BOOK

HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT

One Voter At a Time

►︎ AMAZON

►︎ TARGET

The playbook for consigning MAGA-style politics to the ash heap of history (where it belongs). Featuring a foreword by Jonathan V. Last.

After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Sarah Longwell did what she's done nearly every week for the past eight years: She sat down with voters. She conducted hundreds of focus groups, listening to thousands of ordinary Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and the politically homeless—with the goal of understanding politics through the eyes of the people who will decide our country’s future.

American voters, and what they want for their country, are at the heart of How to Eat an Elephant. Longwell, the founder of The Bulwark and one of the sharpest political communicators of her generation, lays out the playbook for building a coalition big enough, bold enough, and tough enough to defeat authoritarian populism for good. Not with a single election. Not by doing another poll or debating the benefits of being more progressive or more moderate, but by building something new: A modern pro-democracy movement that can create its own communications infrastructure—just like the right has done for decades—achieve narrative dominance, elevate more compelling leaders, and talk to voters like adults.

Drawing on her own unlikely political journey from a lesbian Republican operative to the vanguard of the anti-MAGA movement, Longwell delivers a book that is equal parts war manual and pep talk—with her personal and professional story woven throughout. With her trademark bluntness and humor, she explains exactly how we got here and, more importantly, what we must build next—all while directly quoting the most important but overlooked people in the country: the voters themselves.

She answers the question: How do you eat an elephant? One voter at a time.

Sarah Longwell is CEO and Publisher of The Bulwark, one of the fastest-growing independent media companies in the country with millions of subscribers across all platforms. She has decades of experience leading some of the nation’s most high-visibility targeted persuasion campaigns, including Republican Voters Against Trump, the Republican Accountability Project, and Home of the Brave. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family and is a graduate of Kenyon College.

Longwell is a nationally recognized leader in qualitative research. Since 2018 her team has conducted hundreds of focus groups and talked to thousands of voters from across the country and the political spectrum, the largest continuous data set of qualitative research collected during the Trump era. This work focuses on understanding the key motivations of the voters who are deciding elections in America today. She appears regularly in the media as an expert on voter attitudes, and she hosts the weekly “Focus Group” podcast on The Bulwark.

Sarah’s work focuses on swing voters, including current and former Trump voters, and she uses qualitative research to create compelling communications campaigns reaching millions of Americans. In addition to The Bulwark, Sarah’s work has been featured in The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, CNN, MSNBC, and elsewhere.

THE BULWARK

The Bulwark, founded in 2018 by Sarah Longwell, is one of the largest and fastest-growing independent political media companies in the country. Initially launched as a news aggregator in 2019, it quickly became home to the writers and editors of The Weekly Standard after it was shuttered for being insufficiently pro-Trump.

The Bulwark’s mission is to provide expert analysis and reporting in defense of liberal democracy. Today, it is one of the largest publications on Substack for news and analysis on politics and culture, with nearly a million subscribers and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.

The Bulwark is built on the belief that truth, integrity, and democratic values still matter. At a time when partisan noise drowns out honest debate, The Bulwark continues to publish smart, principled commentary and sharp political analysis—free from corporate loyalties and beholden to no party or tribe. With the rigor of traditional journalism and the moral clarity of the pro-democracy movement, The Bulwark tells it like it is.