Bluesky

Six months into the catastrophe known as the second Trump administration, the Democratic Party is experiencing the unfamiliar emotion of hope.

President Donald Trump has been in a polling free fall ever since the summer of Epstein kicked off in earnest. With the White House’s increasingly frantic efforts to dismiss questions about the president’s decade-and-a-half-long bro-ship with the country’s most notorious pedophile are coming up short, Trump’s credibility is taking hits across the board.

The mass-deportation campaign spearheaded by Stephen Miller is massively unpopular, as are the central oligarchic provisions of the White House’s signature spending bill. After campaigning on combating inflation, Trump has seen it continue to lay siege to Americans’ spending power—and has been unable to deflect blame onto his predecessor, Joe Biden, as is his wont. A recent CBS/YouGov poll found that 62 percent of respondents believe that Trump’s policy agenda is making costs increase, while just 18 percent reported that they were doing better financially under his presidency. These numbers aren’t likely to turn around as Trump’s latest round of tariffs—all de facto taxes on American consumers—are set to kick in.

All these trends portend a classic midterm shellacking for the incumbent party—and with a GOP House majority of just seven votes, Democrats are increasingly confident that the 2026 midterms could produce a wipeout on the scale of 2018, when Democrats flipped 41 seats and regained control of the chamber.

Yet there are still ample reasons to doubt that Democratic leaders are poised for a resounding victory—apart, that is, from the obvious caveats that there are no certainties in politics anymore, and that anything can happen in the 18 months leading up to the midterms.

For starters, the Democrats are enduring historically bad public opinion polling themselves. A new Wall Street Journal poll showed the lowest approval rating for Democrats in 35 years, as the party was still struggling to emerge from the doldrums of the Reagan era. It’s true, as some commentators have noted, that this poor showing is not likely to predict voter behavior—many of the Democrats’ detractors are leftists dismayed with the party’s lackluster efforts to mount any sort of robust opposition to Trump’s omnidirectional putsches. Come Election Day, these observers say, the restive left will fall into line and all will be well—especially considering the extent to which independents and moderates are now disaffected with Trump.

But other metrics also are not looking good for the Democrats—in marked contrast to the run-up to the 2018 cycle. Republicans now outnumber Democrats in party registration—a trend that also upends the political dynamic of the past three decades and makes moderates and independents less decisive in many races than in years past. (In addition, the rapid growth of negative partisanship means there just aren’t as many genuine independent voters as there used to be.)

Democratic fundraising figures—a rough measure of voter enthusiasm that plays an outsize role in midterm cycles, when overall voter participation declines—are also sluggish. The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee raised $32.3 million in the second quarter of 2025, compared to just $29.1 million for the group’s Democratic counterpart. That represents a 20 percent falloff in Democratic fundraising totals compared to where the party stood at the same point in the fundraising cycle prior to the 2022 midterms—and those numbers were already weak, since they reflected a built-in enthusiasm gap for the incumbent White House party on course to lose seats in the midterms, per the recent modern pattern.

These structural deficits are due to what’s blindingly obvious at this point in the Trump era—the usual trendlines and patterns of electoral behavior are now completely up for grabs in a radically transformed American political order. The GOP’s fundraising clout stems in no small part from Trump’s determination not to surrender the House Republican majority, in view of the two impeachments and acute policy gridlock he suffered under Democratic House control over the last half of his first term.

The White House is adopting a flood-the-zone strategy to preserve the GOP’s precarious House majority, with Trump recruiting candidates himself and dissuading Republican lawmakers in potential swing districts from retiring. Trump is also trying to push through an aggressive gerrymander of Texas’s congressional districts to produce as many as five more safe GOP seats in the state. Similar efforts are underway in Ohio and Missouri. Democrats in heavily blue states such as California and New York are threatening to respond in kind, though the logistics of rapid-fire gerrymanders are more daunting in such jurisdictions, since gerrymandering has been indispensable to basic Republican electoral strategizing since at least 2010.

Yet all this structural pre-campaign jousting, in the offstage agoras of donor appeals and map-drawing confabs, doesn’t get to the underlying malaise of the Democratic Party—namely, its failure to act as an effective counterweight to the overlapping MAGA assaults on democracy and economic equality.

Faced with everything from Trump’s cabinet appointments to budget deadline showdowns to the final passage of the administration’s draconian rollbacks of Medicaid and health care coverage, alongside unwarranted tax cuts for the 1 percent and the creation of the ICE police-state package, Democrats have come off as feckless at best, and aloof timeservers at worst. That makes it all the more challenging to explain in direct terms to voters how Democrats on Capitol Hill would meaningfully reverse a MAGA agenda they’ve mostly rolled over for.

So far, party leaders have shown precious little inclination to do that—instead, they’re banking mostly on Trump’s own polling free fall to make their argument before the electorate for them. Any observer of the last decade in politics knows that waiting for Trump to defeat himself is a highly risky and mostly doomed strategy. But Democrats would rather sit back than do much of the necessary work the party needs to do in order to be an effective Trump opposition party.

Again, fundraising returns are a telling sign—while most traditional sources of Democratic campaign dosh are not performing up to past expectations, left-leaning candidates with robust messages about MAGA authoritarianism and Trump’s corruption are doing much better. “Among the 10 incumbent Democrats who raised the most from individual donors this year,” another Wall Street Journal analysis found, “six are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus…. Three of the top four are progressives, with the exception of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.).”

Zohran Mamdani, whose New York mayoral campaign ran up a historic primary victory on basic issues of economic justice, and a robust opposition to the Gaza “war” and the Trump immigration rendition regime, is also emerging as a key fundraiser and political force in the party—and indeed, recent polling shows that his Gaza stand was pivotal to his win. Yet establishment Democrats such as Jeffries and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer continue to act as though Mamdani and his campaign don’t exist. Nor are they alone: One of the party’s leading Reddit discussion boards, reddit.com/r/democrats, has reportedly banned discussion of the party’s candidate for mayor in the country’s largest city.

This is not the conduct of a party that seeks to carry the standard of far-reaching democratic change in the face of the Trumpian drive for ever greater federal power. Indeed, the party’s polling woes are rooted in its own self-created credibility crisis: After three presidential cycles where it ran aggressively on the genuine threat to democracy posed by the MAGA movement, Democratic campaign strategy is now banking largely on the organic implosion of Trump and his corps of Capitol Hill enablers. Is it any wonder that voters, in the midst of general disaffection with Trump, are not rallying to the Democratic brand with the same fervor they did during the 2018 midterm cycle?

Maybe, in lieu of sweating out the party’s dismal standing in public opinion by expecting disillusioned left partisans to succumb to resignation and fall into line, the Democrats could follow Mamdani’s example and give them something that they actually want to vote for.