Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is surging in the polls, particularly in the Midwest. But voters continue to be skeptical of her personality, as a new focus group of female swing voters in a Wisconsin small town revealed.
The focus group, conducted by Engagious/Focus Pointe Global and reported by Axios, included “included 7 women who flipped from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and 2 who switched from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton.”
As Axios noted, while the focus group preferred Warren’s policies, they were put off by her personality.
While some described Warren as “nice,” and “confident,” they did not feel stirred by her or passionate about her.
“I like what she had to say but I still think she’s a sorry bitch,” one said. “I just — the way she acts, and some of the things — I just don’t care for her.”
Another disagreed with the use of the word “bitch” but said Warren said sounded “fake,” even if her ideas were good.
Warren has struggled to convince even her own voters of her electability. At a town hall meeting last month in Franconia, New Hampshire — the first to spark national attention to the growing size of Warren’s crowds — one attendee told Breitbart News that while she liked Warren, she could not see her beating President Donald Trump.
Though the Engagious/FPG data is accompanied by a warning that it is not a statistically representative sample, the information provides clues about what messages are currently resonating with the Democratic electorate.
Axios reports that the results “reflected the doubts that some people have about women in leadership,” but seven of the nine women said they did not know anyone who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because of her gender. Six said that they would vote for Trump if the presidential election were to be held again tomorrow.
Two-thirds (six of nine) also said that it was worth some economic pain to fight China for fairer terms of trade.
A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came to a slightly different conclusion — namely, that voters nationwide did not like Trump’s personality, but were also skeptical of the left-wing policies being offered by most Democrats.
Wisconsin was a key to Trump’s victory in 2016; Clinton avoided campaigning there, while Trump made several visits to the state in the last days of the election. Democrats will hold their 2020 convention in Milwaukee.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.