The Scoop
Late-deciding voters broke for Donald Trump last week and associated Kamala Harris with some unpopular progressive policies, according to polling by the Democratic firm Blueprint, first provided to Semafor.
In a survey of 3,262 voters, conducted in the 48 hours after the election, those who were undecided at some point in the race broke for Trump by a 52-38 margin. Trump handily won voters who made up their minds in the race’s final days; Harris won swing voters who made up their mind months earlier, when she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Blueprint, whose data showed throughout the year that Harris’s economic message tested best with winnable voters, found that she was dragged down by voter perceptions on immigration and cultural issues.
Seventy-seven percent of swing voters who chose Trump said that Harris was not doing enough to fix a “border crisis,” 73% said that she supported “immigrants more than American citizens,” and 73% said she wanted to “take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants.” Eighty-three percent said that Harris would use taxpayer dollars “to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants,” suggesting that the Trump campaign’s focus on these topics broke through.
“These misalignments persisted despite the Harris campaign’s messaging, showing how sweepingly the Republican narrative on Harris’s positions took hold and shaped the lens of these voters,” Blueprint lead pollster Evan Roth Smith said. “This, in turn, created the impression for too many swing voters that Democrats hold the most extreme possible version of left-of-center positions and would enforce them through policy.”
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David’s view
We’re one week into a Democratic fight about why they lost to Trump again. They might wrap this up after the 2028 presidential primary, if they’re quick about it. But it’s clear from the results that many Democrats ran ahead of the presidential ticket, even while losing, after distancing themselves from Biden and Harris on immigration.
Even that fact is being contested by Democrats who want to shape the party, arguing that Democrats who said they opposed “illegal immigration” or “boys in girls sports” couldn’t answer voter frustrations about the economy and the lingering effects of inflation. True: Some of them couldn’t. But the Trump campaign’s relentless messaging followed a theme, that Harris cared more about non-citizens or prisoners than she cared about their material needs.
Would that have worked had voters trusted Democrats more on economic growth and prices? Maybe not. Blueprint’s polling found that three out of four swing voters thought that the Democrats “don’t know how to manage the economy.” You can imagine an election taking place with near-zero inflation and positive consumer sentiment, in which Republican attacks that accused them of obsessing over non-citizens and gender surgery would have been ineffective.
But in this environment, swing voters were inclined to think that the economy was bad. They were inclined to think that it was better when Trump was president. The Trump campaign’s strategy of telling those voters that Harris was simply too left-wing and focused on other people’s needs was effective.
Room for Disagreement
On his substack, progressive anti-war strategist Waleed Shahid critiques the most popular theories of the Democrats’ defeat, with a skeptical view that left-wing positioning hurt Harris.