STAT of the Week

Voters Have No Idea What Democrats Stand For

I want to show you something very important.

You know I talk non-stop about how Republicans have intentionally trashed the Democratic Party’s brand, but today I want to focus on how Democrats help them get away with it.

Last week David Shor from Blue Rose Research released their election autopsy. You can find the entire presentation this slide comes from here in a conversation between Ezra Klein and David Shor.

But I want to focus on just one key chart in Shor’s data, this. 👇

And I want to talk about it differently than Shor does in his interview. He doesn’t even notice what I am am going to show you.

What you are looking at is a chart that on the y axis (the vertical axis) measures whether respondents trust the Republican Party or the Democratic Party on a host of issues. Using this graph we can see -20% means they trust Republicans more on the issue while a positive 20% means they trust Democrats more.

You will see that respondents clearly associate border security with Republicans and LGBTQ issues with Democrats. I have marked both with red circles.

The X axis (the horizontal axis) measures the importance of each issue to respondents. If it is close to vertical line in the middle of the graph it means that issue wasn’t ranked too important. Voters reported the cost of living as the most important issue in 2024.

I want to draw you eye now to where abortion rights rank both in terms of issue importance and in terms of its association with Democrats.

Democrats pretty much abandoned running on abortion despite my protestations. Again, the Harris campaign primarily focused on tax and economic policy. They did so because voters told them it wasn’t a key issue.

Even worse and because of us failing to message on this issue, respondents barely associate abortion rights with Democrats at all!!

Compared with border security which is highly associated with Republicans, abortion rights is only lightly associated with Democrats, which helps explain why a full 18% of voters in the NYT/Sienna poll thought Joe Biden made abortion illegal.

NYT Poll

Those of you with sharp eyes might notice there are quite a few staple Democratic Party issues that voters fail to associate with us. The issues highlighted in yellow are hugging the middle of the graph on the vertical axis. This means respondents were just as likely to trust Republicans as Democrats on education, student debt, health care, housing, Medicare, and even Social Security.

Student debt, after Biden did 188 BILLION in student loan relief.

That’s bad!!!

Liberals invented Medicare and Social Security and voters have no idea that conservatives tried to block it then and have plotted to undermine it since.

The reason they have no idea is we haven’t told them. In fact, despite MAGA’s Project 2025 plans to gut Medicare and Social Security, respondents were more likely to identify Republicans as the party better for Social Security!!

I want you to keep the above in mind as you read this excerpt from a recent interview I gave to Yale student and aspiring journalist Conor Web for the campus paper The Politic about the strategic pivot the party needs to make.

Moving away from identity-based micro-targeting to broader, brand-centric strategy as laid out in Hit ‘Em Where it Hurts IS THE KEY to the future of the Democratic Party.

Working Americans should know which party has their back and which party is stealing their retirement money to pay for tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk. It is up to us to tell them.

Save the strategy, save the world.