During the early Trump era, focus groups taught me everything about the disconnect between Washington and what voters really care about. An early revelation came in July 2018; I had flown to Columbus, Ohio, to hear from a group of people who’d voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but only reluctantly.Three days before, Trump had participated in a diplomatic summit in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin. By that point, the U.S. intelligence community had publicly concluded that Putin had personally ordered a campaign to meddle in the 2016 presidential election for Trump’s direct benefit. At a press conference after their meeting, Trump was asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump responded. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” And just like that, the president had undermined 80 years of American foreign policy, prompting a bipartisan meltdown in Washington.I was excited to hear what Trump-skeptical voters in the heartland thought about this epochal moment. These were the kinds of people who had been Reagan’s fiercest Cold Warriors, right? Surely they wouldn’t tolerate something like this from the American president. But when the moderator running the focus group asked the participants for their thoughts about Trump’s comments, he got a lot of blank stares.This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.Even big news like this doesn’t always filter down to voters, so the moderator explained the incident. I figured that once the group understood what had happened, outrage would follow. Nope. One person said that Trump’s comments were “wrong,” but the feeling in the room was that of a collective shrug. The thing we were all freaking out about in D.C. had barely registered out there among the voters.Since that moment, I’ve conducted more than 400 focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum. To my knowledge, this is the largest and most consistent qualitative study of voter sentiment during the Trump era. Here’s what I’ve learned: People are wild. They are full of contradictions. They lament our deep political divisions while raging about their political enemies. They believe in grace but cut their Trumpy brother out of their life forever. They’re married to an immigrant but voted for the guy who wants to deport millions of people who have the same immigration status as their wife. They hate the government and want to lower the national debt, but they also want the government to spend more to help them and their communities. They call themselves pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose. I could go on.[Missy Ryan: What is the Democrats’ answer to ‘America First’?]Listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics—democracy, after all, is the collective will of the voters—yet few people in politics do it. If you’re running a campaign, you might do a series of focus groups with voters in your district or state. If you’re a politician, you might go on “listening tours,” chat with people at the state fair, or host campaign events. But rarely do politicians and campaigns take the time to talk in-depth about why people feel the way they do.The reality is, the closer you get to institutional politics, the further you are from the people whom politics and government are supposed to serve. Washington is less a swamp than a bubble, inside of which the rest of America becomes an abstraction.I’m a former Republican who left the party after Trump took it over. I saw him for what he was: an existential threat to American liberal democracy. So I say this as someone who both crossed the political divide and still feels that Americans are underreacting to the acute threat of Trump and Trumpism: If Democrats want to win back power, they’re going to need to learn how to better relate to the American people, as people.For all of their nonlinear thinking and idiosyncratic views, voters have told me a couple of things over and over again: They think the system is broken, and they feel that they’ve been lied to in ways that make their life tangibly worse. Fewer of them now believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead in this country. Instead, they think that “establishment” politicians are benefiting from this system while everyone else loses out. Because of that, they want to place their trust in leaders who come across as “real people” who are genuinely interested in improving voters’ day-to-day life—not just winning and holding political office.In 2016, Republican voters looked at their party’s leadership—the Romneys, McCains, and Bushes—and decided they were done. Those leaders were too weak, too unwilling to fight, too committed to norms and processes that Democrats didn’t respect anyway. Republican voters hired a wrecking ball named Trump to knock it all down. Ten years later, I’m hearing similar sentiments from Democratic voters. They don’t trust Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, or any of the old-guard party leaders who allowed Trump to take over America. They want their own wrecking ball.There’s a distinction here. Democrats don’t want Trump’s politics or even necessarily his all-out norm breaking. But they want his energy. They’re sick of a Democratic Party that does the functional equivalent of sending a strongly worded