Bad News On A Summer Day
The latest Wall Street Journal poll should be a wakeup call
Democrats are glad that the Wall Street Journal’s latest poll dropped late on a summer Friday. Because the news isn’t good. While President Trump continues to get low grades, his negative marks aren’t driving voters into the arms of the Democratic Party.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.
On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.
Democrats have been hoping for a replay of 2018, when backlash to President Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act led them to flip the House. While the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” has deep flaws, it hasn’t yet sparked a voter backlash:
At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district.
Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate—and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.
That doesn’t mean hope is lost. We have time before the midterms. But it does mean we need to listen to the winners. Below is a recent edition of our daily Groups Chat newsletter by Liam Kerr, counting down the days until the 2028 Democratic primary with analysis on how Democrats can win again. You can sign up for Groups Chat by becoming a paid subscriber to WelcomeStack. You can also support the people who can flip the House with our Win The Middle Slate.
Last Tuesday, Adelita Grijalva won a primary that will send her to Congress. Despite it being a highly-publicized special election, Google Searches for her barely passed Zohran Mamdani for a few hours.
That captures one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats focused on a House majority: left-wing lightning rods getting more attention and raising more money than the rest of the party, especially centrist Democrats in swing districts.
And everyone is noticing the big gaps in attention and fundraising.
Here is Politico Playbook last week:
THE FUTURE STARTS NOW: The battle for the future of the Democratic Party is coming into sharper focus in Washington today on multiple fronts.
MAMDANI IN D.C.: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, arrives in Washington this morning for a breakfast event hosted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). He will also meet with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). His long-awaited meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is holding out on an endorsement, will come on Friday back in NYC.
Also coming soon: Mamdani “plans to clarify his stance on the use of the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ as soon as this week,” POLITICO’s Emily Ngo and Joe Anuta report.
The broader context: Mamdani’s D.C. pilgrimage comes as Democrats throughout the nation battle over whether a more progressive-populist approach or more moderate posture is better suited to compete, win and deliver in the Trump era.
One way to think of it: “Progressives are like ‘Succession,’ centrists are like the NFL,” Liam Kerr, co-founder of centrist Democratic outfit Welcome PAC, tells Playbook. “One gets high ratings across every demographic every single fall, while the other occasionally dominates elite conversation. Mamdani-mania is like the season finale.”
And yet: That wasn’t immediately clear in last night’s fundraising numbers.
MONEY TALKS: One takeaway from the latest FEC filings: Among Dems, the progressives — not the centrists — continue to be star fundraisers …
If Democrats want to win back the House and make a competitive Senate map, dollars and attention need to be on centrists in swing districts. But as Politico points out here (and our analysis showed last week), that is not happening.
And people are noticing. Here is
, who until recently the head of FiveThirtyEight at ABC News (and now writes Strength in Numbers).But centrist candidates can fundraise small-dollars when they invest in it. Last cycle, Welcome candidate (and now colleague) Adam Frisch raised nearly $10 million in small dollar contributions, roughly the same as AOC.
Political donors are stuck in a polarization doom loop, though: Conflict drives clicks and donations → centrists don’t compete for attention → donors drift to anti-partisan content → Republicans benefit.
To take one example …
launched The Free Press saying “There are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t on the hard left or the hard right who feel that the world has gone mad.” In 2023, The Free Press did $5m in revenue. In 2024, it did $10m in subscription revenue alone. It has continued to boom, and is reportedly under talks with Paramount.The Free Press now has more than 150,000 paid subscribers serving effectively as $1,000,000 per month small-dollar donors. In significant part because they serve content that relentlessly attacks the far left. That is millions of dollars every month to an audience that is at least nominally both anti-MAGA and anti-leftist.
With 931 days before the next presidential primary, how are those readers going to tune into the Democrats who can win?
We will lose if small-dollar donors keep rewarding progressive conflict over competitive campaigns, and centrists do not meet them in the marketplace for attention and small-dollar donations. We won’t just lose winnable seats. We’ll lose the ability to govern.
The House will stay red. The Senate map will remain out of reach. And Trump, with a compliant Congress, will face fewer checks in a second term than he did in the first.
That doesn’t mean every Democrat needs to pile on the left. But the vacuum needs to be filled with voices willing to make the case for electable, anti-MAGA candidates.
Elites will always want to talk about shows like Succession, even when most of the country reliably tunes into the NFL. Small-dollar donors will respond to those, like AOC, who spend millions to get onto their phones. The millions reading The Free Press want to defeat extremism, but don’t hear from candidates. The press will always focus on conflict.
We know where the attention is, and where it needs to be. Time to invest in closing that gap.
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Let me know when you figure out how to drive small dollar donations to candidates who stay out of the limelight and try to legislate to solve problems, instead of Jasmine Crockett and AOC on the left, and MJG on the right.
Non-religious ideologies are merely non-secular faiths (e.g. gnostic atheism). Polls, as facts, do not deter people of faith. Faith supersedes the objective natural world. Moderates cannot share the Democratic party with the ideological far left that holds them in contempt. They must either rule the party or start another one. Moderate voters who have left the party will not trust it enough to return unless the party commits to a thorough cleansing.