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Opinion|Trump’s Return Is a Civil Society Failure
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/opinion/democratic-party-republican-realignment.html
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Guest Essay
Jan. 7, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
A key question emerging from the 2024 election is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?
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), included 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.
In response to the query which party do “you trust more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of voters, according to the survey, chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55-34 on the economy to 57-29 on immigration.
Asked whether the Democratic or the Republican Party is “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53-34) and weak (50-32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52-35) and “strong” (63-23).
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.
