A Conversation with a Focus Group Conductor

PurpleAmerica Talks to Someone Who Sees it All

One of the benefits about being in and around politics for 30 some years is that you get to know a lot of people and they tend to bounce around and get different jobs throughout their careers. A couple weeks ago, I got a message from a friend of mine we’ll call “Jake” mentioning he would be in town last week and wanted to know if I could meet up. I asked him what he was doing here and he said it was his job to run focus groups about the upcoming elections. I asked him one better, if I could watch and put up a story on it here for the wonderful followers on PurpleAmerica. Sadly, he said no, there were reasons he couldn’t allow that. But if I wanted to chat about his job and generically what he has seen over the past couple years, he was game.

Now, I had always known how focus groups work, but I had never seen one in action before. For those who don’t know, a “focus group” is where pollsters or marketers empanel a group of individuals to obtain anecdotal information at the grasssroots level to understand how things are being perceived. Are messages getting through? What messages? What should they target? You get the idea.

Below are basically his responses to my questions over a few Oktoberfest beers and chicken wings.

Questions with “Jake”

Q: So, what brought you to my town for a focus group? You live in a swing Congressional District. The area is changing demographically from what was white rural to a more diverse metropolitan town, although it is still an outer ring suburb. In the past Presidential election, your city was almost 50/50 Biden and Trump (Trump won it by less than 0.5%), but in the recent Governor, Senate and House contests had gone the other way. That’s about as fertile a swing area as you can get. Knowing areas like this are likely to determine the next elections, research into what makes these voters tick is solid gold.

Q: What kind of people are typically included in focus groups? You see all kinds really. Its as random as we can make it, the more random the better. Typically, we send out some random mailers of registered voters asking for volunteers for marketing research. We don’t want to tip people off its a political focus group. Of the people who respond, even less show up. They fill out a questionaire so we can get some background information on them like their job, general income, eduction, etc. The first half hour we do market research on brands that are clients; have them watch commercials and have them give us their opinions as part of the questionaire. After that, we break out into various conference rooms and conduct the focus groups.

Q: So what is a typical focus group like? The first round of questions are just how people felt about various celebrities and personalities as an introductory thing to loosen up the crowd. It’s fun. A picture would pass on a screen and you’d get a various amount of comments on them, occassional chuckles. For the most part, it’s pretty light-hearted and some of the participants smile or roll their eyes depending on who is up on the screen. Intermixed are various political personalities; some well known, some a little more obscure. Trump is always the most divisive image, followed probably next by AOC or Hillary. A lot of indifference about Biden across the board. Interesting among both the political and generic celebrities are the ones that many at the table commented “Who is that?” to. You’ll show a picture of Taylor Swift and get near universal approval and then a picture of Hakeem Jeffries and everyone will be like “What’s he do?” I like throwing pictures up occassionally of sports rivals, so if I’m in Chicago I might throw a pic of a Green Bay Packer in there just to gauge the reaction.¹

The rest of the time I’m managing a conversation around various issues, candidates, races, cultural events and whatnot. For the most part, I bring up a topic and let the participants just speak their peace, calling on one person and then another. You guide the conversation and go around the room, getting everyone to talk and state their opinions on matters. You try and not be judgmental or tip your hand, especially when a participant makes a pretty offensive remark. I’ve heard them all a hundred times.

Q: What Issues are you focusing on lately? Generally? Stuff about potential government shutdowns. Ukraine. Israel. Trump. A lot of just what’s in the news. I tried in one focus group to talk about potential Speakers of the House candidates, nobody knew anything about any of them. You try and bring up a little about the Republican Primaries but other than Trump, only a few usually know anything about them, and those that do know about the candidates tend to look at them negatively so. I just got through a focus group in Des Moines among Republican voters, and other than Trump nobody had much to say about any of the other candidates; just this kind of indifference to them. In IOWA. I mean, this close to the primary you’d expect to see varying levels of excitement for candidates, but its all Trump or nothing really.

Whenever there is a shooting every couple months, guns becomes a hot issue. Everyone agrees something should be done, nobody agrees on what.² Other than that, general feelings about the economy, the direction of the country and the job Biden is doing, and let people focus on what they want to talk about.

Q: How did you get involved in conducting focus groups? Mostly it was because I liked to travel and had the time and capacity to do it. When I was younger I was involved in politics, like you, and got burned out pretty fast. I moved to New York and got involved in a marketing company. As others began moving out of this and not wanting to travel as they started families, I welcomed the opportunity to travel across the U.S.. Ive been all over and still like it. In 2014 I left that job to work for a marketing research firm that also had a consulting arm, including in politics. I didn’t do much of this for the 2016 cycle as my kids were younger, started doing it a little in 2018 and ‘19, and then COVID shut most of these down for the 2020 election, but now that my kids are in their teens I decided to get back into it again and travel some more. I’ve felt cooped up for too long. I’ll probably just do this through the early primary states and then stay back in the offices out east.

