Should Democrats worry about this new poll result from Cygnal? You’d better believe it, especially given the survey’s juxtaposition with Donald Trump’s first fortnight of executive actions. It turns out that real leadership and action appeal to more than just Maxine Dexter’s reproductive senses.
In a survey taken after Trump ordered an end to affirmative action, 42% of black men rated Trump favorably, an all-time high for this series. In fact, during most of Trump’s first term, he’d have been fortunate to get to 42% favorable overall. Trump’s support in the full electorate is also accelerating, Cygnal found:
Black Men Love Trump: the political realignment from November appears to be accelerating as Trump continues to make inroads with historically Dem-leaning constituencies. 42% of black men approve of the job Trump’s doing, and 4-in-10 have a favorable opinion of him.
Top Issues: inflation and the economy (32%) are now the main concern by a country mile. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration appears to have lowered concerns from 21 percent to 17 percent in just a month. …
Vibe Check: people are way more optimistic – in just a month since our last NVT, those who say the country is on the wrong track have plummeted 14 percent since last month.
Lest one think that this is an outlier, the CBS poll this past weekend found very similar numbers. CBS didn’t break their demos down to the same degree as Cygnal, but black voters overall gave Trump a 33% job-approval rating, and men overall gave Trump a 60/40 approval split. Trump was slightly underwater among women 47/53, but that’s hardly outside the margin of error within the demo. Ten percent of black voters “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance in the first three weeks of his presidency.
In the CBS poll, black voters found that Trump had the following qualities too:
- Effective: 41%
- Focused: 43%
- Competent: 38%
- Tough: 62%
- Energetic: 47%
- Compassionate: 17%
Worth noting too: in the CBS poll, only 56% of black voters objected to Trump’s elimination of DEI and affirmative action. Nearly half of the other 44% thought he wasn’t doing enough yet to end it (20% of the overall demo). That comes up in the Cygnal survey, which asked respondents about DEI policy. Once again, it proves to be incredibly unpopular:
Merit vs. DEI: two-thirds (64%) believe government should hire based on merit and experience instead of racial and gender identity, including 55 percent of Hispanics and 41 percent of Democrats who say merit should take sole precedent. Twenty-eight percent say both should be considered, while only 3% believe racial and gender identity should be the only factor for hiring
The merit+experience position scores pretty well with black voters as well, and clearly far better than Democrats must expect:
- Merit and experience: 38%
- Mix of merit, experience, racial & gender identity: 39%
- Mostly racial and gender identity: 5%
- Only racial and gender identity: 3%
Considering all this, let’s remind everyone that Trump beat Kamala Harris while only winning 13% of the black vote in November, before this vibe shift really began. Any significant shift in the direction of Trump and the Republicans with black voters would likely spell absolute disaster, especially after watching Hispanic voters move in Trump’s direction during the election already.
With Democrats doubling down on DEI and their radically weird ideas on gender, Cygnal VP Brock McCleary warned that the reaction to that has been statistically significant:
Brock McCleary, the vice president of Cygnal, noted that 42% of black men in favor of him is not a “small thing.” He explained that the reason why he received such overwhelming approval is because “he does the things he says he’ll do, and that’s a breath of fresh air for everyone.”
Although McCleary voted for Vivek Ramaswamy for the 2024 presidential election, he was in favor of Trump in 2016. “In the pre-Trump era, these numbers for a Republican would be aspirational rather than realistic. In the thicket of this new Trump era, these gains among Black Americans are noteworthy and certainly beyond a threshold of statistical normality”, he commented following the Cygnal survey.
The vibe shift is broader than just this demo, warned another Cygnal analyst:
“In the over two years since we began fielding these national monthly surveys, Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high, and this is matched by another all-time high in optimism about the direction of the country, across every single demographic we measure,” said Pollster and Director of Client Strategy, John Rogers. “Swing voters are plus seven percent in support of Trump’s efforts, led by Elon Musk, to right-size the federal government, and swing voters are plus 29 percent in support of the Trump administration’s actions on illegal immigration. In comparison, Congressional Democrats are rudderless and unpopular, with a net image of negative 14 (40% favorable/54% unfavorable) among all voters.”
This should actually worry Democrats most. Americans love the idea of optimism and “Morning in America,” and have thirsted for it for years. Democrats keep centering their message on how awful/racist/misogynist/Nazifasciststinkybottom America and Americans are, and voters are exhausted by it. They want real leadership to return America to positions of strength and to provide hope for the future, not proclaim a century of malaise and perpetual atonement for sins of the past.
As long as Democrats remain trapped in an Academia bubble of Chomsky-esque pseudo-history, they are doomed to fail. And polls like these are clear evidence of the failures to come if they don’t pull their collective heads out of their collective nether regions.
