Top 3 Reasons Voters Gave for Not Supporting Harris: Poll

Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on stage as she concedes the election, at Howard University in Washington on Nov. 6, 2024. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.

“We cannot get wrapped around the axle by our base and resistance politics.”

Democrats farther to the left than Suozzi disagree. During a community organizing video call on Nov. 8, progressive leaders defended their coalition and its focus on “marginalized communities” amid attacks from their party’s center.

“Maybe you’re a leftist who feels deep frustration at the many calls to move the Democrats to the center at the expense of targeted and marginalized communities, the expense of suffering people and normal times,” Ash-Lee Woodard-Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Research & Education Center, told the virtual attendees.

Progressive congresswoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wa.), also dismissed calls to blame the party’s left-wing coalitions, and their messaging on cultural issues, for Harris’s loss.

“The blame game, you’ve seen it, it’s already started with a lot of cheap shots at our progressive movement, and it’s easy to finger-point even for us, but we need to resist it,” Jayapal said.

“I imagine we share a lot of theories about this election and what led us here, but I think we actually need to look at the [exit polling] data.”

Blueprint’s exit polling data seems to validate the concerns of the party’s more moderate members such as Suozzi.

Another Democratic polling firm, GQR, logged similar sentiment among voters in a Nov. 6 poll. Taken with a smaller sample size of 800 national voters between Oct. 31 and Nov. 5, the poll found that voters ranked opposition to transgender surgeries and transgender kids in sports as the least important issue affecting their vote this year, at 4 percent.

Roughly 64 percent of respondents said they had seen Trump campaign ads highlighting Harris’s previous support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for prisoners and illegal immigrants.

In an exit poll by Fox News, 54 percent of voters—among a sample size of more than 30,000—said they believed “support for transgender rights in government and society” had gone too far. Twenty-two percent said it had “been about right,” and another 22 percent said it had “not gone far enough.”

Voters were roughly split on the topic of gender-related procedures, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors under the age of 18 who identify as transgender. Forty-seven percent said they “strongly/somewhat favor” medical and surgical treatment for minors, while 52 percent said they “strongly/somewhat oppose” the procedures.