Focus Group Leader Relays Rough Reviews of Katie Britt’s ‘Weird’ Speech: ‘She Seemed Like a Stepford Wife’
The fallout from Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) speech continued Friday night after the senator gave a curious rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
Britt’s address left many viewers confused and was roundly mocked online before it had even concluded. The speech ran the gamut from hopeful to furious and had everything in between. One person on X (formerly Twitter) said her presentation was “somewhere between porn and [a] high school play.”
Some also took issue with the choice of venue, which was Britt’s kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) posited that the choice was intended to show that Britt is a “housewife.”
“She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” he said.
Appearing on Friday’s CNN NewsNight, Republican strategist and Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell shared the reactions of a focus group she held. The reviews were not good:
I did a focus group of swing voters today and asked them what they thought about that speech. And the number one word that I heard was “weird.” People thought it seemed weird. She was tonally off. Her, you know, her smiles didn’t match what she was saying. She was kind of all over the place. One person in the focus group said she seemed like a Stepford Wife. Another person suggested that perhaps it was trying to distract from the recent Alabama IVF decision.
But overall, I think they were confused by it. And I think a lot of viewers who were watching it were confused because it just, it just landed as terribly inauthentic. And this is what– the problem is, is that Katie Britt is a talented, normal person, but they wanted to slot her in. They didn’t want people to read, “Senator.” Right? That’s what Tommy Tuberville was really saying. It was sort of like, “Forget that this is a senator here and think about the fact that she’s a wife and a mother.”
But again, this fundamentally misreads the voters that they need to bring back into the tent. The people that they’re– the women that they’re hemorrhaging in terms of voters are people who don’t like the Republican position on IVF or on women’s reproductive freedom and who don’t like the sexist comments that Donald Trump makes and the way that the party’s posture sort of is toward women. And this performance last night actually leaned into the stereotype that gets them in trouble with women.
Based on Longwell’s summary of her focus group, its members seemed far more restrained than say, the hosts of The View, who utterly trashed Britt’s performance.
“I’m thinking to myself, this lady shouldn’t be in a kitchen,” said Ana Navarro earlier in the day. “She should be in a padded room.”
Watch above via CNN.
