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The Democrats' Opportunity, If Only They Can Seize It

President Donald Trump's approval rating is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden's was at this point in his term. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president's approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50 percent, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 elections.

So the Democratic Party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November. That's good, but not good enough.

The stakes are so high that a win isn't sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.

The easiest issue, perhaps surprisingly, is immigration. Since 2024, Democrats have been snakebit on the subject, afraid that their instinctive pro-immigrant positions were unpopular enough to lead voters to select a snarling villain vowing mass deportations. They can exhale. What the polls over the past year suggest is that most Americans are not white-supremacist goons like Stephen Miller, ready to trash the Constitution in the name of purifying die Volk.

Instead, voters actually believed that Trump would only deport "the worst of the worst." As they watched the inhuman treatment of gardeners, veterans, children, and American-citizen protesters, they soured fast. Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, fully 60 percent of respondents told NBC they disapproved of Trump's immigration policies, 49 percent strongly so.

If Democrats present themselves as opposing the brutal tactics of ICE and CPB and favoring firm border controls, they should find themselves in the sweet spot. Messages like Billie Eilish's "No one is illegal on stolen land" are unhelpful. By all means, get angry about the savagery; stress that law and order means that first and foremost the state cannot be the lawbreaker. But also add that borders are not notional and chaos cannot be permitted to prevail along the Rio Grande.

The other big issue on voters' minds is inflation, or "affordability." The reality is that politicians cannot actually bring prices down, as Trump promised to do in 2024, except by crashing the economy. Still, some voters presumably believed him, and they are disillusioned now. Some Democrats may be tempted to run on taxing the rich. This is a comfortable old shoe for Democrats, but as a political strategy it hasn't been terribly successful. Middle-class voters often fear that they will be labeled as rich.

On the other hand, voters have already concluded that tariffs are making life more expensive. The issue is a layup — if Democrats can get out of their own way. Nearly 60 percent of Americans blame Trump for rising prices, and 65 percent disapprove of his tariffs. Fifty-nine percent of independent voters say the tariffs have hurt the economy and their personal finances. Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs. Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.

The progressive wing of the party has long favored tariffs as a way to protect American workers from competition from low-wage nations. This muddies the waters.

Cutting tariffs is one of the only levers governments can pull that will actually reduce prices, and since price sensitivity is very much on voters' minds, does it make sense to temper that message at all? All House Democrats voted in favor of a resolution that would end the national emergency excuse for tariffs, and three Republicans joined them. This is the moment. Tariffs are bad — full stop.

Finally, a vulnerability that Democrats must overcome is seeming soft on crime. Here again the Trump administration has handed them a golden opportunity. MAGA is so fixated on ethnic cleansing that it is pulling Justice Department officials off crime-fighting to pursue immigration cases. A memo from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed officers who had been working on transnational organized crime, money laundering, and major drug trafficking networks to focus instead on assisting ICE. Ditto for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

Ditto for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. In fact, roughly 25 percent of FBI agents (and 40 percent in larger field offices) have been diverted from fighting financial crimes, public corruption, cybercrime and complex corporate investigations and pulled into immigration enforcement. Most maddening are the thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents who've been pulled from investigations of child sex abuse to assist with deportations — as if the administration needed more ways of signaling that it's OK with child sex trafficking.

In fact, roughly 25 percent of FBI agents (and 40 percent in larger field offices) have been diverted from fighting financial crimes, public corruption, cybercrime and complex corporate investigations and pulled into immigration enforcement. Most maddening are the thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents who've been pulled from investigations of child sex abuse to assist with deportations — as if the administration needed more ways of signaling that it's OK with child sex trafficking.

Democrats should stress that the funds appropriated for ICE would be far better deployed to local police departments. Bill Clinton's promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the '90s and cut against the Democrats' soft-on-crime image. The slogans write themselves: More Cops, Less ICE.

The voters are the last redoubt in the fight to reclaim American democracy and decency, and the Democratic Party, the world's oldest political party since the advent of universal suffrage, is the only entity that can carry the burden. If they can win a resounding victory in the House and Senate in nine months, there is hope for us.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Is The Other Party Truly The Enemy -- Or Do We Exaggerate Political Polarization?

Just after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a New York Times/Siena poll found that Americans believe polarization is the second most serious challenge facing the nation. (The economy came in first.) As recently as one year ago, fewer than one percent of registered voters cited polarization as a national problem; this year, 13 percent said it was the most important problem facing the nation. Additionally, strong majorities agree that "America's political system ... is too politically divided to solve its problems."

Not only do Americans believe we're bitterly polarized; they worry that we're condoning political violence and that we cannot agree on basic facts. When Republicans were asked to name the nation's biggest problem, their first choice was the economy but their second was "Democrats." When Democrats were asked the same question, they put the economy second and named "Trump/Republicans" first.

