I just came from participating in a focus group

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I was selected after a phone interview about my political stances about a week ago and accordingly showed up at a downtown Minneapolis marketing research firm with about a dozen other people, most of home appeared to be in their 40s to 50s, although there were two or three younger people.

The moderator first asked us whether we had attended our caucus and for what purpose. She then asked us for general impressions of the Democratic party, what we thought the Democrats should stand for, and our impressions of the DFL and various DFL figures. The final activity was to write a paragraph or two in which we imagined the next DFL governor (who was unnamed).

People were pretty consistent: they thought the DFL had gotten hidebound in the past few years, that the Dems should stand up to the Republicans more and put forth their own ideas. We were also in agreement that the main thing that differentiated us from the Republicans was regard for the interests of the community as opposed to Darwinian individualism.

I'm kind of tired after a long and varied day, so I'm not going to go into more detail, but we did get paid quite well for our participation. :-)

[SupormomFreeAtLast]

1. Sounds positive.

We need to get out the message- more progressive activism and less republican-lite.

[Tigress DEM]

2. Hopefully they won't spin it too strangely. Good for you though.

I've watched these polls that offer up one question when they ask you and then the question posted with the results changes, so I'm a little wary of what people do with the information I give them.

Still, it's better they think we're important enough for a focus group at all.