Book Review
“This was the first time I ever voted. And I think I voted because I knew that he was such a good businessman. Like, he owns a lot of things, he’s good with money, and I was thinking that if he got into office, he would help get more jobs.”
“I don’t call it an insurrection. There was a picture of a bunch of people that were walking through the one lobby, and they’re all staying within the velvet ropes walking single file, calm.”
— Justine from Bedford and Nick from Pennsylvania, two voters from separate focus groups conducted by Sarah Longwell
I think of Sarah Longwell as a kind of political sin-eater. The founder and publisher of The Bulwark sprinkles quotes like the above throughout her new book, a New York Times bestseller, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. They are a small sampling of her regular focus groups of American voters. She listens to the most infuriating inanities from the world’s most irresponsible voters because the rest of us would be driven to madness from the Lovecraftian horror that is American public opinion.
Longwell uses her vast trove of qualitative voter data and her long experience in Republican communications to end the electoral dominance of her former side and enact reforms long and deep enough to decisively resolve the authoritarian crisis. In her words, “We need to burn MAGA to the ground and then salt the earth so that it’s another century before someone tries to overthrow liberal democracy.”
Amen, Sister!
Let’s address, well, the elephant in the room right at the outset. Isn’t it chutzpah for a former Republican apparatchik to lecture Democrats about politics, many of her leftist critics deride? The NeverTrumpers managed to lose their own party, after all. According to such critics, Longwell and the NeverTrumpers, if not actively sabotaging the anti-authoritarian coalition with antics like getting Kamala Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney and obsessing over Hasan Piker, are trying to drag their new party to the right. On this view, NeverTrump conservatives are welcome to switch sides, but they should do so quietly, beyond perhaps apologizing for the sins of their prior political lives.
I don’t take kindly to such arguments. An anti-fascist, pro-democracy coalition needs to be as broad as possible. And once you’re in a coalition, you have as much right to advance your interests as the next coalition partner. And the evidence from Longwell’s book suggests she is very much a team player who is not trying to move her new party toward her preferred policies by making a tendentious electoral case for them. She even gives a fair shake to the left edge of the party, which might be furthest from her politically. Indeed, the handful of references to AOC and Bernie Sanders in the book are neutral or positive. The half dozen mentions of NYC mayor Mamdani are uniformly positive. Control-F of “Piker” comes up empty.
Principled Pragmatist
I discuss this because one of the most important things in our ongoing constitutional crisis is understanding who is in the democratic coalition—and defending them against infighting. Otherwise, the fragile coalition will fall apart. Longwell is one of the good ones.
Beyond advocating a constant drumbeat of affordability and security, Longwell largely steers clear of specific policy recommendations, recognizing that Democrats in different environments may need to tailor their messages differently. More importantly, her stance is active, aggressive, and authentic. Longwell, who made a career out of developing marketing campaigns for conservative causes pre-Trump, distills the lessons she learned from her Republican communications experience:
Defense loses over time.
Be relentless.
ABC: Always Be Communicating.
When one side finds itself constantly defending, it means it’s responding to a narrative established by the other. Voters internalize the narrative, in this case thinking about issues Republicans want them to think about, even if voters may disagree with Republican solutions. Democrats have to establish narrative dominance so voters think about issues Democrats care about, as Democrats frame them.
One way this narrative dominance is achieved is through relentless repetition, says Longwell. We get tired of making the same arguments over and over again, but different voters tune in at different times and places. “Just because you’ve heard an argument a million times doesn’t mean other people have. Most people aren’t paying close attention. You have to keep saying it.” (emphasis in original)
Constant communication is more important than perfect communication. Longwell gives the familiar criticism of Democrats here: they’re obsessed with message-testing and achieving coalitional buy-in. But by the time the message is polished, the rapid news cycle has already moved on. The communication environment also shifts, with different kinds of communication like vertical shorts emerging while traditional platforms like network news and legacy print media fade into irrelevance.
This ties into the all-important idea of authenticity. Voters can smell message-testing and focus groups from miles away. Authenticity is one thing that Trump has effortlessly mastered, and it was the magic key to unlock the electoral id that is MAGA. Even when voters recognize that Trump is brazenly lying, they know he’s only lying about facts—he’s not misrepresenting who he is or what his values are. If Democrats really want to win, they need to wean themselves off consultants, say what they mean, and fight for what they really believe.
Longwell uses an acronym, FLAGS, to describe the five motivations that work in politics: Fear, Love, Anger, Greed, and Sympathy. Democrats do fine on Sympathy, but Republicans maintain an inherent advantage because they have a virtual monopoly on Fear.
These ideas overlap and interact. Republicans win narrative dominance by repeating their ideas (and lies) across all kinds of platforms (not to mention buying and corrupting platforms like Washington Post and Twitter). MAGA politicians stay on the attack by using fear of immigrants and anger at Democratic-coded “elites” like Hollywood actors, HR departments, and university professors and administrators.
Bordering on Malpractice
How to Eat an Elephant mostly applies these ideas about how to engage with voters to affordability. Affordability is a stand-in for all kinds of issues, because Longwell believes, reasonably enough, that everything ties into affordability. It’s the economy, stupid, and if you’re not tying your pet issue to affordability then you’re doing it wrong. Her advice here feels like common sense. Even her foray into trans rights, where Longwell is noticeably to the right of the average Bluesky anime avatar, seems like a helpful and sympathetic application of her method.
