Trump’s poll numbers are bad, but that doesn’t translate to good news for Democrats, who seem to have no idea how to win back voters’ trust.
On this date in 2017, Democrats enjoyed a six-point lead in the average of polls asking respondents which party they’d prefer to see win control of Congress. The Democrats’ sizable lead on this question proved more or less stable over the first two years of Trump’s first term in office.
By the time the 2018 midterms rolled around, Democrats ended up with a roughly seven-point lead — a lead their candidates outperformed at the ballot box. Ultimately, Democrats took 41 House seats from the GOP and won the supposed “popular vote” in the disparate House contests by 8.6 points.
It’s worth reflecting on the Democratic Party’s position then because it bears no relation to the Democratic Party’s position now. Donald Trump’s position may be eroding as a result of the various self-inflicted wounds he’s carving into his political brand. But, in contrast to his first term, Democrats are not the default beneficiaries of Trump’s misfortune.
“Despite several unpopular domestic and foreign policies, President Trump still holds an entrenched base of voters who, if given the chance, say they would vote for him again,” Emerson College Polling director Spencer Kimball said following the release of its latest survey. Despite the public’s growing apprehension about Trump’s conduct of American affairs abroad and at home, the Democratic Party’s image is still circling the drain.
Democrats might be tempted to take solace from a poll that finds Trump’s job-approval rating declining, his subordinates’ unpopularity rising, and nothing approaching majority support for his handling of any major policy issue. But they shouldn’t. Despite all this, the survey found that, if the 2024 election were held again today, Kamala Harris would still lose (albeit narrowly).
Emerson’s findings dovetail with internal Republican polling, which paints a marginally rosier picture of how the public is receiving the GOP’s performance in office. Still, the Emerson survey found the Democratic Party’s popularity declining to an abysmal 25 percent. That number is not out of line with other pollsters’ assessment of the Democratic Party’s favorability, which is now somewhere between 27 and 38 percent, depending on the survey.
In that internal survey, the generic congressional-ballot test found Democrats with a paltry one-point lead over their Republican counterparts. In the aggregate, the GOP’s polling aligns with what independent pollsters are seeing. According to the RealClearPolitics average of generic ballot polls ahead of the 2026 midterms, Democrats claim only a two-point lead over their opponents.
At least Democrats can’t say they’re ignoring their persistent unpopularity. A Politico dispatch published Wednesday details the findings from Democratic focus groups, which show that the well of mistrust Democrats cultivated in the Biden years goes deep:
Following its latest round of focus groups, Navigator Research is urging Democrats to proactively push their own economic policies. Democrats “can’t just assume that because [voters] are upset with Trump right now, that anyone’s coming back to them,” but must give “their vision of what an economy that works for everybody looks like, and it can’t just be that the economy sucks,” said Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, a project within the Hub Project, which is a Democratic nonprofit group.
“Now is the time to provide real solutions that people can look to as an alternative because we’re seeing that splintering right now, we’re seeing people say, ‘this isn’t necessarily what I voted for,’” Russell said.
According to Politico’s dispatch, the Republican Party is buoyed by the fact that so many Trump voters do not yet believe that they will experience economic hardships as a result of Trump’s policies — not, at least, hardships that will prove intolerable. Even if that changes, Democrats may not automatically profit from a turn against Trump and Trumpism.
The party out of power has little evidence to support the notion that it can confidently await the inevitable day when the voters who spurned them come crawling back. And to judge from Democrats’ impotent theatrics, they have no idea what to do to repair their party’s image.