The Democratic Party is in crisis.
In November, they lost the Senate, failed to retake the House, and lost the presidential popular vote for the first time in two decades.
Long-term trends don’t look much better. Trump grew his support among reliably blue voting blocs like Hispanics, black Americans, and young white men. Between 2020 and 2024, every one of the 30 states that track party affiliation showed a shift in registrations toward the GOP, adding up to 4.5 million voters nationally.
The 2026 Senate map looks awful for Democrats, offering just three plausible pickup opportunities. Even if they beat Susan Collins in Maine, flip Thom Tillis’ seat in North Carolina, and pull off a long-shot victory in Ohio, that still leaves Republicans with 50 seats and Vice President JD Vance as the tie-breaking vote. And that’s assuming the Democrats manage to hold the line in Michigan and Georgia.
The House math doesn’t look much better. California’s best efforts won’t be able to offset GOP redistricting campaigns in Texas, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri, which will probably leave the party with a net gain of around half a dozen seats.
Amid the wreckage of their electoral hopes, Democrats have seized on a single piece of driftwood: Trump’s so-called “dipping” approval rating on the economy.
Democrats just watched economic malaise sweep the Biden–Harris administration out of office. Now they’re hoping the same thing will happen to President Trump.
Unfortunately for them, he is in a far stronger economic position than the approval numbers suggest.
Inflation under Biden peaked at a whopping 9.1 percent, and overall price increases during his term topped 21 percent. Trump, by contrast, has kept inflation under 3 percent since returning to office, just like he did for the entirety of his first term.
Voters remain frustrated by the economy because they’re still paying the price for Biden’s inflationary spending spree, which he tried to distract from by blaming a series of scapegoats for the cost of living crisis. These included Vladimir Putin, greedy meatpackers, and even Visa. Biden’s Justice Department sued the company over its alleged monopoly on debit transactions, even though no monopoly or anti-consumer activity existed — Visa had a market share of just 60 percent and plenty of competitors — and the fees themselves were miniscule.
Over time, poll respondents’ frustration with President Trump is likely to diminish. Polls suggest Americans are already feeling less pain at the pump and the grocery store, and wage growth is consistently outpacing inflation. These gains haven’t gotten the U.S. economy out of the hole Biden put it in just yet, but everything’s trending in the right direction.
Democrats also see low job creation numbers as a good sign for their 2026 prospects. They’re especially thrilled about job losses in manufacturing, since these supposedly prove that Trump has failed the working-class voters who elected him.
In fact, these job numbers are nothing to worry about, since Biden-era job growth was almost entirely an illusory “sugar high” driven by mass illegal migration.
“Yes, you can generate higher employment and GDP figures by handing work permits to whomever crosses the border,” economist Oren Cass explained. “You can achieve a similar effect by legalizing heroin and asking all dealers to fill out their W-2s. In neither case will you have improved the nation’s long-term economic prospects or the well-being of the typical American household.”
Job growth looks slow because the decline in employment for foreign-born workers — driven by strict immigration enforcement and voluntary departures — offsets significant gains for native-born Americans. Mass deportations also explain reduced employment in manufacturing, a sector in which illegal immigrants are overrepresented.
Economic growth as a whole also looks strong. The Commerce Department just revised GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025 from 3.3 percent to 3.8 percent, and the Federal Reserve’s recent rate cut will likely drive growth even higher in the coming months.
Much of the economic anxiety these polls are registering is probably a response to Trump’s tariffs. He’s trying something new, and that always makes people a little jumpy. Once again, though, time should smooth those ruffled feathers.
The stock market is still cooking, which suggests that institutional investors aren’t worried.
Trump’s muscular trade policies have already secured trillions of dollars in new investments and opened new foreign markets to U.S. goods.
And despite the liberal media’s pushing of endless sob stories about mom-and-pop stores that can no longer import cheap parts and products, small business confidence just hit its highest level since 2017.
The midterms are still more than a year away. By that time, wage growth will have undone more of the harm caused by Bidenflation, voters will have gotten past their tariff jitters, and Trump’s economic approval rating will be back in the positives. If economic anxiety is the best pitch Democrats have in 2026, they’re headed for certain defeat.
Michael Glassner, the President of C&M Transcontinental LLC, served as Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Campaign Manager for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and was a Senior Advisor on the 2024 campaign. He is one of the longest serving executives in modern presidential campaign history and has had senior roles in seven presidential campaigns.