letter while democracy burns down around us. That tension—absolutely not, but also yes—is the defining mood among Democratic voters right now. They don’t want to become what they hate. But they are tired of losing to it.I don’t think that most Democratic elites understand this reality. In those circles, the dominant debate seems to be about whether the party should be more progressive or more moderate. The future of the party is seen as a policy question. But when I listen to Democratic voters, they’re not asking for ideological recalibration or even policy specifics. They trust that if the right person makes it into office, the policy questions will take care of themselves. Instead, the Democratic voters I’m listening to are almost universally asking a different question: Why aren’t you fighting harder?Last year, my team and I decided to run an experiment. We convened a couple of focus groups with Democrats who wanted the party to be more moderate, then a couple with Democrats who wanted the party to be more progressive. If I didn’t tell you which group was which, you would not be able to hear the difference by listening to them.Here’s a sampling from the more moderate group. Brandon from Georgia lamented that Democrats don’t “fight fire with fire,” saying, “Republicans will take an issue even if it’s completely fake news, and they’ll just beat it down the hatches.” Karen from Pennsylvania said that Jeffries is a “great guy” but that he is “too weak,” and “I think he’s just got to be more forceful, and maybe even nasty.”Now here are some of the Democrats who want the party to be more progressive. Jeffrey from Georgia: “I mean, the party just seems to me like it’s like a turtle that’s been turned on its back, you know. It’s just kind of flailing around hoping that it could, you know, somehow right itself.” Mary from Michigan said: “Them actually showing a spine would be a delightful change of pace. I have been calling my congresspeople every damn day telling them to not go along with the Cabinet approvals, to not rubber-stamp things just because you’re in the minority. They have not done a single thing.”These voters didn’t speak in terms of wanting the party to be more to the left or more to the center. They all just wanted Democrats to be more aggressive.Democratic voters have watched their party lose battles that they thought were already settled—abortion rights, voting rights, basic democratic norms—and they’re done with the old approach. They’ve watched Democratic politicians continue to engage with MAGA Republicans like it’s 2012 and Mitt Romney is running the GOP. Democratic voters recognize that the old rules don’t apply anymore. It’s not clear that their leaders have caught up to that reality.How can Democrats make a change? One of the things that Trump did—and I mean this not as a value judgment but as a factual matter—was transform the relationship between the president and the public. He made it direct, constant, intimate, and unavoidable. Through his tweets and his rallies and his Fox News call-ins and his Truth Social posts, Trump is in people’s face all the time. You know what he thinks about everything. You know when he sleeps by the time stamps on his posts. You know whom he’s mad at today.As a result, voters feel like they know him—like they’re in on the joke, part of the movement, personally connected to power. Many Democratic Party figures hate this. It feels to them like a debasement of the office, and, in my view, they’re right.[Listen: A battle for the future of the Democratic party]Although Trump’s constant communication was initially a shock to the body politic, voters developed a tolerance for it—and they have come to expect it. Whoever runs on the Democratic side in 2028 will have to be culturally omnipresent too. They shouldn’t mimic Trump’s chaos and cruelty. But they’ll have to play along with the electorate’s desire to know where they stand on everything, all the time. They’ll need a direct relationship with the voters that bypasses what’s left of media gatekeepers.Julie, a Democrat from Arizona, said this about her party’s leaders in an April 2025 focus group: “They didn’t make people connect to them emotionally enough. And we need that emotional connection. If you look at the MAGA party, they have, albeit a bit psychotically, a very emotional connection. And we need that.” She’s recognizing that Trump built something that Democrats haven’t—a bond that goes beyond policy positions.Looking ahead to the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, I cannot emphasize this enough: Donald Trump is not 10 feet tall, and MAGA is not invincible. Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator? “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” he said. MAGA might have all of the power right now, but it’s bleeding. Voters in the focus groups have talked about four main areas where the GOP is weakest, giving Democrats an opening.The first is immigration. This was supposed to be Trump’s strength, and in many ways, it still is; voters consistently rate Republicans more highly on border security. But there’s a gap between what voters wanted and what Trump has delivered. Lauren, a Trump voter from Florida, captured this: “I feel like we have so many hardworking immigrants,” she said. She wants the government to “leave those people alone. Please target people entering the country now, and people—criminals—who are here now illegally. I feel like that should be our first point of action, not going into elementary schools and picking kids out of seats.”Many of the voters who say this kind of thing aren’t open-borders liberals. They are people who wanted border security, but they believe that Trump has gone too far—that there’s a difference between strength and cruelty.Trump is also vulnerable on the issue of corruption. Voters who expected him to fight for them are discovering that he’s been cleaning up for himself. Olan from Georgia, a 2020 Joe Biden voter and 2024 Trump voter, noted the skeeviness of Trump accepting a jet from the government of Qatar: “Everything he’s doing is basically enriching his family. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to make money,’ but I thought we’re supposed to be helping the middle class here.”Jeffrey Epstein also remains a weak spot for Trump. “Why did he campaign on it that he’s gonna get in there and he’s gonna release the Epstein files?” Melissa, a two-time Trump voter from Pennsylvania, wondered in November. “Usually he’s super transparent, and what he says he’s gonna do, he’s gonna do.” Sam, a Gen Z Trump voter from Minnesota, said early this year, “By dragging his feet on it, it’s really like, man, some people might really just be above the law, and it’s not something that sits well with me.”Finally, there’s the economy. What I hear from 2024 Trump voters in focus groups is simple: Trump isn’t doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices. In particular, young people who voted for Trump have said that they believed him during the campaign when he promised to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world.” When he didn’t, they felt duped and let down. “There are things that are very disappointing and very rough right now,” Kim from Virginia said. “Overall, I think the job market is really hard right now,” Allison from New York said.I know this might seem obvious to say, but the economy and cost of living remain as important as ever to voters, even while many of the long-standing rules of politics and voter behavior are shifting.Good news for the Democrats: This is the kind of moment in which new leaders emerge. The old guard is exhausted. The appetite for change is overwhelming. People are ready—desperate, even—for something new. When I ask voters which potential candidates they’re excited about, they don’t cite boring, by-the-book, geriatric politicians. They talk about fighters who go viral.Mike, a Massachusetts Democrat, said, “Jon Ossoff is blowing me away. He doesn’t go on and on. He’s not apologetic. He’s not defensive. He simplifies things.” Mike likes that Ossoff “just brings it down to, like, a bullet point.”[Idress Kahloon: The Democrats can’t just laugh off ‘Woke 1’]Bryan, a New York Democrat, said, “Someone like Pete Buttigieg is a fantastic communicator, articulates well, and is willing to go on as many right-wing areas and interview formats, just because he can, because he knows how to articulate and he knows how to speak to both sides.”Leonard, another New York Democrat, praised New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Sometimes you absolutely need a new voice, someone who actually can come in there as a renegade and not be beholden to the past, and come in there as an innovator and aim to get some things done.” Ultimately, he said, “sometimes you just need that kind of a shake-up.”And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name gets brought up all the time. Adrien, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said, “She’s charismatic. She actually gives a crap about people. She knows what it’s like to be working class.” Petra, another Democrat, agreed: “She has a backbone. She’s a strong, strong woman. She’s not afraid to tell it like it is.”Notice that this kind of appeal isn’t limited to either the party’s left wing or its center. It’s more about coming across as an authentic messenger who cares about the issues that ordinary people also care about—not the interminable moderate-versus-progressive policy discourse that animates professional political obsessives.I know from listening to voters that they recognize a fighter when they see one. They respond to authenticity, to energy, to the sense that a leader gives a damn. And they can tell when someone is genuinely committed to changing things.The Democratic candidates who succeed in the coming years will be the ones who articulate clearly why Trump and his movement have failed voters. They will seize on the contradictions and broken promises of the “America First” movement and build a platform that feels responsive to people’s everyday needs. They’ll center economic concerns, opportunity, the idea of rebuilding the American dream as part of a concrete plan for how people’s lives can get better.And they’ll do it with urgency—not because they want to be like Trump but because they understand that these times demand wartime generals, not peacetime diplomats: leaders who recognize that American democracy is in a fight for its survival and are willing to act like it. The voters are ready. The question is whether the Democratic Party will listen.This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.