Nations are not eternal, and domestic divisions often lead to destruction — especially when exploited by foreign enemies. So it's important to pay attention to these red flags, but it's equally important not to misinterpret them.

When we consider how much of our discourse is mediated through partisan sources and the fact that the governing political party is dominated by incendiary extremists, it's surprising we aren't even more polarized. A reservoir of moderation persists in the nation. It's shrinking but still present.

Research by More in Common (where I serve on the board) has found that time spent online is highly correlated with support for political violence. A 2024 survey conducted by the group found that 14 percent of American adults agreed with the statement "I feel that violence is sometimes needed to advance political causes in the U.S. today." That number jumped to 22 percent among those who spent five or more hours on social media daily and dropped to six percent among those who devoted a half-hour or less to social media each day.

Surveys showing support for political violence are disturbing, particularly in the wake of assassination attempts on Trump, arson at the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk, and other politically motivated attacks. But those surveys can also be misleading. As More in Common explains, vaguely worded questions — that, say, fail to define violence or to distinguish between attacks on people and attacks on property — can lead to inflated responses. When Americans are asked, for example, whether it is justified to commit violence against supporters of the other party's presidential candidate, nearly 100 percent say no.

And yet, Americans have a distorted impression of how their political opposites feel about violence. The same More in Common survey from 2024 (conducted after the assassination attempt on Trump) found that Democrats and independents vastly overestimated how Republicans would react. Democrats guessed that 47 percent of Republicans would agree with the statement "Violence against Democrats is now justified." The actual number of Republicans who agreed with the statement was 13 percent. Independents estimated that 38 percent of Republicans would endorse the statement.

Misperceptions abound on other topics as well. A June 2025 survey found that 85 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats believe freedom of speech to be "unconditional." Yet Republicans estimated that only 52 percent of Democrats believed that, and Democrats guessed that only 57 percent of Republicans would say so.

Similarly, 80 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans say it's important to respect those with whom you disagree. Democrats think only 39 percent of Republicans assent to this, and Republicans estimate that only 36 percent of Democrats would say the same.

Vast swaths of Americans of all political persuasions would like to see a more united country, yet on this question as well, the perception gap is large. When Republicans were asked in January 2025 what qualities Democrats would want to see in the country 10 years into the future, they guessed "green" or "tolerant." Republicans estimated that only about 14 percent of Democrats would say "united," but in fact, 44% percent of Democrats chose united, more than any other quality. And while 47 percent of Republicans offered that they wanted to see a united country, Democrats supposed that this would be true of only 13 percent of the GOP.

There is no sugarcoating the trend toward authoritarianism among the very online and a growing share of Republicans. While only one percent of Democrats say they endorse non-democratic government in the United States, fully 10 percent of Republicans now say as much. On the other hand, Democrats might be surprised to learn that 13 percent of Republicans believe that Donald Trump's presidency poses a greater threat to democracy than the courts or bureaucracy. Of course, if that 13 percent includes the 10% who like autocracy, it's a less encouraging finding.

Surveys can't capture everything. And even in a nation where large majorities disfavor violence or extremism, we can't kid ourselves. A small number of dedicated revolutionaries have overcome widespread indifference before. Still, the research on perception gaps is a useful corrective to pervasive beliefs about our divisions. The gaps are wide but perhaps not as deep as we fear, and there remain opportunities for leaders to appeal to unity and mutual respect.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

If Voters Blame Republicans For Shutdown, Why Are They Angry At Democrats?

With the government shut down, polls show Americans are angrier at Republicans than Democrats. That’s good news for Democrats, right?

It’s complicated. Yes, voters are upset with President Donald Trump and the GOP—largely because they’ve flatly refused to even negotiate on health care protections for millions—but Democrats aren’t getting a free pass. Despite their efforts to cut a deal, many of their own voters remain frustrated and give their leaders low marks.

“Republicans have historically been more loyal. That has wavered in a couple of elections, but it’s been generally true,” Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Daily Kos. “The other advantage is that the Republicans currently have a president in office, and presidents have often fared better than Congress. So, in part, it’s a ‘president effect.’”

Still, you’d think Democrats would get more credit—especially now. In the days leading up to the shutdown, the party pushed for stronger health care protections. Their proposal would roll back the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s tax and immigration law, and it would extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year. At a moment when polls show Democratic voters want their leaders to fight harder, this was Democrats putting up a fight.

But so far, that fight isn’t resonating.

“When a party loses an election, they become less popular, including with their own supporters,” said David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College. “Their own supporters get very upset and say the party ‘blew it.’ Their voters are in a bad mood and want someone to blame, so they’ll blame the leadership of their own party for squandering the election and causing all these bad things to happen now that the other side is in power.”

