Chosen to appeal to white men and that the Trump team is locked in on the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And we're going to link to that piece in the show notes.

I'm going to play some sound in a minute about what the Trump to Biden voters knew about Vance, but just give me your quick overview of why you think the Trump team chose Vance. Well, it's why Trump chose Vance. Trump chose Vance. You're right. Why is he just there's a team? My bad. Yeah. Well, this was his decision. They made it pretty clear. I think actually it was Will Salatin. I'm going to rip him off from the other day. He might have said it. And he's right that J.D. Vance made himself the most attractive pick to Donald Trump, right?

And so that's a big thing. But Trump likes Vance. They have a very good relationship. Vance is just very good at these interpersonal relationships, at the risk of forgetting myself here, especially with some of these older, more powerful men like Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist. He had worked for him and was a very young sort of devotee, and that benefited him very well. Now you see he was able to ingratiate himself with Trump and succeed. Trump,

does like his, quote, beautiful blue eyes. There's a lot of chatter about whether Vance uses eyeliner. He denies it. His team denies it. But it is the ladies of Magaville have taken note. And so has Donald Trump. J.D. Vance is, despite his speech, which was sort of the oral equivalent of diphenhydramine, like it was like Unisom,

Like he's very good on television and he's a Yale educated lawyer, Marine Corps vet. Like he's got, you know, Kill Billy Elegy, a bestseller, independently wealthy. He checks a lot of boxes. OK, so that's all of the qualifiers. But the reality is this. The number one group that cost Donald Trump the election in 2020 was actually white men.

And, you know, we are always talking about like, oh, is he going to get more black men or more Hispanic voters? And like, oh, what about suburban white women? I mean, those are all legitimate conversations. Don't get me wrong. But relative to the number of white men and the defections that he saw in Georgia, if you look at the exit polls.

Trump's margin of victory in Georgia in 2016 with white men, right, went from 64 percent to 45 percent. He lost 19 percentage points with white men there. He lost 14 percentage points in Arizona and Michigan, respectively, and seven percentage points in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among white men. Those are the numbers that killed him.

And J.D. Vance, as someone who hails from Ohio, as someone who wrote this hillbilly elegy book that well acclaimed –

And as someone who is a very good communicator and is a creature, lately so, of the modern MAGA America first nationalist populist media environment is well suited to make the case to those voters that Trump lost to bring them back. Now, you know, just to be clear, it's not like he's going to be campaigning solely on like white grievance.

But they're very aware of this. And, you know, J.D. Vance, when he launched his Senate campaign, his first ad out of the box revolved around going straight at the issue of race. He looks direct to cameras like, are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?

And it was a way of just kind of bringing up the racist, you knowing it was going to be a thing and going to war over it. And ultimately you won. So all of those things, the Trump campaign likes, they look at the map. You're talking about the expanded map. They believe based on the public and their private polling that he's winning the Sunbelt swing States. And that all Donald Trump has to do is win one of the three Rust Belt States and he wins. And Pennsylvania is the biggest of them. It also happens to share a border with Ohio, J.D. Vance's home state.

81% of the registered voters there are white. A lot of white guys. So they're going to give this a whirl. Yeah, it's interesting. All right, so I want to play a little bit of sound. Let's listen to what some of the Trump to Biden voters knew about J.D. Vance. Like, I don't know much about him, except I know he was very extremely anti-Trump. And so it kind of, like, speaks to his, like, lack of integrity and sincerity.

I mean, maybe he'll explain why he came around and it'll make sense, but I doubt it. It'll just be one of those things. But, you know, it is important to recognize, I mean, he was extreme, but I think about the early 2020 debates and the way that Kamala Harris talked about Joe Biden. And it was like super negative, like made him sound like an old racist and now is his vice president. And so they all do it.

There's a bunch of people that are anti-Trump and then all of a sudden they're on it. But again, you look at all the sides and there's similar things going on with the Senate, with the House, with bills, so on and so forth. That's politics in Washington. All these guys are jumping in with political ambitions. So they all, you know, hated Trump and now they love Trump and it's all just total BS and I lose respect for every single one of them that flip-flops like that.