But when Longwell talks about immigration, she reverses course. Digging into the issue is a worthwhile exercise of testing out Longwell’s ideas. She recounts:
Here’s how those conversations typically go: Ask about the border, and someone will very often bring up fentanyl. Ask about crime, and someone will mention “illegals.” Ask about their biggest fears for the country, and terrorism, drugs, gangs, and open borders might tumble out in the same breath—as if they were all the same thing. Because to these voters, they are the same thing. Illegal immigration isn’t a singular threat. It’s an entire threat cluster. (Emphasis in original.)
Trump wins the narrative war by activating fear and anxiety about immigrants and tying the issue (by dogged repetition) to issues of drugs, economic precarity, and crime. Elsewhere, Longwell insists that public opinion is like cement, soft and malleable before it hardens. Yet when it comes to immigration, she seems to believe that American voters intrinsically associate immigrants with danger, disorder, and economic displacement. She even warns against over-interpreting “public opinion swings that result from near-term excesses … and the more durable sentiments on the subject of immigration and the border.”
Instead of attack-attack-attack, forcing Republicans to respond to a Democratic narrative that capitalizes on suddenly malleable public opinion, Longwell advises Democrats to acknowledge voters’ valid concerns about immigration and promise to address them. She offers sample scripts.
“We’re going to secure the border by actually managing it—with technology, with personnel, and with real consequences for crossing illegally. We’re going to fix the broken legal system so people who want to come the right way actually can. And we’re going to deport violent criminals because you deserve to be safe.”
“We know you’re struggling with the cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare. We’re going to make sure American families come first—with good jobs, affordable housing, and real economic security. And we’re not going to ask you to sacrifice while we prioritize everyone else.”
In these examples, the hypothetical speaker confirms the MAGA framing of immigration and then fails to identify how Republicans are the real threat. Immigrants are still associated with “violent criminals” who must be deported. “Dangerous criminals” are “slipping through the cracks,” even though study after study has shown that immigrants, even undocumented ones, have a far lower crime rate than natives. Immigrants are implicitly cast as a threat to jobs, housing, and economic security and “American families” are portrayed as being sidelined for immigrants. Longwell is offering sympathy to American voters and to immigrants, unlike Republicans. But she’s leaving the fear unaddressed.
The Immigration Exception
Longwell offers no explanation for why immigration is a different issue not amenable to the treatment she prescribes for other issues. A script more faithful to Longwell’s method would sound very different:
Donald Trump and his lackeys in Congress are trying to scare you with stories about immigrants in caravans, but we know that immigrants are our friends and neighbors. The real threat is Trump’s masked ICE agents killing American citizens and kidnapping decent people off the streets to send them to concentration camps run by foreign dictators.
Feel free to insert language about Trump using immigration to distract voters from high gas prices and his illegal war in Iran, or from the Epstein files and AI data centers that Trump’s billionaire buddies are shoving down our throats. The point is that in this language, immigrants aren’t for a moment acknowledged to be threats. Trump (at historically low popularity) is bundled together with other unpopular figures and policies, and the voter is quickly reminded of the humanity of immigrants before being redirected to areas where Republicans are weak.
It may be true that human nature means immigration will always be liable to demagoguery, and that Republican advantage will always eventually return after bloody excess. We may never convince the median red state voter that foreigners are just Americans who haven’t arrived yet—although we did for a good long while after Dwight Eisenhower and before Donald Trump, as the rhetoric of every president in between suggests.
But let’s strike while the iron is hot. For at least the next two years, voters will be open-minded to a liberal interpretation of immigration. We can use this time to press our own narrative of America as the Mother of Exiles, and closed borders as the chaotic tool of despots bent on totalitarianism.
Tough Love
How to Eat an Elephant is not always pleasant to read. Longwell has some bitter medicine for Democrats, who have been long afflicted by inauthenticity and an addiction to talking down to voters in baffling academic or social justice language. Her discussion of enemy-controlled social media algorithms and the objective reality-destroying novelty of AI—where voters can now simply choose to believe “evidence” they like and dismiss what they don’t like as fake—is legitimately terrifying. This new reality isn’t Democrats’ fault, but it’s still something they have to deal with.
But Longwell’s counsel is not one of despair. Some Democrats are already learning how to drive the narrative with cascading attacks. Jon Ossoff has been a constant media presence, driving discourse by drawing attention to “Natalie” and his Senate opponent’s “Third Reich“ staffers in a debate yesterday. He has introduced incisive slogans like “Epstein Class.” Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic contender for the Senate, has flipped the Democratic liability of “abolish the police” by pointing out she wants her opponent “arrested and in jail for stealing $10 million from sick kids.” Given the rampant criminality of the Trump administration, such a script reversal could be used by every Democrat in every election through 2028. Sherrod Brown, who aims to dislodge Ohio’s Republican Senator, is showing voters how out of touch his opponent is on affordability. Take a listen to his “Listen to this shit” campaign. AOC and Mamdani have mastered the art of forming parasocial relationships with voters.
How to Eat an Elephant is a needed and welcome intervention. The good news is Democrats are poised to listen and already putting its ideas into practice.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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I listen to Longwell often, and like her, but your analysis of her weakness re: immigration is completely apt.