Pricing in Unpopularity
Polling trends open doors for midterm playing field, and keeps larger dangers at bay
The first round of post-Liberation Day polling on Trump is out (it’s bad), and so is the official list of incumbent Republicans targeted by House Democrats in the midterm (it’s big), and so is the GOP’s top Senate recruit (smart year to skip).
New polls show voters continue to sour on Trump, which is expanding the map of competitive midterm districts - and building a safe harbor against the authoritarian threat he poses.
First, the new polling: “After last week’s tariff announcement, Trump’s economic approval has dropped precipitously, now tied for his worst ever in Navigator tracking since 2018.”
That’s a Democratic-aligned firm, but new polls from the bipartisan pollsters sponsored by Trump’s own pollster and the nonpartisan Morning Consult tell similar stories.
Nate Silver’s polling average now has Trump’s disapproval crossing 50%.
Economists - and their former students in the upscale Democratic and Never Trump chattering class - overwhelmingly oppose tariffs, as expected. But the good ol’ US of A hasn’t started a trade war since 1930, so we are watching an experiment unfold with the general electorate.
There are different views to be considered at different points as this unfolds, including:
Support or oppose tariffs conceptually
Highly partisan
Directly impacted by tariffs
Moved by general economic conditions like the stock market
Sensitive to high prices
Tariffs are typically thought to have visible supporters (benefits concentrated in business owners and workers in protected industries) and invisible opponents (costs are widely distributed). But the Trump tariffs are a whole different beast - this isn’t Senator Smoot and Rep. Hawley in a smoke-filled room in 1930.
It is unfolding live on social media, the nightly news and TikTok. The world is not just deeply interconnected, everyone can watch investments and prices moving in real time. It’s not just Dave Portnoy live-streaming, even kids YouTuber Mr. Beast is upset.
The stock market is currently the most prominent scoreboard. Many have noted that 61% of Americans own stock, but that number likely undercounts the share of stock-owning voters as it is driven down by groups less likely to vote like Hispanics (28%), young voters (41%), and households making less than $40,000 (29%). What is the share of midterm voters who own stock?
But stocks are mostly about the future. As
notes, “The (high) level of political pain that's ongoing now is before people really even start feeling the real economy effects.”What is that political pain? Early surveys look bad for Trump, with tariff favorability 28 points underwater. It is steeper among independents at 32 points, a 17 point jump from December.
Not surprisingly, independents show the biggest jump in awareness: 74% have heard about tariffs lately, up from 46% in December.
Vox’s Eric Levitz has a concise take on why:
Voters may have had a weakly held, ideological sympathy for protectionism at one point. But the largest tariff hike in modern history was liable to change that. And it has. In this survey, voters disapprove of tariffs by 28 points, while union households disapprove by *41* points.
It makes sense that voter views on tariffs are weakly-held. The subject matter is complex, not deeply tied to demographics, and voters have no memory of the impact (we haven’t started a trade war in 95 years). The more weakly held a view, the more prominent the topic, the faster opinions can change.
Trump’s tariff opponents have a clear base (conceptual opponents, hyper-partisans) that is now growing with the addition of those focused on economic forecasts, including their own investments. Support has grown among MAGA, but with just 8% of that group now opposed there’s not much room from growth from partisanship alone.
But the real economic effects are still to come. Political volatility is high.
Where Trump is Losing Support
Before the most recent movement, John Burn-Murdoch had a great chart showing where Trump was losing support:
Trump has gotten significantly less popular over the last eleven weeks, and it is clear who he is losing (non-MAGA 2024 Trump voters) and on what issues (economy and inflation).
The Midterms
The worse Trump does, the wider the midterm playing field can be. And House Democrats are responding.
Welcome has spent the past four years begging for a headline like this, from Axios yesterday:
It's essentially the codification of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' (D-N.Y.) newfound bullishness that Trump-induced stock market turmoil is opening the door to a potential wave election next year.
Democrats also view over-performances in special elections as a sign that their party is seeing the midterm enthusiasm typically enjoyed by the party out of power.
