'Really disappointed': Former Trump voters worry he can't be a 'normal person'

A number of undecided voters in The New York Times' running focus group continue to be turned off by former President Donald Trump — largely because of his ongoing inability to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

The focus group was conducted with the help of Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster who has been highlighting key vulnerabilities for the former president.

Not everyone in the group is leaning toward Harris, with plenty favoring Trump or considering a write-in or sitting out the election — but at least some who backed Trump in 2020 remain turned off by him.

"These voters suggest that Trump should be more worried than Harris right now," said the report. "They’re similar to those 158,000 Republican primary voters in Pennsylvania who supported Nikki Haley over Trump in April — one month after she dropped out of the presidential race. There are voters who said 'never again' about Trump after Jan. 6. Just how many of them there are, and where, could shape the outcome of the election."

Many of the voters liked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance's performance in the vice presidential debate — right up until the very end, when he refused to answer Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's question about whether Trump legitimately lost the 2020 contest.

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"It was like a boxing match where one boxer outboxed the other for eight rounds — and then in the ninth round, he got knocked out in an upset because of the Jan. 6 question," said Chris, a 24-year-old law student from Florida who backed Trump in 2020. "I thought it was a great opportunity for Vance to try to at least mend that issue with voters like me. And unfortunately, he didn’t. I was really disappointed with that."

Another 2020 Trump voter, Lillian, a 27-year-old advertising worker from Virginia, said her opinion of Vance has improved since the debate, but not Trump.

"I don’t trust Kamala with our national security or with our economy. But I don’t know if I trust Trump to be a normal person for the next three months," she said, explaining she was likely to just write in a candidate.

Focus groups are not a representative sample of voters, compared to polls which can reach hundreds or thousands of people; however, they are often useful to campaigns for deciding their messaging.