Q: Whats the most surprising thing you’ve encountered in these? When you’ve seen as many of them as I have, you tend not to get surprised by what people say. A lot of people who stay buttoned up during their normal lives love to divulge in a room full of strangers what they really think. You hear it all. I’d say that some of the first focus groups after the Dobbs decision came out, it was a bit of an eye opener how many REPUBLICAN women were offended by it—before it was legal and they wanted less, now it could be illegal and they think that’s too harsh. I wasn’t expecting that. Kind of a through the looking glass moment in their logic. I guess another one was just this growing “anti-vax”-ism that took root. Five years ago, everyone would acknowledge vaccines as a universal good but now people take political positions on them. It’s become a form of virtue signaling.

Other than that, what you tend to see are just people commenting on caricatures of what they think these politicians are and what they are for; what they believe isn’t often accurate, but it’s not my job to correct them. It’s my job to get those impressions and send them up the ladder to the client. It’s very easy to be disconnected and cynical about what other people think and why.

Q: Most interesting one you’ve seen? The real interesting ones are when the opinions are so opposed and so staunchly argued that you half near expect them to come to blows. It’s happened a few times. Maybe more than a few. You wonder if something goes down in the parking lot after we leave. You saw a lot more of that in the period between George Floyd and COVID, when BLM and “Defund the Police” were discussed. It was so easy to rub one another the wrong way with just some poor wording that people took huge offenses to it and there was a lot of walking on eggshells. Once COVID shut everything down, it cooled off a lot of that so that I don’t see that level of intensity anymore.

Q: Are there any pollsters or pundits you follow in regard to stuff like this? Not really. When it’s your day job you tend not to get excited about it in your off time. You’re seeing a lot of the same thing they are. I do like on election nights when Dave Wasserman would say “I’ve seen enough…” on Twitter, but I’m no longer on Twitter so…

Q: What are your personal thoughts on some of these issues? Nah, I’ll keep those to myself. I will say, traveling around, the best places tend to be the ones not so monolithically one way or the other. They’ll have a Republican Governor but then vote for Biden. Or are a solidly Red State that votes in a Democrat as Governor or Senator. Those are usually the best run places. They just seem to work better. People have a better sense about themselves and the need to get some things done. There’s more working out of issues instead of ramming it down the throats of the other side.

Q: Any thoughts about 2024? You get a lot of “Tear it all down” people nowadays, but then ask them what would you do then, it’s always “I dunno.” Younger people are being more idealistic longer; that usually breaks as they get into the workforce but hasn’t really yet. But then you ask them if they’ll vote and its always a “Maybe, nobody excites me” kind of thing. I’d say that’s one of the biggest variables right now is trying to predict turnout; nobody has a clue what that’ll look like, especially when the most useful datapoint was 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic. You’re going to see so many voters sit this one out that the winner is going to be determined by which side can just get their voters to the polls. I would be shocked if the number of voters exceeds the totals in 2020 by any sizeable margin, and that was in the middle of a pandemic. If there is something everyone agrees on, all across this country, a Biden and Trump rematch excites absolutely nobody.

PurpleAmerica Recommended Stories

Here you have two of the best pollsters, in Sarah Longwell and Amy Walter (from the Cook Political Report) talk about the coming election and what they’ve been seeing in Focus Groups. It’s a podcast well worth listening to.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

For an obscure fact, this was Jake’s take on the focus groups:

For many of us, we tend to follow politics and what is going on closely and have an intelligence about these things, regardless of how you feel about the issues or candidates particularly. For the overwhelming majority of voters, they follow it a lot less and are actually a little bored or disdainful towards politics and government generally. Pick a sport you don’t follow or musical genre you don’t like—that’s how they look at politics.

Which is why many people categorize these people as dumb. They aren’t dumb. In fact, from what I always see, many are actually very bright, insightful and articulate. They just don’t have an interest in this topic like a lot of us do, so are more apathetic towards it. They tend to really dislike people who are more active in it rubbing their noses about how they should take these things more seriously.

That is why I want to reiterate, when people don’t agree with you politically, please refrain from disparaging comments about them. It’s way too easy to alienate them, especially when just a little bit more context and appreciation could win them over.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“The best focus group are ten random people at a bar in Peoria late afternoon after three or four drinks and some nachos; they’ll tell you what they think about anything and solve all the world’s problems by the time Happy Hour finishes.”

—Jake

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. This was a ribbing at me because he is originally from Chicago, and he knows I am a Packer fan.

2. That he mentioned this last week was prescient.