It’s been 20 days since the 2024 election — and we are starting to get some deep dives — and thoughtful analysis — of what went wrong for Democrats and how they can fix it.
The latest is a post-election poll of battleground states by two very well respected Democratic outfits: Third Way and Global Strategy Group.
The data has ton of insights in it — but one thing, illustrated by two different findings, stood out to me: People thought Kamala Harris was too liberal for them.
Consider this chart — in which voters were asked to rate both their own ideology and that of Harris and President-elect Donald Trump on a scale of 0 (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative):
So, Harris was seen as 3.1 points more liberal than how voters saw themselves while Trump was 2.2 points more conservative.
Which might not seem like a lot! But, in an X thread on the results, Third Way notes: “These ratings are like a Richter scale, so when voters put themselves that much closer to Trump, it’s an indication of a real problem for Democrats.”
Agreed.
Then there’s the second chart, which affirms the first. Voters were asked to say the first word or two that came to their minds when Harris and Trump were mentioned. Those results were then turned into word clouds — with the bigger words the ones that came up the most.
“Liberal” was the most common word mentioned about Harris. It was “strong” for Trump.
You don’t have to be a political scientist to see the problem there.
As Democrats debate where to steer the party — and what voices to elevate — they would do well to think hard on these two slides. Like it or not, battleground state voters believe the party is not only liberal but significantly more liberal than voters themselves. That’s never a good pace to be, politically speaking.
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