Let’s be clear, Fox News is not running focus groups. Fox News is making reality television and passing it off as focus groups. I was watching FN during the NH primary and I was shocked at Frank Lutz, they way he conducted the bits of the group that they showed and the bias he showed in talking about it afterward.
If it was actually a focus group they would have made the group smaller in order to drill down into the issues and respondents preferences and triggers. As it was, it looked an awful lot like a made-for-TV panel with trite, surface level questions and a large studio video camera trained to capture respondents carefully crafted answers.
Moreover, as this video shows, they didn’t do a very good job at screening the folks from central casting.