Polling data backs that up. Since the last election, views of congressional Republicans have remained fairly stable, but Democrats in Congress are viewed far more negatively in comparison, according to YouGov’s tracking data.

That’s the paradox: Democratic voters demand tougher resistance to Trump, but they’re sour on their party even when it does exactly that.

The numbers are rough. A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll shows just 26 percent of voters approve of how congressional Democrats are doing in office. And a whopping 64 percent of voters disapprove, up from 58 percent in July—and 42 percent of Democrats disapprove. Republicans in Congress do only slightly better, with 37 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval among voters.

In other words, Democrats trail Republicans by 11 percentage points on approval, even though voters overwhelmingly blame the GOP for the shutdown. That contradiction speaks volumes.

Share of survey respondents who would blame a government shutdown on Democrats in Congress, Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump, or both parties equallyChart by Andrew Mangan/Graphic by Datawrapper

“It’s one thing to say you think Sen. [Chuck] Schumer is less to blame than President Trump, and quite another to say you support the job that Sen. Schumer is doing,” Reeher said. “The dissatisfaction among Democrats has been festering for a long time—at least back to the first Trump presidency. Many were deeply dissatisfied with [Joe] Biden as the nominee in 2020, and with the way the latter half of his term was managed, especially the campaign disaster. One small tilt favoring the Democrats on a government shutdown is not going to erase all that damage.”

“The Republicans have been more loyal and are more focused on the president—that’s what these overall numbers are reflecting,” he added.

Shutdown politics rarely deliver big policy wins. From December 2018 to January 2019, Trump shut down the government, demanding billions of dollars to build a wall along the U.S.--Mexico Border—and got nothing. In 2013, Republicans wanted to defund the ACA, kicking off a 16-day shutdown that produced little tangible results for them. At best, shutdowns offer largely symbolic wins for a party’s base. At worst, they backfire.

“I’m a skeptic about shutdown politics, but I understand the choices of the Senate Democrats because what we’re seeing in the polls is what they’re hearing,” Hopkins said. “They feel pressure to have some dramatic moment, so that’s where we are. If history is any guide, we will not end up with a real victory they can tout to their supporters.”

Maybe the problem is that voters tend not to reward effort. Resistance without real wins fades fast, and even actual achievements barely register with an exhausted public. Or maybe it’s that many Americans don’t realize Democrats can’t fully stop Trump’s agenda when they don’t hold a majority in either chamber of Congress.

The Democratic Party’s approval rating usually gets an approval boost only after it actually wins power. According to Pew’s data, their peak approval in the past decade came in early 2021, right after winning a government trifecta. And a smaller boost happened in early 2019, after they regained control of the House and wielded real power to fight Trump.

Democrats also face a structural challenge Republicans don’t: a lack of a clear leader.

Former President Joe Biden remains unpopular and is largely invisible. Former Vice President Kamala Harris lost last year’s election and didn’t connect deeply with many voters. Former President Barack Obama is nearly a decade removed from office. And while former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once embodied the anti-Trump resistance, her successors—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—are hardly household names, according to Pew.

Republicans, meanwhile, still have Trump. After his 2020 loss, GOP voters didn’t splinter the way Democrats have. Some denied he lost, and even those who didn’t deny the election results still rallied around him. No alternative figure emerged to take his place.

The good news for Democrats is that these feelings aren’t permanent. As Hopkins put it, politics is as much about emotion as logic, and Democratic voters are still angry and scared. The surest way to channel that energy outward instead of inward? Start winning again.

“It seems like the next election is a million miles away, but in reality, we have more elections than any other country and there’s one right around the corner next year,” Hopkins said. “If what you really want to do is constrain Trump’s freedom of movement to implement policies, the best way to do that is to put one house of Congress in the hands of the Democrats in 2026.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Americans Hate Gerrymandering -- But That Won't Stop Republicans

Texas already had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country. Now, under pressure from President Donald Trump, state Republicans are trying to go even further by proposing a map that could hand them up to five more seats.

The first draft of the new map, released on July 30, hasn’t been discussed by lawmakers and is expected to change before final approval. However, the goal is clear: to dilute the voting influence of voters of color, who predominantly support Democrats.

But new polling finds that Republicans are operating in the face of widespread public opposition. Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it should be illegal to draw maps that make it harder for a political party to win seats in elections, according to YouGov. Even more—74%—oppose drawing maps to reduce the voting power of a specific racial group.

The proposed Texas map would do both. It divides voters of color in Tarrant County (located in the North Central part of Texas) across several Republican-controlled districts. It also significantly redraws Central Texas’s 35th District, which a court forced the state to create to protect minority voting rights. The new boundaries not only ignore that ruling but are also designed to eliminate communities of interest.

