5 reasons Democrats are in good shape — and 2 reasons they're in deep trouble

Vox

3 days ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine.
A delegate wears a donkey hat during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on Aug. 22, 2024. Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Democratic Party's approval rating is at its lowest point in at least 35 years, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released last week.
In that survey, 63 percent of voters expressed an unfavorable view of the Democrats, while just 33 percent voiced a positive one. By contrast, voters disapproved of Congressional Republicans by only 11 points. These dismal figures are broadly consistent with other recent polling: In RealClearPolitics's average of recent surveys, voters disapprove of the Democratic Party by a 59.3 to 36.3 margin.
What's more, Democrats don't just have a lower favorability rating than Republicans, but also command less trust on the public's top issues. In the Journal's poll, voters disapproved of Trump's management of the economy, tariffs, inflation, foreign policy, and immigrant deportations. And yet, they said that they trusted Republicans to handle all of those matters better than Democrats would. Of the 10 issues raised in the survey, voters favored Democrats on only two — health care and vaccine policy.
These grim data points have spurred some handwringing in blue America. But just how dire is the Democrats' predicament? Is the party temporarily tainted with the stink of last year's defeat — and poised to rally back into power, just as it did after losing in 2004 and 2016? Or is the better precedent for the party's current position 1981, when the party began a 12-year struggle to escape the shadow of a failed presidency?
Only prophets can answer such questions with certainty. In my own view, though, two things are true:
• The Democrats' putrid approval numbers paint a misleadingly bleak picture of its current standing.
• The party is in much worse shape than it was eight years ago, and will likely struggle to secure full control of the federal government any time soon.
Below, I'll detail five reasons for believing that first point, and two for accepting the second one.
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Why Democrats might not be in disarray
1. Disaffected, but loyal, Democrats are driving down their party's approval rating
In the Journal's poll, the GOP's net-favorability rating is 19 points higher than the Democratic Party's. And yet, in that same survey, voters say that they would prefer a Democratic Congress to a Republican one by a 3-point margin.
This seems odd. Voters disapprove of Democrats by a much larger margin than they disapprove of Republicans. Yet a plurality nonetheless say they would vote for the former party over the latter one.
As polling analysts G. Elliott Morris and Mary Radcliffe observe, there is only one explanation for this: Unhappy — but loyal — Democratic voters are driving down their party's favorability rating.
This interpretation is consistent with polling from YouGov and The Economist, which finds that only 74 percent of Democratic voters approve of congressional Democrats, while 22.6 percent disapprove. By contrast, 88.9 percent of Republican voters approve of their party's congressional causes, while just 8.3 percent disapprove.
Partisans often disapprove of their own parties when they suffer defeat. Republicans had abysmal approval numbers in 2009, yet stomped to a historic midterm victory the following year. And that turnaround was not an aberration: According to Morris and Radcliffe, historically, there is no correlation between how well a party performs in favorability polls taken this far from Election Day and how well they ultimately do at the ballot box.
It's unlikely that the Democrats' plummeting popularity is entirely attributable to the disaffection of its own base. The GOP's trust advantage on various issues suggests a broader problem. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party is (almost certainly) in better shape than its approval rating would suggest.
2. Trump is more unpopular than Biden was at this point in his presidency
The president's approval rating is among the best predictors of an opposition party's midterm success. And Donald Trump has rapidly squandered the American public's goodwill.
When Trump came into office, voters approved of him by an 11.6 margin, according to Nate Silver's polling average. Now, they disapprove of the president by 8.8 points.
For context, at this point in Joe Biden's presidency, the public still approved of the Democrat by more than 7 points. And although Trump's approval is unlikely to collapse to the extraordinary degree that Biden's did, there's reason for thinking it will follow the same trajectory. Namely:
3. Americans will likely feel the full impact of Trump's tariffs next year
Thus far, the economic impacts of Trump's tariffs have been fairly modest. Those duties have pushed up consumer prices and likely slowed economic growth. But they haven't triggered inflation akin to that which America witnessed in 2022, let alone a stagflationary crisis.
This is partly because Trump walked back his most radical tariff proposals. Yet the president's trade restrictions remain extraordinarily expansive, outstripping what many deemed the worst-case scenario during campaign season. According to Yale's Budget Lab, America's average effective tariff rate sits at 20.2 percent, its highest level since 1911. And Trump's current tariffs are poised to cost US households an average of $2,700 in annual income.
Americans are not yet paying the full price of Trump's trade policy. The US government has yet to begin collecting tariffs on many foreign countries. And American retailers loaded up on foreign goods earlier this year to get ahead of the president's trade duties. But as America ramps up its tariff collection regime — and companies draw down their inventories — consumer prices will rise. Preston Caldwell, chief US economist for Morningstar, recently told Vox that he expects inflation to peak in 2026, when voters will be heading to the polls.
4. Democrats dominated the most recent high-profile, swing-state election
Since Trump's conquest of the GOP in 2016, Democrats have gained ground with highly politically engaged voters, and lost support among less-engaged ones. This trade didn't work out very well in the high-turnout environment of 2024. But the fact that Democratic voters are now disproportionately 'reliable' — which is to say, disproportionately likely to cast a ballot in every election — may help them in the 2026 midterms, when overall turnout is sure to be lower.
