If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you must be thinking that the Democrats are cruising to a 2026 midterm bonanza.
After all, we’ve got that “MAGA civil war” over the Iran attacks. (Except that kind of went away once the Iran attacks went well.) Now we have “MAGA civil war” over the Epstein files. (Which will probably go away now that the Trump administration is making transparency on the dead sex trafficker and financier a priority.)
And, of course, you have that Big Beautiful Bill, which — we were all reliably informed — was going to kill millions — if not billions or even trillions — of seniors instantly the moment it was passed because of health care cuts. (Haven’t seen the data on that yet, but when have the Democrats ever been wrong when they’ve fallen back on shrill messaging that fiscal continence and reasonable budgetary priorities mean “people will die?”)
So clearly, now that MAGA is gearing up to fight its own Antietam over foreign policy or Epstein or something (quick organizational question for the civil war thing: How do we tell which side is which when we’re all wearing red caps?) and seniors are dropping dead in the streets because of Donald Trump and the GOP, the Democrats must be doing better than ever, right?
Actually, they’re doing worse than ever. And I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way: Literally, the Democratic Party is at its lowest point in The Wall Street Journal’s history of party-approval polling, which dates back to 1990.
“Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term,” the Wall Street Journal said in announcing the results on Friday night.
“But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.”
Give this much to the Wall Street Journal: They’re nothing if not masters of understatement there. In the strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” Calvin once said that scientists missed the boat on conveying the scope of the big bang by not calling it the “horrendous space kablooie!” In the same way, the WSJ probably should have considered “Horrendous Poll Kablooie!” as its headline.
In a poll of 1,500 registered voters taken between July 16-20, 63 percent of respondents said they held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, compared to just 33 percent who held a favorable view.
Are the Democrats done for?
That 30 percent gap is the highest ever recorded by the publication — and its down nine points since April, when the party had a negative 21 percent gap.
Even in a poll released July 2, 2024 — this was after Biden had proved he was non compos mentis on a debate stage on June 27 but before he actually pulled out of the race because America had figured out with their own eyes that he’d outsourced most of his executive powers to Jill, Hunter, and their retinue — the Democrats only had a minus-20 approval rating.
The Republicans aren’t doing grand, either, with a negative 11 percent approval rating. But that’s hardly a low, particularly in the post-Iraq quagmire era where the rating for the GOP has always been underwater.
The only good piece of news was that, in a hypothetical congressional ballot, voters said they would back a Democrat over a Republican 46 to 43 percent. That’s close to the 2.5 percent margin of error, though — and in 2017, at the same point, the lead was 8 points for the Democrats.
Furthermore, Trump’s approval rating is at 46 percent with 52 percent disapproval — but this is also higher than the 40 percent approval at this point in his first term.
“We were already watching the tide moving out for the Republican Party by this point in 2017, and that’s not where we are today,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster.
“And that’s worth jumping up and down and trying to explain: how much more competitive Trump and the Republicans are today than in 2017.”
The only other good news is that voters disapproved of how Trump was handling some issues — but also felt the alternative would be worse:
In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.
Voters have significant concerns about the centerpiece of Trump’s agenda—his immigration policies—opposing some of his deportation tactics by double-digit numbers. And yet they trust congressional Republicans more than Democrats on immigration by 17 points and on handling illegal immigration by 24 points.
A Democratic pollster who worked on the survey said that it was because his party had lost the ability to be credible opposition.
“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” John Anzalone said.
“Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”
Of course, maybe it’s the fact that people remember who caused a lot of these problems in the first place — and who told them, in the run-up to the 2024 election, that they’d never had it so good, they just didn’t know it.
And then there’s the shifting electorate. Remember that old phrase “demographics is destiny” — the idea that the changing racial and age makeup of the United States meant we’d invariably become more Democratic? You don’t hear that anymore, because a funny thing happened on the way to assuming people vote based on the color of their skin or their country of origin:
At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district.
Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate—and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.
While I don’t see a granular breakdown here, we’ve seen too many other polls that show the GOP’s broader base for this to be a non-issue. It’s almost like two decades and change of Democrats effectively telling America “if you’re young, you’re non-white, or female, shut up and vote for us, we’ll give you free stuff and make the old white patriarchy pay” somehow wasn’t a winning message. I can’t imagine how.
And by the way — generally speaking, in the Journal’s poll, at this point the opposition party to the White House should be on the upswing. It shouldn’t be trending downward like Peloton stock after the stay-at-home orders were lifted, which is basically what the Democratic Party approval graph looks like right now. And yet, we’re told that the GOP is in disarray, and Trump’s base is splintering over [insert issue here], and the Democrats are poised to take control once our civil war gets underway in earnest.
Meanwhile, when they’re not fighting the possibility of Zohran Mamdani being the face of the party for the foreseeable future, they’re fighting the lowest approval numbers they’ve ever seen. Let’s hope the horrendous poll kablooie turns out to be the horrendous midterm kablooie, as well.
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