“Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years” began the headline from The Wall Street Journal. “The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party,” the Journal reports, “the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.”
The newspaper’s poll is far from the first survey to show the party’s brand in the dumps. In an NBC News poll from March, just 27% of voters had positive opinions of the Democratic Party, its “lowest positive rating in NBC News polling dating back to 1990.” A CNN poll this month put the party’s favorability at 28%, the lowest since 1992.
Democratic politicians shouldn’t worry — at least not yet. But Democratic leaders should start fretting.
Why the discrepancy between the party’s favorability and its share of the congressional ballot?
As my colleague Steve Benen noted, the first sign that most Democrats shouldn’t be alarmed comes from the Journal’s same poll. Forty-six percent of voters said that if the midterm elections were held, they’d back a Democrat for Congress, compared with 43% who would back a Republican. The Journal adds that “at this point in 2017, the Democratic lead was 8 percentage points,” but even a 3-point lead would be more than enough to at least flip the House. (And as polling analysts G. Elliott Morris and Mary Radcliffe note, there’s no correlation between a party’s favorability rating this far out and its performance in an election.)
Why the discrepancy between the party’s favorability and its share of the congressional ballot? In the NBC News poll, the Democratic Party’s decline in standing stemmed in no small part from angry Democrats. “Nearly 20% of Democratic voters say they have negative views of the party,” NBC News reported at the time, while “10% of Republicans say the same about the GOP.” Other recent polls find a similar decline: The July edition of the Economist/YouGov poll, for instance, found 66% of Democrats view the congressional representatives of their party favorably, versus 27% who view them unfavorably. That may sound like a positive, but as recently as October those numbers were 85% and 6% respectively.
The Journal didn’t release crosstabs for its poll, but a comparison with a Fox News poll conducted at almost the same time is instructive. The polls surveyed similar populations of registered voters, used similar methods and found similar approval ratings for the president. But in asking voters which party was better on the economy, for example, the Fox poll had the two parties essentially split (49%-48% in Republicans’ favor), while the Journal poll gave Republicans a plurality of 39% to 27%.
The big difference, as CNN polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy pointed out, is that the Fox poll gave respondents just the two parties as options, while the Journal added “both equally” and “neither.” In the latter poll, roughly 10% of the respondents chose “both,” and about 20% chose “neither.” But when they were pushed to choose, as in the Fox poll, the result is a lot different. That difference suggests Democrats or Democratic leaners are dissatisfied with their own party.
Democratic leaders should be familiar with this dynamic, as it afflicted the most significant Democratic legislation of the last 20 years. After President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats enacted the Affordable Care Act in 2010, polls consistently showed the new law was unpopular. After Republicans swept to victory in the midterms later that year, GOP politicians had every reason to expect the new law’s unpopularity would make Obama a one-term president.
The Democratic base is clear what strategy it wants.
But when given the chance to explain their view, a chunk of the bill’s opponents said it didn’t go far enough. Voters for whom Obamacare didn’t go far enough were never going to vote Republican, and indeed the ACA was no obstacle to Obama’s securing a relatively comfortable re-election. Today, the law is viewed more favorably than ever.
Most Democratic politicians, then, shouldn’t be worried. The party is doing even better in special elections this year than it did in the first year of Trump’s first term, according to analysis by The Downballot. The same CNN poll with risible favorability numbers for Democrats also found 72% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters are “extremely motivated” to vote in the midterms, 22 percentage points higher than Republicans. And Trump’s approval ratings are well underwater as he enters the first August of his new term, often a rough month for presidents (think George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina or Joe Biden and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan).
The one group of Democrats who can’t rest easy is the party leadership, especially in Congress. Already, a Reuters/Ipsos poll from June found 62% of Democrats want the party’s leadership replaced. The Democratic base is clear what strategy it wants: In the NBC News poll, for instance, roughly two-thirds of Democrats said they preferred Democrats in Congress to “stick to their positions” rather than compromise with Trump. And while favorability at this point doesn’t correlate with midterm performance over a year from now, if things don’t turn around by fall 2026, that could dampen turnout enough to lose key races. A midterm is supposed to bring victories for the opposition party; if Democratic voters end up disappointed, their already ample anger at their party’s leaders could explode into something extraordinary.
