Trump’s falling in polls. Why aren’t Democrats benefiting?

In Navigator Research’s polling this year, favorable views of the Democratic Party started negative and stayed there — a 44-51 favorable/unfavorable rating after Trump’s first weeks, a 43-53 rating after 100 days. Over the same period, the GOP’s favorable/unfavorable rating dipped from 46-50 to 43-54. Voters grew more sour about Trump and Republicans.

It didn’t benefit Democrats at all. In NBC News polling, the party has fared even worse, with a record low 27% approval rating driven by frustration from their own base.

This was not the story eight years ago, around the 100-day mark of Trump’s first governing trifecta. Quinnipiac University’s national polling put Democrats 16 points ahead in a House ballot test, benefitting from widespread buyer’s remorse. By a 49-point margin, voters disapproved of what Republicans were doing in Congress; they disapproved of what Democrats were doing by roughly half that, a 24-point margin.

There is no similar polling to calm Democrats in 2025. In a survey shared with House Republicans last week, their campaign chair Richard Hudson, R-N.C., found Trump just barely underwater in competitive seats, and Republicans up by an average of 2 points in the 13 Democratic seats that Trump carried last year.

Their party’s persistent unpopularity has been a subject of heated debate between Democrats — especially the loss of their usual advantage when voters are asked which party cares more about people like them.

“This is a party that has a 27% approval rating,” former New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman said last week on the new Zeteo show he hosts with former Missouri Rep. Cori Bush. “The party is on life support and it needs new ideas, new voices, new energy to come and save it.”

Bowman and Bush, who were ousted thanks in part to millions of dollars spent by pro-Israel groups to challenge them in primaries last year, agreed that Democrats would have been stronger had they listened to them.

Moderate Democrats, just as confidently, have blamed the left wing for discrediting the entire party with the voters they need to win back. In March, other polling for Navigator Research found a majority of voters in swing seats agreeing that Democrats were “more focused on helping other people than people like me,” that they were “too focused on being politically correct,” and that they did not share voters’ values.

Democrats who’ve been competing in state elections countered that the DC gloom isn’t spreading everywhere.

“We’ve seen three specials this year where we put up 20-point over-performances,” said Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls, pointing to a significant shift toward the party locally that helped them flip one seat just a week into Trump’s term. “We are seeing huge energy, whether it’s door-knocking or recruitment or rallies outside the big cities. That energy is more important, to me, than poll numbers.”

But that strength has come in lower-turnout elections, without much evidence that voters who abandoned the party have been convinced to come back. According to Smith, Democrats are not benefiting automatically from Trump or GOP problems because 74% of all voters say they wanted “major change” in the political system, or to change that system entirely.

Just 26% said that the system needed minor changes, or none at all.

“Most people don’t just want a system update,” said Smith. “If you offer them a version 1.2 of America, they won’t see a difference in their day to day life. They’d rather see and feel change.”

The easiest answer to the Democrats’ problem is the one reporters enjoy the least: It’s early.

Most voters rejected Democrats last year, and they’re not looking at politics again until they really have to.

But why are Democrats less popular now than they usually are after defeats, and why are Republicans holding onto most of their 2024 support?

One reason, suggested by the actual special election results so far, is that some of the anti-Democratic negativity is from people who will vote for the party anyway. NBC’s headline-generating poll found that 59% of self-identified Democrats wanted their party to compromise with Trump in 2017. This year, just 32% of Democrats said that.

Those Democrats heard their party leaders call Trump a threat to democracy, and they are sticking to their opposition, even when the leaders waver.

Another reason is a long-term shift against the party that’s been visible in voter registration patterns for eight years. At this point in 2017, Democrats still outnumbered registered Republicans in Florida. Republicans now hold a 1.2-million voter advantage.

The decline hasn’t been quite so Alpine everywhere, but there is grist here for moderate Democrats who say that their party lost voters, perhaps for good, with the leftward shift that started at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and arguably ended during Biden’s.

And Biden’s unpopularity, driven by questions about why he ran again at age 81, is a frequent Democratic distraction. (Tune in to “The View” this week!)

I’d propose a third reason why Democrats are lagging right now: Republicans learned from 2017 that they are most vulnerable when they are targeting health care and entitlements for cuts. At this moment, eight years ago, the GOP was slogging through its doomed Obamacare repeal campaign, which would drag on through July.

That raised the salience of the Democratic Party’s best issue and united it behind one cause. Republicans learned from that and are talking as little as they can in public about cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that might make it into their party-line tax and spending package.

Democratic messaging often tries to change the news of the day back to Medicare and Medicaid; Republicans have not given them much of a hook for that, working in committee rooms on targeted health care spending cuts that are wrapped tight in jargon.

Would Democrats’ problems be fixed if the DS conversation turned to this? No, but they have been fighting the “which party cares about people like you” question on unfamiliar turf — tariffs and stock prices, not the cost of medicine.

Lakshya Jain, a partner at the election firm Split Ticket, said that Democrats are actually situated where most losing parties are, this far from their last defeat.

“Usually, the party out of power has a stink on them for a while,” Jain said. “First-quarter generic ballot polling virtually always overshoots the eventual margin of the in-party.”

At this point in 2005, and 2009 and 2013, the party that had lost the presidency was not leading substantially in public polling. Each time, that party went on to win a midterm election landslide the following autumn.

Democrats’ early advantage in 2017 was an “aberration,” said Jain, because Trump had lost the popular vote and got mired in fights like the unsuccessful effort to repeal Obamacare. “This presidency is behaving much more like the other presidencies have, in terms of public opinion.”