Online Appendix for Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era

This is the online appendix to the Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era report, by the Center for Working-Class Politics and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. The report explores how Democratic economic-populist messages perform with American voters. The online appendix reports full subgroup results for the report's primary survey, which tests 13 distinct economic populist messages offered by Democratic candidates and two Republican opposition messages. See survey details below.

Message performance by subgroup

All fifteen statements tested, Democratic and Republican together, ordered by overall net would-vote.

Outcome
Statistic

Click message names for full wording. Click subgroup headings for how each group is defined.

Descriptive statistics

Who is in the survey. For every subgroup used in the cross-tabs: the unweighted number of respondents, and the group's weighted share of U.S. adults. Note that totals do not sum to 100%, either due to definitional choices (such as class) or non-response.

Click a subgroup name for how it is defined.

Statistically distinct performance tiers

Full sample results, using the mean 0 to 100 predicted vote share measure. Messages in the same tier are not statistically distinguishable from the strongest message in that tier; each lower tier received significantly less support than the leader of the group above. You can see the full wording of each message by clicking on the message's label.

About the survey

Fielded by
Verasight, June 16 to July 1, 2026.
Sample size
n = 6,100 completed interviews (5,000 national + a 1,100 rural oversample). Verasight pre-cleaned for attention, straight-lining, speeders, and duplicates before delivery.
Weighting
Weighted to U.S. adult benchmarks (Census / CPS demographics, RUCA rural share, Pew partisanship, and 2024 presidential vote). Reported margin of error about +/-1.5%.
Design
Each respondent was randomly assigned one of the two GOP messages and three of the thirteen Democratic messages. Note that in cases where messages were nearly-identical with small manipulations (for example the two American Way variants) respondents were shown at most one of the nearly-identical messages.
Measures
Two 5-point scales per statement: a favorability scale and a vote-likelihood scale ("How likely would you be to vote for this candidate?").