Okay, so here's my take on pants. I think bringing up all the stuff he said about Trump in the past is useless. We tweet it out sometimes from like the RVAD Twitter account, but like that doesn't really matter because you know what? Actually, for a lot of people, like in the state of Ohio,

They voted for John Kasich in 2016 in the Republican primary, and now it is a very Trumpy state, right? Lots of Republicans have learned to live with, if not love, Donald Trump over the last eight years. And so there's a lot of people for whom what J.D. Vance said about Trump in 2016 isn't far off from what they said about Trump. And now they're on board, too. So I think that's part of it why it's not.

that helpful. Agree. And I also agree with you about the men thing. I see this a lot, that there's a real focus looking back on 2020 that, you know, white suburban women made a big difference. And like, yeah, but it was men. It's true. And it was college educated suburban men, as well as Joe Biden doing less bad in rural areas than Hillary Clinton had done with men. Men moved. There was real movement for men.

It was the biggest movement for white men, more than black women, black men, Hispanic men, Hispanic women, or white women. Here's my thought for you. So let's say, whether it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or somebody else, what about Vance?

that I find odd as a person who would shore up these white men is that he is actually doubling down on the MAGA weirdo stuff that the voters don't like, right? Like, and this happens in groups all the time. People always think about like abortion being a women's issue. Like men have plenty of opinions on it.

The white voters tend to be like these white secular, either working class or these college educated suburban voters. They don't like people who are hardcore on abortion. And so Vance has a little bit of like the Blake Masters kind of weirdo MAGA stuff that I don't know that I think helps them. Yeah. I mean, Blake Masters' fundamental problem is that he looked like a serial killer. He actually kind of talked like one. I think Vance is at least a little smoother in that regard. But you're right.

I'm not saying J.D. Vance is a perfect candidate and he does have some of that far right stuff and his views on abortion are certainly going to be litigated. I thought it was weird, actually, for Trump to open himself up because Trump has like the biggest armor against abortion is that people view him as a cultural moderate and think that he paid for abortions and therefore like isn't going to be super socially conservative. Yeah.

But Vance now really opens that criticism up. Like you can start to sort of make hay out of the Vance and Mike Johnson and say like the whole cast of characters are a bunch of weirdos. Right. Well, you could have made the same abortion argument against Rubio and against Burgum. I think Burgum did a six week bill and Rubio has been very clear that he would sign any abortion bill that would come to his desk or restrict abortion any way he could.

I guess that's true. I think of Marco as being slightly more of a moderate's moderate, but he's not on abortion. You're right. That was always something that was important to him. What's interesting about Marco, not to spend too much time on him, is he has this amazing skill on abortion.

to be so clearly hardcore Opus Dei Catholic, far right on it. Life begins truly at conception. I'll do anything to ban it, but says it in an incredibly non-threatening way. His tone is utterly moderate. His policy isn't. I haven't really listened to him on this in a long time, but I think you're right. Yeah.

I also want to just contest the notion, you are correct that Ohio and Pennsylvania are next to each other geographically. The idea that they are the same or similar is,

I grew up in Pennsylvania and then I went to college in Ohio and I love Ohio. But like Pennsylvania has a lot of big urban thriving centers like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, but also the northern part of Pennsylvania up Erie. Like those guys have taken big economic hits. But in Ohio just really got hollowed out. Ohio is just much more industrial Midwest than Pennsylvania is in a way that I think

turned Ohio from a swing state when I was in college to an R plus eight state now. And a lot of that comes from

frustration with immigration. Tim Ryan talks about this all the time. The guys who got paid in Ohio to go unbolt the machines, to put them on a truck that was going to send them over to Mexico and take their jobs, they feel it in a way that Pennsylvania's economy has just been much more dynamic. Yeah, well, Pennsylvania also, fracking, right? Yeah, fracking, that's right. And so

I think that they tend to have more of these college-educated suburban voters, the Bucks County, the Dauphin County, in a way that I think Ohio doesn't. So I wonder if that's the right play. I think Margot Rubio would have helped Trump a ton in a place like Pennsylvania, and I'm not sure Vance does as much. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I'll confess to that. I don't know either. One of the subtexts of the story that I did write is how they believe and they point to polling showing that

The progressive racial dynamics that benefited the Democrats in 2020 are irreversible. Yeah. That there is a mounting sort of white backlash or a white lash. DEI programs are apparently in retreat. They're not polling very well. With the economy having been tough on a lot of people with inflation, it does bring about the issue of jobs more.

