Is the Media Misusing Focus Groups?

The New York Times’ America in Focus series highlights the voices of a certain few Americans – but are other voices being lost in the process? Photo courtesy of Ajay Suresh. 

In the face of a stinging defeat, Democrats have spent the last few months frantically  searching for a new identity. However, from the creative liberties taken by the social media administrator of @TheDemocrats to some Democrats’ partial embrace of tariffs, party leadership still hasn’t landed on a concrete message. One thing that does unify them, however, is the desire to understand why they’ve lost support among the historical foundation of their coalition, young and black voters, and how those groups view the current Trump presidency. In response to Democratic hand-wringing, some media organizations have relied on focus groups to pierce into the psyche of Trump supporters and provide insights about why Kamala Harris lost in November. 

Focus groups have been a popular tool for understanding Trump voters since the 2024 election. The 2025 Deciders is one such focus group program. A partnership between Syracuse University, NBC News, and market research firms Sago and Engagious, the program will conduct four focus groups this year “with distinct groups of voters,” such as young and Black constituents, “in presidential election battleground states,” to provide insight into how these communities view the Trump administration. Similarly, The New York Times’ series, “America in Focus,” conducts interviews with key demographics like Trump-supporting men. While useful information can be drawn from these interviews, we cannot draw conclusions about the whole population from them. Media outlets have placed too much weight on the results of these small panels. 

The increased usage of focus groups is, to an extent, understandable. These panels have some benefits that distinguish them from other methods of discerning public opinion. Firstly, they give researchers insight into the complex thought process behind a respondent’s answer. By soliciting open-ended feedback, researchers can get closer to understanding why voters make decisions rather than just their top-line opinions. Second, the social nature of panels allows participants to discuss and debate the issue at hand. These interactions can provide researchers with insight into how voters respond to conversations with other voters. Finally, there are practical advantages—since focus groups don’t methodologically consider statistical accuracy, researchers can save time and money on gathering a representative sample.

Still, focus groups have intrinsic drawbacks that should dissuade organizations from relying too heavily on them. Focus groups are inherently unrepresentative of the populations that they are drawn from. Participants, for example, are more likely to be sociable or opinionated than the average person. Furthermore, while the social effect of focus groups—in other words, how participants react to other people’s opinions—can be helpful, it can also bias results towards the group norm and silence dissenting opinions. This is especially troubling in the context of political research, as social desirability—the desire to only express popular opinions—is proven to influence political discussions. We can’t generalize the results of a focus group onto an entire population, which means we definitely shouldn’t use them to draw conclusions to the most pressing political questions of our time.

Unfortunately, some organizations continue to misuse focus groups. Media outlets like the New York Times and NBC News often present their findings as if their panels represent the entire population. In discussing its panel with Black Trump voters, NBC News presented the top-line ratios of their panelists' perspectives, reporting that “10 of the 12 participants said they approved of Trump’s early tenure during his second presidency.”  Reading that sentence, one would be forgiven for thinking that 80%, or even a majority of black Trump voters, still support him. This may be so, but we simply don’t know without more research.

The New York Times’ project isn’t much better. They assembled a focus group of 12 men in an effort to understand why this demographic is particularly supportive of Trump. The authors observed that participants wanted a politician who was a fighter and had  “common sense.” This might be a reasonable hypothesis for why men support Donald Trump, but without further research, it’s only an anecdote. We can’t confidently come to conclusions based solely on one focus group. That would fall into the trap that focus group pioneer Robert Merton once warned against: taking promising hypotheses from focus groups and portraying them as representative of large populations. In other words, the opinions of ten people don’t necessarily represent the average opinion of an entire demographic. While anecdotes can apply more generally, researchers need to methodically test them before presenting them as instructive for understanding group opinions. Typical audiences have limited knowledge about the nuances of public opinion research, so they cannot make the distinction between an unrepresentative focus group and a representative survey. 

Focus groups can be beneficial—to the public, to politicians, and to democracy—but only when interpreted properly. They can display the thought process of the fickle American voter and place political discussions in a social context. The information we derive from focus groups, though, should not be generalized further than applicable. Instead, researchers should use focus groups to inform further research, such as additional focus groups or a survey. By generalizing the results of a single focus group, we risk drawing incorrect conclusions about important political issues and sowing distrust in the media. Furthermore, this can obscure the true will of the voters, making it more difficult to produce popular policy. Focus groups should be just one tool of many for unearthing the nuances of public opinion—not a silver bullet for unraveling the mysteries of the American voter.

Jack Greenspan (GS’ 25) is a senior in the Dual BA program with Trinity College Dublin. He studies political science and Russian. You can reach out to him at jdg2212@columbia.edu.