The map is just one part of a nationwide redistricting fight. Republican-led legislatures are under pressure from Trump to further distort their maps in favor of the GOP before the 2026 midterm elections. What happens in Texas could serve as the national model.

As such, the fight in Texas has been escalating rapidly.

Democrats recently walked out of the legislature, blocking Republicans from reaching the quorum needed to move the bill forward. As of Friday, the map had not progressed in the legislature, despite threats of arrest, expulsion, and FBI involvement from Gov. Greg Abbott and other GOP leaders. This past Wednesday, Texas Democrats’ temporary hideout in Illinois was targeted with a bomb threat.

Despite the drama, the walkout isn’t without precedent. Democrats fled the state in 2003 to block a similar Republican redistricting plan. They did it again in 2021 to protest a voter-suppression law that eventually passed and empowered partisan poll watchers, criminalized certain election activities, and banned local officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, even to seniors who automatically qualify, among other actions.

But this moment feels different. Democrats are not just opposing a map but also highlighting a structural imbalance that voters are increasingly aware of. When YouGov asked Americans about Texas’s current legislative lines, 47 percent said they’ve been drawn to benefit Republicans in the state. Notably, that number was only 21 percent for Wisconsin, another heavily gerrymandered state, where Democrats regularly win statewide but hold just two of eight congressional seats.

Meanwhile, a substantial majority of Americans—67%—don’t want lines in their state to unfairly benefit either party. And nearly 60% said in another recent YouGov survey that they’d rather see redistricting handled by nonpartisan commissions, not politicians.

Public opinion may be shifting, but Republicans in Austin aren’t budging. So far, the party has shown zero interest in negotiating. If anything, they could double down with an even more aggressive redraw once the walkout ends. Abbott, for his part, could also call a series of special sessions until the bill passes—a tactic he’s used before.

Unlike other states, Republicans control both chambers of Texas’ legislature as well as the governor’s office. That makes this walkout more of a speed bump than a blockade.

Still, for now, Democrats have some leverage. The longer the walkout lasts, the more attention they bring to the GOP’s brazen power grab. They’re hoping national outrage can help fuel a broader movement against gerrymandering.

“I don’t think [Trump’s] planning on those five seats alone,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told Daily Kos. “At this point, the president is staring at historic unpopularity and having to sell a historically unpopular signature piece of legislation, while the very normal midterm waves tend to go against the party of the president. He is petrified at losing control of Congress, and it’s much more than the normal petrified because of him. He knows it’s going to come with oversight, with investigations, and stop his passage of what’s been a historically unpopular public program.”

While Republicans may think the map guarantees them gains, it’s far from a slam dunk. In the right electoral environment—say, with an unpopular GOP figure at the top of the ticket—a gerrymandered district could backfire.

“I have seen partisan gerrymanders that slice a party’s own support so thin that they end up losing at the polls rather than winning,” Levitt said. “In a wave year, one of the ways that you effectuate a partisan gerrymander, usually, is you take existing districts that are quite safe and you move supporters from that district into another. And it is entirely possible to get so greedy that you cut the margin so small that the safe districts are no longer, and then, in a wave year, the other party wins.”

There is precedent for this. In 2018, Democrat Kendra Horn won a House seat in Oklahoma that Trump had won by over 13 percentage points just two years earlier. It was one of the few times a candidate flipped a district that political prognosticators had considered to be basically a lock for the other party—and it’s a warning to Republicans pushing too far.

But even if overreach costs the GOP some seats, the bigger issue is the erosion of trust in democracy. YouGov found that about a third of Americans are unsure whether their own state’s legislative lines are fairly drawn, and another 35% see their state’s lines as drawn unfairly—two signs that confidence in the process is slipping.

That’s what Texas Democrats are betting on: that the public recognizes the power grab and demands change.

“Gerrymandering is terrible and should be banned. And every Democrat in Congress right now is a sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to ban gerrymandering nationwide,” Texas Rep. Greg Casar, a progressive whose district would be redrawn to favor Republicans, told NPR on Wednesday. “But what we need to be really concerned about and what I’m sick and tired of is Democrats playing by one set of rules and then Republicans gerrymandering.”

Absent federal action, that’s exactly what Republicans will keep doing. State lawmakers face virtually no constraints—and in states like Texas, where a single party controls all of state government, the temptation to rig the rules is too powerful to resist.

Ultimately, the crisis in Texas is about more than five districts. It’s a preview of a nationwide battle over how political power is allocated—and who gets to wield it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Start your day with The National Memo Newsletter

The Democrats' Opportunity, If Only They Can Seize It

Is The Other Party Truly The Enemy -- Or Do We Exaggerate Political Polarization?

If Voters Blame Republicans For Shutdown, Why Are They Angry At Democrats?

Americans Hate Gerrymandering -- But That Won't Stop Republicans

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