Election pollsters say Trump's victory sends a strong message from middle Americans, working class

Following GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's victory on Nov. 5, many pollsters and commentators have said his win is sending a strong message to Washington, D.C. from America's working class. 

"This was a statement by the working class and Middle America that says, 'We run this country, not you elites out there in Los Angeles and New York,'" pollster and political strategist Mark Penn said on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

He added that Trump's win occurred because of different constituency groups who felt that they've been ignored and they finally made their voices heard. "His campaign actually transcended identity," Penn said. "That's why he wounded up getting more Latinos [and] more black male voters because he did not treat them as pieces of identity politics," Penn said. 

The 2024 presidential election was called for Trump in the early hours of Nov. 6 after Trump managed to win the swing states of Georgia and Pennsylvania. A CNN exit poll showed Trump won about 54% support of Latino men and surged among independent voters in the state of Georgia. 

A group of elites

Pollster Scott Rasmussen said that one of the lessons Democrats could take away from the election is that they shouldn't lecture, but instead listen. 

"On the key issue of the economy, when they saw data saying people are pessimistic, they were saying, 'Well, voters just don't understand how good they have it,'" Rasmussen said. "That's not what you do. You listen to voters."

He said that the Democrats' main constituency has become a group of elites with postgraduate degrees who are out of touch with the American people. A project that was recently conducted by Rasmussen titled "Elite 1 Percent" goes into detail about who the one percent are and what their views are regarding American policies. 

"The views and influence of the Elite 1% may be the root cause of the political toxicity in our nation today," Rasmussen wrote on the social media platform, X. "Their underlying attitudes reflect an implicit rejection of the ideal that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed." Some of the basics that Rasmussen observed is that the "elites" identify as Democrats, by 73%, more than half of them being between the ages of 35 and 54.

"We have to respect it"

Something else that Penn posits is that some Democratic surrogates for Harris seemed to somewhat work against her with comments made about the border and the economy. When former President Bill Clinton was stumping for Harris in Georgia, he made a remark about migrants at the southern border not being properly vetted. 

Earlier this year an illegal alien from Venezuela, Jose Ibarra, was charged with the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. “You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you?” Clinton asked rhetorically. Referring to pro-Trump ads, he said “They made an ad about a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

"The thing about Bill Clinton was he never denied reality........Clinton would really agonize over every problem and look for a solution to it," Penn said. Another campaign failure came from former President Barack Obama when he went to stump for Harris in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He chastised black male voters for not showing more support for Harris. 

Former Ohio Democratic state Sen. Nina Turner slammed Obama's comments in an appearance on CNN.

“Why are black men being lectured to? Why are black men being belittled in ways that no other voting group are?” Turner said. "Now, a lot of love for former President Obama, but for him to single out Black men is wrong, and some of the Black men that I have talked to have their reasons why they want to vote a different way, and even if some of us may not like that, we have to respect it.”