Even voters who previously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites.

Democrats conducting post-mortems on their sweeping losses in 2024 are finding more reason for alarm. And the problem isn’t just Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.

In a trio of focus groups, even voters who previously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites, according to research by the progressive group Navigator Research.

When asked to compare the Democratic Party to an animal, one participant compared the party 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.” Another likened them to koalas, who “are complacent and lazy about getting policy wins that we really need.” Democrats, another said, are “not a friend of the working class anymore.”

The focus group research, shared first with POLITICO, represents the latest troubling pulse check for a party still sorting through the wreckage of its November losses and looking for a path to rebuild. Without a clear party leader and with losses across nearly every demographic in November, Democrats are walking into a second Trump presidency without a unified strategy to improve their electoral prospects. And while some Democrats blame Biden, others blame inflation and still others blame “losing hold of culture,” the feedback from the focus groups found Democrats’ problems are even more widespread and potentially long-lasting than a single election cycle.

The focus groups offer “a pretty scathing rebuke” of the Democratic Party brand, said Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, a project within the Hub Project, which is a Democratic nonprofit group.

“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 focus groups — held immediately after the 2024 election and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm — featured three kinds of voters: young men in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024; voters in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote at all in 2024; and voters in blue states who had previously voted for Democrats, a third party candidate or didn’t vote in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024.

“I think what the Democratic elites and their politicians believe is often very different from what the average Democratic voter is,” said a Georgia man who voted for Biden in 2020 but Trump in 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.”

These voters voiced cautious optimism about Trump’s second term, both in the focus groups and a post-election poll that found Trump’s highest approval rating since 2020 in a GBAO survey. The national poll, which surveyed 1,000 people, found 47 percent viewed Trump favorably, while 50 percent disapproved of him — the highest marks he’s received since he left office.

Russell argued that Trump’s high marks reflect a “honeymoon” period, which she predicted will fade once he takes office: “Once things start happening, it’s going to take a turn, and so it’s going to rely really heavily on the actions in the first 100 days to see how we go from here.”

She also noted that the polling suggests openings for Democrats on issues like abortion, health care and taxing the rich, as well as a fear that Trump may go too far on tariffs. Their survey also showed that two-thirds of voters said inflation should be the incoming president’s top issue, but only a third of voters believed it was Trump’s or Republicans’ top issue.

When the focus group participants were asked about inflation and tariffs, many of them said they didn’t fully understand the policy, while others acknowledged they expected prices to go up.

“Obviously I wouldn’t want stuff to go up, but at the same time, in the long run, would it be better off for America and maybe having more stuff made here?” said one man from Wisconsin.

Even though the focus group voters did not solely blame Harris for their distaste of the Democratic Party, they also weren’t happy about her candidacy. Participants described her as “inauthentic,” “very dishonest” and “did not seem competent.”

An Arizona man, citing the time Harris said, “you better thank a union member,” during a speech in Detroit, said “that was very disingenuous to me because I didn’t see an honest person that could be president.”

“It seemed like a lot of what she came out and said wasn’t really off-the-cuff, wasn’t coming from her,” said another man who voted for Biden in 2020 and 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, whereas, 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.”

The feedback on Harris comes as the vice president mulls her own future, weighing a third presidential run against a bid for California governor in 2026. Some party loyalists have said they’d back another presidential run, arguing that Biden’s late exit from the race burdened the vice president’s three-month sprint. But others are not ready to get on board for it.

Several participants also raised the transgender attack ad that the Trump campaign deployed against Harris, which showed a 2019 clip of her expressing support for gender affirming surgery for state prison inmates. The ad’s tagline included: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Democrats disagree on the potency of the attack ad, but several participants raised it unprompted in the focus groups.

Lagging turnout was a major problem for Democrats in November. One woman from Georgia who didn’t vote in 2024 said that she didn’t agree with Harris’ “thinking that it’s okay for children to change their body parts.”

“I think that there needs to be some parameters on what’s accepted in society and what isn’t. Some of the societal norms, and I think that the Democrats have tried to open that up a little too much,” said a woman from Wisconsin who also didn’t vote in 2024.

When asked by the moderator if she was referring to the “trans issue,” the woman said, “primarily that.”

(Source: Politico)