The poll queried more than 3,000 national and swing state voters between Nov. 6 and Nov. 7.
An exit poll released by Democratic polling firm Blueprint outlined the top three reasons voters nationwide gave for not supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in her 2024 bid for U.S. president.
The leading issue for voters was that inflation is too high. This was followed by the Biden–Harris administration allowing in too many illegal immigrants, and that Harris focused too much on cultural topics like transgender issues rather than the middle class.
The poll asked 3,262 national and swing state voters in the two days following the 2024 election to rate the importance of potential reasons for their decision to vote for President-elect Donald Trump instead of Harris.
In addition to inflation, illegal immigration, and Harris’s focus on transgender issues, the next three factors named by all voters were that debt rose too high under the Biden–Harris administration, that Harris is too similar to President Joe Biden, and that Harris would let in even more illegal immigrants. One choice that scored high among swing state voters in particular was that “Democrats did a bad job running the country.”
“In the end, Harris couldn’t outrun her past or her party—perhaps it was a lack of time, but it was certainly a vice grip that proved impossible to escape,” the polling report’s authors wrote.
The factors of least concern to voters were that Harris was too pro-Israel, too conservative, or not similar enough to Biden.
The poll’s findings were published as top Democrats reel from Tuesday’s election results, point fingers, and assign blame for who’s responsible for Trump’s sweep of the seven battleground states.
“In this election, Americans have made their voice clear: Democrats need to focus more on issues Americans care about, like wages and benefits, and less on being politically correct … Democrats have been too intimidated to speak up for the same values that many of us hold dear—the American Dream, public safety, and a common sense of right and wrong among them,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) wrote in a Nov. 7 post on X.
By Jacob Burg
