"Our polling partners at Public First presented survey respondents who voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 with a variety of high-level hypothetical policy scenarios and asked what they thought of them. Oh, and they included a key piece of info: Each policy was labeled as being proposed by either Democratic lawmakers or by Trump and Republican lawmakers.
Party authorship made a huge difference. Take a look at what happened when we asked about a theoretical proposal to subsidize home purchases for all Americans:
When it’s a Republican plan to subsidize home purchases, Trump voters support it and Harris voters don’t. When the plan comes from Democrats, Harris voters switch to supporting it — and Trump voters don’t."
--------
In my opinion, this observation leads to interesting implications - should the Trump administration adopt progressive coded economic messaging, it could solidify support amongst swing demographics as was shown in a recent HKS paper on voter polarity [0]. If economically progressive messaging is not adopted and placed at the forefront by DNC candidates, then the ability to swing votes in 2026 could be at risk - as can be seen in the Crockett versus Talarico primary in the TX DNC. I alluded to a similar strategy before as well [1].
> When it’s a Republican plan to subsidize home purchases, Trump voters support it and Harris voters don’t. When the plan comes from Democrats, Harris voters switch to supporting it — and Trump voters don’t.
How can you be able to find compromises, when you can't even agree on something you wouldn't even need to compromise on to have consensus.
Because, based on the polls, the downward shift in support from Dems ends up getting replaced by support from Republicans and Democratic polling ends up aligning with Republican polling.
What this implies is that there exists an economic swing demographic in the GOP that is essentially indifferent to cultural messaging and voted primarily on economic messaging.
On the other hand, there is a cohort of DNC voters that will always vote partisan on economic decisions no matter what, implying that they are determining voting preferences based on cultural polarity.
A similar trend occurs in cultural topics amongst GOP voters based on the polling.
Essentially, it implies that a subset of GOP voters are open to liberal-leaning economic policies, but turned off due to cultural messaging.
If the GOP hypothetically made a shift towards co-opting economically liberal messaging (which is slowly starting to happen in the National Conservative movement which has become the underlying intellectual movement in MAGA), and a similar shift did not happen in the DNC side, disaffected voters who are not strongly GOP leaning may become a GOP voting bloc.
This trend has already started happening in major unions like the UAW [0], Teamsters [1][2], and ILA [3].
Basically, blue collar union support has become the swing demographic that the DNC is slowly losing at the expense of white collar unions like the SEIU [4] (teachers, healthcare workers, federal/state/local government employees) along with corporate America's realignment towards the DNC at the expense of the GOP [5]. Conversely, campaigning primarily on economic issues and ignoring cultural issues nets wins for the Dems, as can be seen with Spanberger's win in the 2025 Virgina Gubernatorial election [6]
"Our polling partners at Public First presented survey respondents who voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 with a variety of high-level hypothetical policy scenarios and asked what they thought of them. Oh, and they included a key piece of info: Each policy was labeled as being proposed by either Democratic lawmakers or by Trump and Republican lawmakers.
Party authorship made a huge difference. Take a look at what happened when we asked about a theoretical proposal to subsidize home purchases for all Americans:
When it’s a Republican plan to subsidize home purchases, Trump voters support it and Harris voters don’t. When the plan comes from Democrats, Harris voters switch to supporting it — and Trump voters don’t."
--------
In my opinion, this observation leads to interesting implications - should the Trump administration adopt progressive coded economic messaging, it could solidify support amongst swing demographics as was shown in a recent HKS paper on voter polarity [0]. If economically progressive messaging is not adopted and placed at the forefront by DNC candidates, then the ability to swing votes in 2026 could be at risk - as can be seen in the Crockett versus Talarico primary in the TX DNC. I alluded to a similar strategy before as well [1].
[0] - https://socialeconomicslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ze...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43574128
> When it’s a Republican plan to subsidize home purchases, Trump voters support it and Harris voters don’t. When the plan comes from Democrats, Harris voters switch to supporting it — and Trump voters don’t.
How can you be able to find compromises, when you can't even agree on something you wouldn't even need to compromise on to have consensus.
Because, based on the polls, the downward shift in support from Dems ends up getting replaced by support from Republicans and Democratic polling ends up aligning with Republican polling.
What this implies is that there exists an economic swing demographic in the GOP that is essentially indifferent to cultural messaging and voted primarily on economic messaging.
On the other hand, there is a cohort of DNC voters that will always vote partisan on economic decisions no matter what, implying that they are determining voting preferences based on cultural polarity.
A similar trend occurs in cultural topics amongst GOP voters based on the polling.
Essentially, it implies that a subset of GOP voters are open to liberal-leaning economic policies, but turned off due to cultural messaging.
If the GOP hypothetically made a shift towards co-opting economically liberal messaging (which is slowly starting to happen in the National Conservative movement which has become the underlying intellectual movement in MAGA), and a similar shift did not happen in the DNC side, disaffected voters who are not strongly GOP leaning may become a GOP voting bloc.
This trend has already started happening in major unions like the UAW [0], Teamsters [1][2], and ILA [3].
Basically, blue collar union support has become the swing demographic that the DNC is slowly losing at the expense of white collar unions like the SEIU [4] (teachers, healthcare workers, federal/state/local government employees) along with corporate America's realignment towards the DNC at the expense of the GOP [5]. Conversely, campaigning primarily on economic issues and ignoring cultural issues nets wins for the Dems, as can be seen with Spanberger's win in the 2025 Virgina Gubernatorial election [6]
[0] - https://uaw.org/tariffs-mark-beginning-of-victory-for-autowo...
[1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/11/teamsters-donations...
[2] - https://teamster.org/2025/05/teamsters-statement-on-presiden...
[3] - https://ilaunion.org/ila-president-harold-daggett-credits-pr...
[4] - https://www.seiu.org/2024/07/seius-verrett-seiu-is-all-in-fo...
[5] - https://www.axios.com/2024/10/22/ceo-campaign-donations-demo...
[6] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/06/democrats-spanberge...