I found the graph above, sampled from John Halpin’s latest post at The Liberal Patriot, sufficiently eye-opening that I wanted to pass it along. Here are some of Mr. Halpin’s remarks:
For example, in a comprehensive post-election survey of 4800 working-class voters conducted by PPI and YouGov (including oversamples in the battleground states of AZ, GA, MI, WI, and PA), Republicans outperformed Democrats across every indicator of party leadership and values. As seen in the charts below, pluralities or majorities of working-class voters overall viewed Democrats as “incompetent,” “out of touch,” “not on my side,” “weak,” and “untrustworthy.” In contrast, 50 to 63 percent of working-class Americans viewed Republicans in this election as “competent,” “in touch,” “on my side,” “patriotic,” “strong,” and “trustworthy.”
To date most of the reactions of the election results by Democrats that I’ve read have suggested that tweaking the messaging or a better “get out the vote” campaign would have resulted in victory.
Mr. Halpin’s remarks continue:
If Democrats want to be honest with themselves, they will admit that their party is no longer the historic voice for blue-collar, working-class Americans. The Democrats’ national party brand is sadly a pathetic shell of its former self.
Whether it’s just a false perception or not it looks to me as though many Americans believe that the Democratic Party is the party of government. People who work for the government, want to work for the government, get paid by the government, or want to get paid by the government.
or granted privilege and illicit income from the government. (Can you say Joe Biden?)
Its the natural evolution of Democrat philosophy. I’m flummoxed as to why anyone is surprised.
Hard to reconcile those large percentage preferences with the very small winning percentages in the vote and not just for Trump. The differentials when you add the plus to Republicans and the minus to Democrats adds up to about 50% for a lot of those categories yet Trump won by about 1.5%. Heck, you would think he would have gotten at least 50% of the vote.
“With 96% of the vote in, Trump has, according to the Associated Press, 49.97% to Vice President Harris’ 48.36%, or 76.9 million votes to 74.4 million. (The U.S. Election Atlas has a higher raw vote total and a slightly narrower margin, 49.78% to 48.23, or 77.1 million votes to 74.7 million.)”
https://whyy.org/articles/2024-presidential-election-popular-vote-trump-kamala-harris/
Steve
What Steve said. But even accepting the numbers, pointing to common opinion is just as consistent with messaging as it is with policy. But who to support? The feckless and big-nosed Weimar Republic or those snappily-dressed fascios having those fun rallies and promising all the answers?
The graph reflects people’s opinions about political parties. Individual candidates can be perceived higher or lower on any measurement than the party itself. Joe Manchin, John Tester and Sherrod Brown probably polled more favorably on these measures than the Democratic Party in general, but their rope ran out.