Americans Say Democrats Are Out of Touch With the People

The stereotype of the elitist, Ivy League, head-in-the-clouds Democrat is not a new one, but a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post shows that it rings true with more Americans than ever before. At a time when Democrats are trying desperately to tap into some form of populist fervor against President Donald Trump, the polls proves that they don’t have the strong, diverse base the media constantly portrays.

Both Donald Trump and the Republican Party are seen as out of touch with the average American, according to the poll. But their numbers aren’t nearly as dismal as those facing the Democrats. A full two-thirds of the public sees the Democratic Party as out of touch with voters, and that includes nearly half of registered Democrats.

In a poll analysis performed by the Post, they dig into these findings and compare them to another question found in the survey:

Last week, we noted that Trump’s party is seen as more divided than the opposition, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Sixty-eight percent of Americans think the Republican Party is more divided than united, including 57 percent of Republicans. Most Democrats, by contrast, say their party is united.

How does that comport with the findings from the Post-ABC poll? It’s tricky to determine, certainly, but one way may be that a large chunk of Democrats feel that their party is united in a vision … that’s at odds with the concerns of the American public. That would certainly align with the main tension in the party, between the vision of supporters of Bernie Sanders and that of Clinton backers — which was made manifest during last year’s Democratic primary.

Now that is bad news for the Democrats. Their own voters see the party as unified around a common agenda…which would seem to be excellent for the party’s reputation. But if the agenda itself is opposed by many of their own voters – and many more who are on the fence when elections come around – they could be looking at a long period of deterioration. Rather than experiencing the big comeback many feel is waiting for them in 2018, the Democrats could actually perform even worse than they did last year.

The poll doesn’t reveal, specifically, where voters diverge from the Democrat agenda, but we can hazard a few guesses. The party is seen as being too cozy with Wall Street interests, for one thing. For another, there aren’t nearly as many hardcore “social justice” Democrats out there as the party (and the internet) seems to believe.

Is the country clamoring for a left-wing party reimagined in the mold of Bernie Sanders? We shall soon see. But once voters get a real look at the socialist policies that lie behind Sanders’ populist speeches, they may realize that an even darker vision of America waits for them underneath that rosy exterior.