And the Bloomberg report that one person in Vance's orbit pointed to me about how S&P 500 companies after George Floyd promised to do all of this hiring and 94 percent of the new hiring was people of color. That's what white male grievance is paved with. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of truth to that. And by the way, when I say grievance, I just need to be clear. I'm not dismissing their grievance as being unjustified. I'm just using it as just kind of a neutral term. Okay. We're going to listen to some more voter sound on Vance. But I'm actually curious from you quickly, do you have like a sense of the evolution of Vance's thinking? Like how did he go from the never Trump guy that was on my team to Trump's vice president? What was the evolution in thinking?

This is more speculation on my part rather than reporting. I mean, I have talked to a few people like in his orbit about it, but they haven't discussed with him like, hey, boss, why'd you flip flop? Right. Yeah. Instead, there are a certain number of people that just evolve on issues. Is he kind of a foxhole convert or an opportunist where he realized, like, look, Trump is the guy I need. I'm going to do the things to get him. Yeah. At the same time,

When I read his criticisms, Vance's of Trump in 2016 with what I know now about him, it's pretty clear that he thought Trump was a bore and Hitler and all these other things. But I think there was a quality of almost envy that Trump was able to kind of muster the support and love of these folks that Vance grew up with and Vance wrote about in his bestselling memoir. Like, how could he, Vance, the guy with all this experience, the Yale educated guy, be

So get Donald Trump wrong. At the same time, with the rise of the Trump backlash that occurred while Trump was president, it did radicalize or Trumpify a lot of Republicans. Yeah. Like they thought the Russia probe was bullshit. They think all of the legal stuff against Trump is bullshit. And there are a lot of Trump haters in 2016 who became Trump lovers in part because of

the sense that the other team is trying to persecute my guy and I'm not going to leave a guy on the field. I get your drift. Okay, let's get into what the down-on-Trump former Trump voter said about the VP pick. So these are the people who, they voted for Trump twice, but they're like, oh, I do not want to vote for this guy again. A lot of them are out after January 6th. And this sounds interesting. I think it gets to the duality of Vance, the former and revered Trumper turned mega-mega. Let's listen.

Wasn't Vance critical of him back in 2016? Yeah, so he's previously called Trump America's Hitler, a cynical asshole, cultural heroine, and noxious and reprehensible. That about sums it up. It's a little bit of Jekyll and Hyde, the guy that was ripping Trump apart a few years ago. Now he's his VP.

So I want to do some homework and kind of dig into a little bit of what's going on with JD Vance. You know, it's all going to be apple pie and blue sky coming out of the RNC about him this week, of course. So trying to be a little bit realistic with what it is and who he is. But his personal background sounds fairly impressive. He started in business, did well, moved into politics. But the transition is what I'm really curious about. Who is he really? Because I think the intent is to set him up.

If Trump wins, that becomes the main guy for the next eight years after that. So it's a 12-year picture I think we're looking at. He's a 39-year-old, so he's got a lot of years ahead of him. I think Vance might need to have a conversation with Mike Pence before he accepts that job. I like the fact that, you know, Peter Thiel and Steve Case highly trusted him. But it's also a bit of a dichotomy, too, in terms of

who he is as a person, because I think he's had to reinvent himself quite a bit coming from his very humble beginnings.

