Donald Trump is flailing. Despite easy battlefield victories, the Iran War is quickly turning into a quagmire; the regime has not fallen, and threats against oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz are causing gasoline prices to soar and threatening to reignite inflation. This is on top of Trump’s existing unpopularity due to the cost of living and the violent lawlessness of ICE. The electorate is moving solidly toward the Democrats; even groups that traditionally supported Trump are starting to get fed up. Unless Trump somehow manages to cancel the midterms, it seems certain that his party is going to take a huge loss.
And yet if Democrats want to really capitalize on this epic failure of Trumpism — if they want to hold power for more than just one more backlash cycle — they will need an ideology that’s more appealing than what they have now. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is still extremely low. An NBC News poll from two weeks ago found that the Democrats’ net favorability was worse than the GOP, Donald Trump, or even ICE itself:
Many progressives claim that these low approval ratings are due to progressive voters disapproving of the Democrats for failing to fight Trump hard enough. That’s probably a factor on the margin, but it ignores the Democrats’ deep unpopularity on core issues. For example, a poll from six weeks ago found that voters preferred Republican approaches to Democratic ones on immigration, crime, and most other issues, even though they planned to vote for Democrats:
And polls consistently find that Democratic voters themselves would prefer that their party took more moderate stances, especially on social issues such as crime and trans issues.
In other words, most of the Dems’ unpopularity probably doesn’t come from their lack of aggressiveness against Trump; it mostly comes from the fact that progressive ideology is unpopular.
In fact, many progressives probably don’t even realize that their values are out of step with the country. On a survey by the Cooperative Election Study, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all basically agreed that Republican voters are very conservative. But Democrats saw themselves as moderates, even though Independents and Republicans saw them as leaning strongly to the left:
This is evidence that a lot of progressive Democrats are living in a bubble with regards to the overall country’s values. The simplest explanation is that progressive institutions — universities, nonprofits, etc. — and deep blue cities have concentrated educated progressives so much that they don’t interact with the masses of Americans very often, and hence don’t realize how far out of step their values are with the values of the electorate.
A prime issue is trans rights. While 54% of Democrats say people are able to change their gender, 74% of Independents say gender is determined at birth:
