Reflect on all of the awful political developments in the United States since 1990 and consider that at no point have voters been as alienated from either party as they are from Democrats at this moment.
As remarkable as that is, there’s an easy story we might tell to explain it: Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.
Hating the Democratic establishment has always been a core part of progressives’ political identity, but mainstream liberals have had good reason lately to sour on it too. Their party just lost to a felonious authoritarian miscreant again. And not only did it lose, its leaders sabotaged its chances by covering up Joe Biden’s declining health until the issue blew up in their faces four months before the election.
The last time Democrats led Republicans in net favorability was October 2020. By November of the following year, after a mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan and many more months of COVID-driven school closures, the party had reached its lowest mark in popularity to that point since the Journal began polling. The rest of Biden’s term produced inflation not seen in decades, a disaster in border enforcement that spooked swing voters, and a popular backlash to the left’s cultural agenda that gave Trump the capital he needed to wage war on diversity programs and pro-trans policies.
It’s been a long time since Democrats achieved something major that was unambiguously popular with voters to offset the many losses they’ve taken over the last five years. Their most momentous accomplishment since 2015 was sending Trump into retirement in 2020—barely, as it turned out, and only temporarily.
That’s the easy story of Democratic unpopularity. Their voters are tired of failure. The problem is that you can tell a similar story about the GOP from 2005 to 2010.
George W. Bush’s second term brought numerous calamities, from the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina to the financial crisis, and ended with a Republican wipeout at the polls in 2008. The party was left leaderless and was told repeatedly that Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” would bring about a permanent Democratic majority. Right-wing voters hated their party’s establishment at least as much as modern progressives hate theirs, enough so to have birthed a Tea Party movement aimed at unseating moderate Republican officeholders in primaries.
Yet, despite all that, the GOP never fared worse than -17 in net favorability over that five-year period.
Why are Democrats so much less popular now?
No confidence.
One way to answer that question is to dismiss it. It doesn’t matter if Democratic voters hate their party, you might say. What matters is whether they’re still willing to turn out to vote for it.
And they are, it appears. Earlier this month CNN found Democrats’ favorability at 28 percent, the worst number Team Blue has received in more than 30 years of CNN polling. But the same poll saw 72 percent of Democrats and “leaners” describe themselves as extremely motivated to vote in next fall’s midterms, 22 points higher than the share of Republicans and Republican-“leaners” who say so. A blue wave remains well within the realm of possibility, despite the Democratic Party’s unpopularity.
The Journal’s data supports that theory, in fact. In November 2010 the GOP annihilated Barack Obama’s party in House races. Two months later, Republicans were still viewed much less favorably (-13) than Democrats (-1) were. A party can thrive at the polls if many of its own voters dislike it, so long as they dislike the other side a little more.
Under that theory, the collapse in Democratic popularity is a mirage of sorts. Lots of left-leaning voters are really, really angry at their party right now for blowing the election to Trump and then flailing ineffectually as he sledgehammers various federal institutions, but they’ll come around. They’re just butthurt!
If only it were that simple.
Start with this: The same Journal poll that saw Democrats’ overall favorability cratering also found that voters now trust Republicans more to handle various key issues—including issues on which Trump receives bad marks. The economy, inflation, foreign policy, immigration, tariffs: More Americans disapprove of how the president is handling each issue than approve, yet they still have more faith in Trump’s party to deal with each than they have in Democrats.
That looks to me like a catastrophic decline in confidence in the left’s basic ability to govern. The fact that tariffs are among the issues on which the GOP is favored is especially shocking given that even many of Trump’s own supporters are suspicious of his trade policies. Voters do still trust Democrats more on health care and vaccines, two subjects on which Republicans are famously terrible, but otherwise Americans prefer to take their chances with a MAGA-fied GOP basically across the board.
That’s not all. If the Democratic Party’s collapsing favorability were being driven by ephemeral liberal disgruntlement, we wouldn’t expect to see significant shifts in party identification towards Republicans. A Democrat who’s butthurt will still identify as a Democrat (or an independent, if they’re really butthurt). They wouldn’t join the Trump Party.
In reality, lots of Americans have joined the Trump Party. In 2018, Pew Research saw Democrats ahead on party ID, 50-42, when leaners were included. By 2020 that had slipped to 49-43. Now, in 2025, it’s landed at 46-45—in favor of Republicans. Over the last seven years, every major racial and educational demographic has shifted to the right, especially nonwhites. If all Americans had voted last year, Trump still would have won. That’s not butthurt. That’s realignment.
If you’re still skeptical, consider Trump’s job approval. On this date in his first term he was crawling along at 39.7 percent, almost 16 points underwater. Today, despite the more aggressive authoritarian tactics of his second term, he’s at 46 percent approval and less than 6 points from positive territory. If you’re foolish enough to think the Jeffrey Epstein uproar might do him real damage, note that he’s declined a grand total of six-tenths of a point in approval since news broke that his Justice Department had nothing more to share in the matter.
It’s not a mirage. America has become meaningfully less friendly to Democrats. Why?
Something different.
I suspect it’s because Democrats have become the party of the status quo. The Trump revolution necessarily slotted liberals into the role of the ancien régime, and no one likes the ancien régime.
A weird (but not quite contradictory) quirk about Americans is that most of us say we live in the greatest country in the world, yet most of us also say—and have, for years—that that country is on the wrong track. And that remains true no matter who’s in charge: Since 2009, not once has the number of people who believe the U.S. is on the right track exceeded the number who say otherwise in the RealClearPolitics average.
Not once. Not for a single day in more than 15 years. That’s some mighty deep, protracted dissatisfaction with the direction of modern America.
In 2016 Republicans broke radically with the unsatisfying status quo by nominating Trump for president. He was boorish, he was ruthless, he was iconoclastic—he was different. He aimed to win the culture war, unapologetically, and looked dimly on restraints on that effort and on his own power. Democrats responded by positioning themselves as defenders of civic norms and institutions, wagering that Americans would side with them against Trump once those stakes were clear.
Not only did they choose poorly, they chose caricatures of the political status quo to represent them on the ballot. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were the platonic ideal of establishment Democrat dinosaurs; Kamala Harris was derided as a so-called “diversity” pick who owed her spot on the ticket in 2020 as much to her race and sex as her governing credentials. Millions of Americans who aren’t particularly ideological and don’t follow politics closely but know that they want something different have accordingly had an easy choice before them on Election Day since 2016.
Some may have turned to Trump in part because the last candidate whom Democrats presented as something different turned out to be not so different in practice. When the New York Times recently interviewed nonwhite voters who supported the president last November, several African Americans told the paper that they felt they had nothing to lose by doing so. “We had eight years of Obama, and the communities didn’t change. Our communities probably got worse,” said one. “[Democrats] need to take accountability for how they have mismanaged the black communities.”
A country that’s grown gradually more disgusted over time with the status quo and with the two major parties that produced it was primed to depart from it radically, and now it has. More so than for any particular idea, the post-Biden Democratic Party might now be a stand-in in the American consciousness for politics writ large as it was practiced from the end of the Cold War to 2016. If so, the astonishing collapse in Democratic favorability in the Journal poll begins to make sense: It’s not just disdain for the party’s leaders or its program that’s driving the decline, it’s a sense of good riddance to an era that left many Americans dissatisfied.
That might not be the case if modern Democrats stood for some big idea that defined them clearly, but an irony of this age is that Trump has an ideological vision yet few policy ideas apart from immigration and trade, while Democrats have lots of discrete policy ideas but no vision. It reminds me of The Onion’s parody of the two parties’ positions in the 1980 election. What is the Democrats’ big-picture goal in 2025—apart from protecting as much of the widely despised institutional status quo as possible from Donald Trump?
The GOP of the Tea Party era didn’t need a big-picture goal because owning the libs, not passing an affirmative legislative program, is what traditionally has driven the right. Since 2016 that impulse has been channeled into a cult of personality around Trump such that “serious” policy disputes like bombing Iran or aiding Ukraine are settled in a blink once he endorses them. That may explain why Republicans have never reached the depths of unfavorability that Democrats have presently sunk to: In the end, hating the left is enough to paper over all disagreements.
Democrats haven’t had a leader capable of imposing conformity like that since Obama. And unlike the right, the left’s various factions do tend to have firm, often conflicting ideological commitments that compete to drive the party’s agenda. If it’s true that a rift is widening between centrist liberals and “Tea Party” progressives, we might expect both wings to grow less happy with the Democratic Party as each attacks the other’s favored policies—and that does seem to be what we’re seeing in the Journal’s graph. For lefties, owning the cons isn’t enough.
A strategic dilemma.
There are other factors that might be contributing to the Democrats’ collapse. If you believe that the mainstream media’s bias is worth something to Team Blue, go figure that the party’s numbers began to crumble once voters started seeking out less traditional sources for political coverage.
Or you might reason, paradoxically, that Democrats are in freefall because Trump’s authoritarian agenda has proven to be so radical. For all the Tea Party hysteria about socialism circa 2009, Obama didn’t do anything half as hair-raising as shipping people off to foreign prisons without due process to be beaten and sexually abused. Instead of leading Americans to appreciate Democrats more by contrast, though, Trump’s program may have ended up leading leftists to appreciate Democrats less because the party’s leadership can’t find a way to galvanize the public against it.
Remember, some congressional Democrats say they’ve been told by constituents that they should be willing to get shot if that’s what it takes to stop Trump. And so it might be more than a coincidence that the party’s popularity has collapsed at the same time as Democratic voters’ pride in being Americans has: The same left-wing disgust at what the country is becoming may be showing up in their plummeting esteem for a party that seems to have neither the brains nor the will to stop it.
Whatever the explanation, Democrats are about to face a strategic dilemma. If I’m right that they’re being killed by perceptions that they’re “the party of the status quo,” doesn’t that mean the key to victory next fall is … something different?
Like, how different? Zohran Mamdani “seize the means of production” different?
If something different on the right is what lured nonwhite voters towards Trump, something different on the left might logically be the way to lure them back. But that’s risky, per Times political analyst Nate Cohn: Given that a lot of those voters have become sufficiently well disposed to the GOP to have voted for the president last fall, a radical left-wing agenda might frighten them even further to the right. They’re America’s swing voters now. Do parties normally go after swing voters by turning their kook dial up to 11?
On the other hand, Cohn pointed out, the sort of Blue Dog centrism to which parties have traditionally turned to woo swing voters is more likely to appeal to white suburbanites (who have already moved left in the age of Trump) than to the nonwhite voters that the party actually needs to persuade. There’s a “status quo” sweet spot somewhere in which Democrats are just radical enough to qualify as something different, but not so radical that undecideds need to start worrying about them abolishing prisons or whatever.
They have 15 months to find it.
