For Reporter's Notebook, an NPR political correspondent shares the lessons she has learned listening in on groups of swing voters in swing states.
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. Since January, NPR political correspondent Ashley Lopez has been listening in on focus groups of swing voters who voted for President Biden in the 2020 election and then switched to President Trump in 2024. Here's Ashley reporting for Morning Edition in May about a group of 12 North Carolina swing voters.
ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: What most of these voters expressed was a deep frustration that Trump is out of touch when it comes to the economy.
VIKKI: 'Cause he's laser-focused on just the war, he's not thinking that a hundred in groceries only gives me two bags of food doesn't even last me a week.
LOPEZ: That's Vikki. She, like all participants, took part in these focus groups under the condition that her last name wouldn't be used. Vikki's frustration was shared by a lot of these voters. In fact, nine of the 12 said they feel more economically anxious than they did before Trump took office again.
KURTZLEBEN: For this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to hear about the larger takeaways from NPR's Swing Voter Project. I started by asking Ashley what got her most excited about the project.
LOPEZ: Well, mostly that this group of voters, this very small sliver of the electorate, I should say, which are swing voters in battleground states, are some of the most powerful voters in America. These people have a real outsized influence, particularly in presidential elections. The other thing that is really helpful about this is that we work with a messaging firm and a marketing research firm – Engages (ph) and Nelson Recruiting – and they do the hard work of finding these people. It is really hard as a journalist to track down, like, this very small sliver of people that exist in the electorate. And every month, 12 or so of them appear on a screen in front of me, and I get to hear from them, and it's, like, very, very useful.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. When I hear your stories about this, I think, like, man, Ashley got a room full of unicorns…
KURTZLEBEN: …In front of her. 'Cause you and I, we go out to a political event, it is rare, and it's a rare find and a great find when you can find someone who voted for this party and then for that party and will tell you about it.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And it's a room of 12 people who, I mean, they are people who are, for the most part, not super political, not super engaged. They're low-information voters. Not all of them are likely to vote even these midterms. Like, they tend to only pay attention every four years. Those are not the people we come across at rallies. It is usually the diehards, the people who are already plugged in, the people who already care. It is a very different group of people here, but it's – they are – they make up the median voter in a lot of ways. So it's endlessly useful as a political reporter to hear what these folks have to say.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. I mean, how has listening to them changed or influenced your thinking on politics? I mean in this particular year?
LOPEZ: I think it's particularly important to hear the people who do not listen to all of the news the way I do.
LOPEZ: I'm surrounded. I mean, I'm in a newsroom. I'm surrounded by news junkies and nerds, people who know what's going on. Most of America doesn't.
LOPEZ: And it's really useful as a political reporter to be like, oh, this is what breaks through. This is what people care about. I mean, telling people what is important from your perspective, from the perspective of, like, what is important for a democracy, blah, blah, blah, is one thing, but, like, I think another important tool for journalists to keep in mind is, like, what do people already care about? Because if you're giving them information that they're not all that invested in, it's fine. Sometimes people need to eat their broccoli, news-wise. But things that they do care about I think are more salient. I think as journalists, there are sometimes more interesting stories to tell because otherwise, you're just, like, living in your own head and, like, in your own priorities.
KURTZLEBEN: I'm curious hearing you talk about that. Can you give an example of something that really is breaking through with these voters and maybe an example of something you expected to break through that people just haven't really heard about or aren't thinking about?