And the results of this year's Supreme Court election in Wisconsin lend credence to this view. That contest was the one 2025 race that 1) pit a Democrat against a Republican, 2) took place in a swing state, and 3) galvanized national attention. And the Democrat won 10 points, outperforming her standing in the polls.
5. Democrats' best issue is gaining salience, while their worst issue is losing it
Finally, the American electorate's top concerns have been shifting, in ways that are potentially beneficial for Democrats.
For years, Republicans have enjoyed an advantage over Democrats on immigration. And the Journal's poll shows that voters still trust the GOP to better manage illegal immigration by a margin of 17 points.
But Americans are also much less worried about that issue than they were a year ago. In Gallup's polling, the share of voters who say they worry 'a great deal' about illegal immigration has fallen from 48 percent in 2024 to 40 percent this April. A more recent Gallup survey showed that the percentage of Americans who want immigration reduced has fallen from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who worry 'a great deal' about health care — perennially, one of the Democratic Party's strongest issues — rose from 51 percent to 59 percent in April. And that was before the GOP enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid funding.
Two causes for concern
1. Democrats are in much worse shape than they were in 2017.
All this said, there's still reason to fear for the Democrats' future. For one thing, the party is much weaker than it was at this point in Trump's first term. Eight years ago, voters said they favored a Democratic Congress over a Republican one by roughly 8 points (compared to just 3 points today).
Since 2018, the share of Americans who identify with the Democratic Party has also fallen sharply. Seven years ago, 50 percent of Americans said they supported (or leaned toward) the Democrats, while 42 percent said the same of Republicans, in Pew Research's polling. Today, 46 percent support the GOP while 45 percent back the Democrats.
Opposition parties almost always gain House seats in midterm elections. And since the Republican House majority is small, Democrats are heavily favored to retake the chamber next year. But current polling suggests that the party's gains will be meager.
And in 2028, for the first time in more than a decade, the Republican Party will not be led by Donald Trump. If the GOP retains its advantage on the economy — while shedding its exceptionally undisciplined and scandal-plagued standard-bearer — the party could become even more formidable.
This is a very speculative concern, to be sure. But it's worth entertaining the possibility that Democrats' current position is more analogous to its predicament in 1981 — when Jimmy Carter's defeat was followed by 12 years of Republican presidential rule — than in 2017.
The previous two times that Democrats lost control of the White House — in 2000 and 2016 — the party's outgoing president had been reasonably well-liked. Bill Clinton had earned a reputation for skillful economic management, thanks to the late 1990s economic expansion. Barack Obama was a singularly magnetic figure, and the US enjoyed relatively low unemployment and inflation in 2016. Both Clinton and Obama's successors won the popular vote in their respective elections, despite the fact that they each were conspicuously uncharismatic. Their losses could therefore be fairly easily dismissed as the consequence of easily reversible tactical errors.
By contrast, presiding over post-COVID inflation rendered Biden historically unpopular while devastating the Democrats' credibility on economic management.
Related The Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover
2. The party has long odds of winning the Senate anytime soon
The Democrats' biggest political problem, however, lies in the Senate.
The party's prospects for securing control of Congress's upper chamber — either next year, or in 2028 — look poor. Democrats need to gain four seats to win a Senate majority in 2026. Yet next year's map features no easy targets. The party's best pickup opportunity lies in Maine, a state that Kamala Harris won comfortably in 2024. But that state's incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins, won reelection by 8.6 points in 2020, even as the national political environment leaned towards Democrats. Her defeat next year is far from assured.
After defeating Collins, Democrats' next-best hope for growing their Senate caucus is winning the open seat in North Carolina, a state that backed Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot, most recently by 3 points.
If the party manages to beat Collins and win over the Tarheel State, they would still need to win races in Ohio and Iowa — or else, in places that are even more Republican — to eke out a bare majority in the Senate.
Even winning control of the Senate by 2029 would require extraordinary electoral feats. The most plausible path here would involve Democrats beating Collins, winning a race in North Carolina, flipping a Wisconsin Senate seat in 2028, and taking back the presidency that same year (since the vice president breaks all ties in the Senate, Democrats would only need to flip three seats to boast a working majority in 2029, provided that they control the White House). And yet, this path only works if Democratic Senate incumbents also win reelection in every swing state race between now and 2029: Specifically, Democrats would need to win two races in Georgia, one in Pennsylvania, one in Michigan, and one in Arizona.
This is conceivable. But it is not especially likely.
The fundamental problem facing Democrats is that only 19 states voted for their party in each of the last three federal elections, while 25 US states backed Trump all three times. Put differently, the median US state is more right-wing than America as a whole. In practice, this means that — to win a Senate majority — Democrats don't merely need to beat Republicans nationally, but to do so by a hefty margin. For context, in 2018, Democrats won the House popular vote by 8.6 points and still lost Senate seats.
In the US, midterms usually witness backlashes against the president's party. But Democrats need more than an ordinary midterm backlash to put themselves on pace to win the Senate by 2029. And without a Senate majority, Democrats that year would be unable to pass partisan legislation or appoint liberal Supreme Court justices, even if they did manage to win the presidency.
Democrats might not need to become drastically more popular to win back the House. But to actually run the federal government, they likely need to make their party more broadly appealing than it was eight years ago. This makes their historically low approval rating more than a little alarming.