I grew up in a very similar kind of a town and I lost my accent. I have multiple higher ed degrees. Being in the military, I think gives them a lot of credibility, making it through law school, all of the above, working in venture capital with the names that I gave. But then also thinking about some of his experiences

positions in terms of kind of shifting with religion and and talking about his beliefs with homosexuality but then you know Peter Thiel who is gay gave him lots of money to manage and gave to his campaigns so there's only two ways you get there from where he was in 2016 or 2015 right either

he thought all those things about trump and then at some point got to know trump better and knew him more personally and had some kind of better impression of the guy and genuinely thought wow this guy really is great and i have a really hard time believing that or he's playing the political game and doing what he needs to do to elevate his career i tend to believe the second

Okay, so sort of mostly cynical takes on J.D. from these voters. Welcome to politics. But to your point, it does sound like the campaign has decided really to try less to woo these swing voters instead of just sort of ramping up their performance with white men, MAGA base, get people energized, get people out. Right. I mean, what I didn't know heading into the story that I did, one of the characteristics of a lot of white male voters is

is that a lot of them are swing voters and they're just anti-encomment. Yeah. Which puts them in an interesting position because...

they voted for Trump because he wasn't the incumbent in 2016. And then they voted against him and voted for Biden because Trump was the incumbent in 2020. And well, now who's the incumbent? Well, where do they shift? And that, you know, that all well may be true, but if the Trump campaign were truly interested in courting these voters that you're talking to, one thing that would really help is just to stop saying that he didn't lose the 2020 election. It was based on fraud. It just doesn't help him, but he's just continues to

do it. So that's just a feature, not a bug. That is a crack in the chassis of the Trump engine that they just have to, you know, occasionally repair with epoxy or whatever. They just can't deal with it except for the fact that they're going to accept it.

So similarly, this is the hand that they have and this is the hand they're going to play. I don't think that Vance is going to spend a lot of time talking about January 6th and the like or the stolen election. Despite the fact that he is a big stolen election guy too. Yeah, but they have what they have. I do think that while they want to pretend that Kamala Harris would be an easier opponent, that it's got to be dawning on them that

Well, you can tell from their statements, it is dawning on them that they're increasingly believing that she might wind up being their opponent. And she's just going to have to be harder to beat because she can speak in more cogent sentences.

I think that's right. I think the prosecutor versus the felon is not a terrible frame. Hey, I want to ask you one last question before we get out of here. And this is kind of a point of personal privilege. I saw some reporting, maybe it was yours, that Don Jr. pushed hard for Vance. Oh, yeah. What do we think that like Eric and Don Jr., because they've become these national figures in their own right, like Don even had his daughter up who wasn't scheduled and he just had her get up and like give a little convention speech. It was very like

Boy, all in the family, Laura Trump's running the RNC. It's a family business, yeah. Is it a family business now? It is, definitely. A great report that I think the Daily Beast had where there's some far-right people who have an almost messianic view of Barron Trump and think he's sort of a reincarnation of Augustus. I'm not joking. Oh, that's cool. That's normal. Yeah, so just watch it. What's interesting about the Trumps, the two main sons,

is that Don is sort of like, he is more of the political figure. He's got a highly rated podcast. He was the one who was actively involved in like, you got to pick Vance, you got to pick Vance, you got to pick Vance. And Eric handles sort of more of the business side of the venture. But then obviously you have his wife. A funny thing that is just a point of departure, gives you an insight into Donald Trump. When I was at his Doral rally near Miami on the Tuesday before the Saturday shooting,

Don Jr. got up and spoke. Eric spoke. And when Eric was up there, he actually did this competition like, hey, crowd, who did you like more, me or my brother? They got about equal cheers. And then later on, once Donald Trump Sr. got up and was speaking, he introduced Barron to everyone who had just turned 18, and everyone gave him wild applause. And then Donald Trump was like,

Well, I don't know. It sounds like you guys like the young guy, like Barron, better than my two older sons. Like, oh, man. It just gives you an idea of some of the cutthroat nature of Donald Trump. So sick. So sick, man. And it's something that Mary Trump writes about in her book about her family. And I guess Fred Trump, Donald Trump's dad, kind of ran his family in this way. And I guess this is a similar way. It was done in a joking way, so it was funny, I'll admit. But it was like, oof, you know.

Great. Okay. Mark Cavuto, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks to all of you for listening to the Focus Group podcast. Remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the board on YouTube. We will see you next week.