A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists.
YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees), including detailed analyses of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and also asked 881 people in the national sample, to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment.
More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — is the party “on my side or not” and which party do you trust “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of all voters participating in this survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would.
In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:
The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala Harris explains her support for publicly funded sex-change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”