A new national study, conducted by the Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP) and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), finds that straightforward ‘Kitchen Table Populism’ is the clear winner among Democratic messaging strategies, significantly outperforming both the mainstream liberal focus on Donald Trump and more progressive “divide-and-conquer” messages.
The survey, fielded by Verasight, polled 6,100 adult Americans in June, including more than 1,000 additional rural respondents. The novel survey tested economic populist messages against strong counter messages. This allowed researchers to see how durable each message was when presented with a popular, conservative counterargument.
To do this, each respondent saw a Republican message first (randomly assigned to focus on either government waste or immigration), then they were asked to rate Democratic messages drawn at random from a pool of 13 distinct appeals. The messages tested included five developed by the research team and eight others currently in active use by campaigns, advocacy groups, and influential messaging professionals.
Researchers found that what they call “Kitchen Table Populism” won across the board.
Every message in this category performed strongly and, in nearly every case, beat the Republican opposition message among persuadable voters — including undecided 2026 voters. The top-performing message in this category was net positive even among Republicans, and it outperformed a Republican opposition message among 2024 Trump voters who say they don’t plan to vote Republican in 2028, a group the researchers call “Trump waverers.”
The study also found that progressive “divide-and-conquer” messages — those designed to educate voters about right-wing scapegoating of minority groups — significantly underperformed populist messaging across every demographic tested, including among Democrats themselves. Meanwhile, more mainstream anti-Trump messages — focused on Trump as a corrupt rule-breaker responsible for economic hardship — also underperformed Kitchen Table Populism with every group studied, including voters who backed Kamala Harris.
The June survey builds on a preliminary experiment conducted in April with more than 9,000 respondents, which tested nearly 18,000 variations of populist messaging.
Full results, detailed methodology, and crosstabs are available in the complete report linked below.
Download Executive Summary
Download Full Report
Media Contacts:
Jared Abbott, Director, Center for Working Class Politics
jared@workingclasspolitics.org
Erica Etelson, Board President, Rural Urban Bridge Initiative
As a rural Western Wisconsin resident, this seems like common sense.
Rurals have lived with serious economic precarity for too long and people need hope for the future.
The Dems also need better messaging than in the past because (Trump bad / rural people deplorable) didn’t exactly inspire love for the D’s.
As the Brown University economist Mark Blythe put it once, “Why would people want to vote for a party that holds them in contempt?”
That is how rurals have perceived the Democrats for decades now.
I spoke to Paul Jay on The Analysis News several years ago about this very issue.
Link:
https://youtu.be/wcvyF0GLtw4?is=XxKgvluyisSlvCEY
Makes sense to me...