By now, everybody knows the Democrats are in deep trouble, at least for now.
The problem? Nobody likes them. Nobody trusts them. And their main strategy over the past few years has been to insult the intelligence, and in the case of center-right voters, the morality of voters. The gaslighting, ridiculous policies, and pure propaganda have turned off everybody but the Bluest of the Blue.
Their strategy has boiled down to hating Trump and embracing mental illness, and the voters decided they were hateful nutters.
The election of Donald Trump was the ultimate repudiation of this strategy, and now the Democrats are reaping the whirlwind.
The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds, new polling shows
— POLITICO (@politico) Mar 10, 2025
Today, according to POLITICO, the House Democratic Caucus is getting a major wake up call. A poll done by the Democratic aligned polling firm Navigator Research has nothing but bad news to report.
The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds.
Nearly two months into the second Donald Trump administration, a majority of voters in battleground House districts still believe Democrats in Congress are “more focused on helping other people than people like me,” according to an internal poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research. Among independents, just 27 percent believe Democrats are focused on helping them, compared with 55 percent who said they’re focused on others.
The polling, shared first with POLITICO, is one of the first comprehensive surveys of voters in swing congressional districts since November 2024. House Democratic members and staff are scheduled to hear from one of the researchers, who will present their findings, at their caucus’ Issues Conference on Wednesday in Leesburg, Virginia. The meeting is aimed at guiding members’ messaging as they prepare for the 2026 midterms, and the survey suggests the party has an enormous amount of work to do to repair its image.
“The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust and understanding people’s challenges,” said Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters who worked on the research by Navigator, a project within the Hub Project, a Democratic nonprofit group. “Even though voters are critical about Trump and some of the things he’s doing, that criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats. The trust has to be earned.”
Democrats have put all their (very expensive) eggs in one basket: Trump hatred.
But it turns out that Trump hatred is not a desirable brand to market. Everybody knows what they think about Trump, and have for a long time. Once you get to HITLERSTALINMUSSOLINI, you can’t go much further than that. You can’t call Trump Satan because the base of the Democratic Party are Satanists anyway.
They would do better accusing Trump of a plan to force everybody to buy Nickelback’s music. At least everybody agrees they suck.
Joe Biden and the Pravda Media so discredited the Democratic Party through their constant gaslighting and advocacy or insane policies like DEI and alphabet ideology that voters are not inclined to trust them. They need a complete rebrand, and I doubt that moves like Gavin Newsom’s recent discovery that men don’t belong in women’s sports (yeah, right, Gavin, I trust you on that one) are just further proof that the Democrats are liars who have contempt for voters.
Only 39 percent believe Democrats have the right priorities.
“We’ve always had the stigma of being the ‘welfare party,’ but I do think this is related to a post-Covid feeling that we don’t care about people working, and we’ve had a very long hangover from that, which feels really, really consequential,” Murphy said. “How can you care about working people if you don’t care about work? It’s going to be really hard in the midterms if voters don’t think we care about work.”
Republicans, too, face their own branding problems, according to the survey, with 54 percent of voters saying they view Republicans in Congress unfavorably. Only about a third of voters said they approve of the GOP’s handling of the economy.
But Democrats’ difficulties appear to go deeper. For example, the poll found a whopping 69 percent of voters said Democrats were “too focused on being politically correct.” Another 51 percent said “elitist” described the Democratic Party well.
Actually, since that poll number of 54% disapproval is of Congressional Republicans, that is quite good, and consistent with other polls showing that voters are much less hostile to Republicans now than in the past. If 46% of voters can even stand Congressional Republicans, that is nearly a miracle.
Nobody likes Congress. Do you like Congress?
I like the concept of Congress, of course, but the average Congressman is a douche, or at least two-faced and weak.
Maybe that is unfair to say, but only the news media has a worse approval rating than Congress. Satan does better, at least with Democrats.
None of this is predictive of electoral outcomes in 2026. Not only is it a “lifetime away” in political years, but events always intervene.
Still, when Jasmine Crockett is one of your main spokesmen, you have real problems.
