Voters say Republicans aren't focusing enough on pocketbook issues

59% view the GOP as "too extreme," compared to 46% who say the same for Democrats

This is a follow-up to the article I published on Sept. 25 about voters’ perceptions of which policy issues each party is focusing on, titled “Are Democrats ‘talking too much’ about left-wing issues?”.

A day or so after I published that piece, I saw the following post from Mike in the Strength In Numbers Discord server (which paying subscribers can access here):

I was looking at the crosstabs from Searchlight after reading SIN this morning and was looking at the “perceived focus” broken out by party ID. I rearranged the issues so they’re in the same order and then put the “most important” or “top 3 focus” in darker blue (slightly lighter if the values were < 5 from a top 3 value):

They’re showing quite [large] difference between what Democrats think Democrats are focused on and what Republicans and independents think Democrats are focused on. This is less true for Republicans, where there is more agreement across the board. This could be some support for D’s point above about message delivery vs fussing about the content.

(I have removed D’s real name.)

Mike attaches this chart:

Ok, first off, great value-add from the SIN discord (this is why you should become a paid subscriber)! Mike is using the party ID crosstabs to try to proxy whether voters perceive Democrats as “focusing too much” on LGBTQ issues and climate change as a function of Democrats’ actual speech, or because of Republican-friendly advertising or television/digital news programming.

Let me highlight Mike’s point again:

They’re showing quite [large] difference between what Democrats think Democrats are focused on and what Republicans and independents think Democrats are focused on. This is less true for Republicans, where there is more agreement across the board.

My analysis follows:

Republicans don’t talk enough about kitchen table issues

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