The Democrats Lousy Polling
Plus all the week's links
This has been a very good week for understanding why many Democrats still dislike the Democratic Party and why it’s not apt to be a problem for the party this fall.
Here’s the thing: The big reason that Democratic voters and a fair number of Dem party actors are fed up with the party right now is because of an impression that the party hasn’t fought hard enough – you don’t have to look very hard to find people saying that the big split in the party is between “fight or fold.” And the truth is that simulating a tough fighting spirit is hard to do for minority parties in Congress – and very easy to do for non-incumbent candidates for office.
So yes, for example, the most recent polling I see (from Navigator Research) had the Democratic Party under water and only a few ticks less unpopular than the GOP. But we’ve seen this before.
The Tea Party in 2010 wasn’t just a revolt against Barack Obama; it was in very large part directed against the Republican Party for failing to win – to fight hard enough for – sufficient conservative victories.1 It’s true that some of the Tea Party candidates that year really were more conservative than those they replaced, but in lots of cases it was just the same or similar folks who just learned to talk tough. The result? Anti-”Republican” Republicans produced a huge landslide for the party. I’m not predicting the same outcome for the out-party in 2026, but I’m pretty sure that Democratic frustration with their own party just won’t matter much by Election Day.
I’ll start with the incumbents. Congressional Democrats spent the early part of the week getting beat up by a lot of pundits because they didn’t boycott the State of the Union address, thereby (supposedly) undermining any effort to show that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. The decision they had to make was actually a bit more complicated; boycotting would prevent other actions such as holding up signs and getting kicked out (as Al Green did) or heckling and then walking out (as Talib and Omar did) and would have given viewers two hours of everyone in the room applauding Trump.
Now, in reality I’m very confident that anything Democrats did Tuesday night would have been quickly forgotten – indeed, given that State of the Union speeches themselves are almost always quickly forgotten, it’s very unlikely what the opposition does could become an ongoing story. But it’s easy for Democratic voters to get the mistaken idea that the party in Congress isn’t fighting. Indeed, the fact that some of them chose noisy ways to react made the rest of the party, including leadership (most of whom attended) look even worse.
And the thing is that congressional Democrats are constantly facing these kinds of choices: Not fight or fold, but how to navigate a situation where they’re going to lose whatever they do. Not to mention cases, such as the spending bills recently passed by Congress, where Democratic negotiators actually rolled back a lot of the proposals coming from the White House – where the choice they were making was between looking like “fighters” and losing, or cutting deal that provided real gains for their constituents compared with plausible alternatives.
The point isn’t that compromise is always the best choice. It’s that the minority party is always going to look like losers in Congress, regardless of what choice they make. And that’s going to produce a lot of frustration among voters. Sometimes deserved, sometimes undeserved, but real either way.
However! The opposite situation applies to every single candidate for Republican and open seats. It’s easy for them to proclaim themselves as fighters. All they have to do is say it! And it’s easy for them to contrast themselves with the losers who the party currently has in office.
We’re seeing that here in Texas, where both of the candidates in the contested Democratic primary for US Senate are calling themselves the real fighter. I don’t know who will win the primary; the polls are pretty close. But as far as I can tell Democrats in Texas who have been paying attention generally like both of them and buy that they will follow up on their promises to fight Trump.
An even better case might be Illinois US House candidate Kat Abughazaleh, who has made establishment-bashing a central part of his candidacy. This week she complained that Democrats in Congress haven’t been “breaking quorum” and otherwise “exploiting parliamentary procedure.” Never mind that breaking quorum isn’t something that (unlike in some state legislatures) minority parties can do in Congress. Or that Senate Democrats right now are defeating the Republicans’ big election bill by filibuster, and have shut down the Department of Homeland Security by using the filibuster. In other words, that congressional Democrats are already using the parliamentary procedures available.2 It still sounds like she won’t settle for losing.
I’m not knocking any of these “fighters.” I’m sure they mean it. Anyway, it no doubt sounds good to frustrated minority-party voters that their candidates want to go on the offensive. That’s their job right now.
Even if it has the additional effect of reinforcing voter suspicions that the current incumbents, especially the leadership, isn’t doing enough.
And of course part of why this all works is that this November the ones on the ballot will be the local candidates, not Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden or “The Party Establishment.”
Then again, that’s just one of the costs of being a leader in Congress – taking the blame for things so that rank-and-file members, and in this case also new candidates, don’t have to. If Jeffries and Schumer don’t like it, I’m sure someone else will be willing to bear the burden. I hear that they’re all fighters, too.
How about some links? Don’t miss Julia over on Greg Sargent’s pod (with transcript) talking about Trump’s polls and more. Greg’s always great even when he doesn’t have a GP/BP guest, by the way.
1. Elizabeth N. Saunders at Good Authority on Trump and Iran. Essential. (And by the way: I try to limit myself to one Good Authority item per week, but there are just so many excellent pieces over there. Just outstanding work, one after another).
2. Dan Drezner on Trump and Iran.
3. Matt Glassman on the legislative veto.
4. Miranda Yaver on the SAVE Act and health policy.
5. Casey Burgat has all the SOTU facts.
6. Ray La Raja and Robert Saldin on participation, transparency, and democracy.
7. Natalie Jackson on Gallup.
8. Daniel Nichanian on March elections. It’s going to be a busy month.
9. And I loved Seth Masket on Trump’s SOTU as a 1970s variety show. I’m adding an important clarification, however: On the good 1970s variety shows – Carol Burnett, or best of all the Muppets – the guest star enhanced the hosts’ strengths, creating wonderful TV. Seth’s talking about, well, most of the rest of them. (I liked the bad ones too, but sheesh were they often bad. Not as painful as Trump’s speech, though).
As is the case now, part of the additional frustration then was from two years of divided government before the other party won the presidency in 2008 and 2024, with partisans blaming their own party, rather than the inherent limits of divided government, for failure to achieve their goals.
Again: It’s true that there are procedural maneuvers that congressional Democrats have not used because they believe it would be counterproductive. They could be wrong! But I can say that there is nothing that Mitch McConnell used (or various GOP House leaders) used when Democrats had unified party government in 1993-1994, 2009-2010, and 2021-2022 that Democrats have not used during this Congress.