Democrats around the country are still licking their wounds after last month’s stinging election defeat — but the party might be sailing toward an even bigger iceberg.
New research from progressive polling outfit Navigator Research shows the party’s reputation is in tatters even among previous backers, who have come to view the Dems as weak, obsessed with “woke” initiatives such DEI and overly accommodating to the elites at the expense of the middle class.
They’re “not a friend of the working class anymore,” a respondent wrote.
Navigator at one point asked participants to compare the Democratic Party to an animal.
One likened them to an ostrich because “they’ve got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they’re failing,” said Politico, which first published details of the research.
Another person answered koalas, owing to the fact that the marsupials are “complacent and lazy about getting policy wins we really need.”
Rachel Russell, Navigator Research’s director of polling and analytics, said the findings represent “a pretty scathing rebuke” of the Democratic Party.
“This weakness they see, [Democrats] not getting things done, not being able to actually fight for people — is something that needs to be figured out,” Russell said.
“It might not be the message, it might be the policy. It might be something a little bit deeper that has to be addressed by the party.”
The research was conducted just after the 2024 election and included three distinct focus groups: young men in battleground states who voted Trump in 2020 but Biden this year; battleground state voters who backed Biden in 2020 but abstained from voting in 2024, and blue-state voters who previously backed Democrats — or third-party candidates — but supported Trump in November 2024.
“The elites that run the Democratic Party — I think they’re way too obsessed with appealing to these very far-left social progressivism that’s very popular on college campuses,” said a Georgia man, who backed Biden in the last election but went for Trump in 2024, to the outlet.
The poll’s participants also didn’t hold back with their criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris — who was abruptly named the party’s standard-bearer for 2024 after elderly President Biden was pushed to step aside by fellow Democrats.
“It seemed like a lot of what she came out and said wasn’t really off-the-cuff, wasn’t coming from her,” said a man who switched his support from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024.
“Seemed like every interview, every time she came out and talked about something, it was planned out and never her thoughts, didn’t seem genuine to her thoughts,” he said, drawing a contrast with Trump’s famously improvisational style.
“Trump, even though you never really knew what he was going to say, when he was going to say it, it was always him and genuine to what he thought, so that’s what swayed me.”
A Wisconsin woman who said she didn’t vote at all in 2024 told the researchers that the Democrats’ embrace of fringe social issues were a turn-off to her.
“I think that there needs to be some parameters on what’s accepted in society and what isn’t,” she said. “Some of the societal norms, and I think that the Democrats have tried to open that up a little too much.”
The moderator asked whether she was referring to issues around transgender Americans, to which she conceded, “primarily that.”
Since Harris’ resounding defeat at the polls, the idea of her running for governor of California has been floated in recent days, much to the consternation of many liberals.