Driving the news: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of "districts in play" includes a whopping 35 Republican-held seats they believe "will determine the House Majority."
That's more than the 29 districts listed as some degree of competitive by Cook Political Report.
It's also more than the initial target list of House Majority PAC, House Democrats' primary super PAC, which has 29 seats.
"Our Districts in Play map is more expansive than at the start of the 2024 cycle, reflecting a political environment of eroding public support for House Republicans," the DCCC said in a press release.
Details: More than a half dozen Republicans on the DCCC's list are considered to represent "safe Republican" seats by Cook.
The targeted “safe” Republicans include several highlighted by Welcome over the past four years, including Ann Wagner in Missouri and Cory Mills in Florida. We highlighted Andy Ogles as a potentially vulnerable incumbent and called for Democrats to make a play for Mike Turner’s Ohio district.
Economic uncertainty is leading to political uncertainty, creating a conditions to compete in a broad range of districts.
Watch What They Do, Not Say
Republicans have talked a big game about the upcoming midterms, but it’s worth focusing on deeds, not words. With Trump’s tariffs creating economic devastation and his immigration policy turning off even staunch allies, the midterms aren’t shaping up well.
There are signs Republicans recognize this.
Chris Sununu, the popular former Governor of New Hampshire, announced yesterday that he won’t run in the open Senate race in New Hampshire.
When top recruits turn down potentially winnable races, that is a sign of how they really view the political environment.
The Long Game
has a thoughtful piece on increasing risks from Trump. Here’s a bit from Competitive Authoritarianism Comes for Civil Society:Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way first developed the concept of competitive authoritarianism in the early 2000s. Their goal was to describe and classify a growing number of hybrid regimes in which elements of ongoing democratic competition coincided with undeniable patterns of autocratic rule. Today, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey stand as classic examples of this type of regime.
Trump has long made no secret of his admiration for these strongman rulers. In his second term, the U.S. will come to operate more like their countries.
One optimistic take is that these leaders have been far more popular than Trump. Pew Research shows majorities of Turkish adults held favorable views of Erdogan for most of the last thirteen years, with a peak of 75%. Pew has had Orban at 56% among Hungarian adults, a majority he has sustained for a decade. Modi has been even more popular in Pew polling, reaching 88%.
MAGA’s unpopularity is key, not only for the midterms but for the long game.
Bonus Concern
Sorry not to end on a high note, but Stid’s piece has one other vital warning:
It will once again be tempting for progressive philanthropists, advocates, and activists to intermingle their pre-existing policy preferences with their efforts to defend democracy. This helps them maintain their intersectional commitments and alliances on immigration, climate, DEI, trans rights, political economy, etc. But it makes it much harder to build the cross-partisan coalition of supporters that liberal democracy requires.
Civil society actors who are serious about stopping and reversing authoritarian drift should ask themselves a clarifying question: “Do the policy positions we hold currently appeal to a broad majority of Americans, including the median voter?” If the answer is “no” or “not really,” then they should either modulate the intensity with which they insist coalition partners and leaders share their policy preferences, or candidly acknowledge that they are prioritizing those preferences over the recovery of liberal democracy.
Keeping Trump unpopular - and Democrats relatively more popular - will require a lot of restraint, and not just from politicians.
The words of warning at the end are really important. People like me - college-educated technical experts with unpopular liberal social values - are the most hated group in America. Voters hate us with a gravitational force so powerful it bends everything around it. My net favorables rival cancer and terrorism.
And as long as the Dem brand is tarnished by association with us, WE WILL LOSE. So the job of people like me is the following:
- Get over ourselves and face the reality that the public hates us and everything we represent
- Help our party recruit more Blue Dog style candidates in the mold of MGP and Rebecca Cooke
- Don't complain when Blue Dog style candidates throw us under the bus
- Don't get mad when Blue Dog style candidates say things about guns and immigration that working-class voters agree with
- Shut up and support them anyway
I remain quite bearish about Dem chances in 2026 precisely because I don't think high-engagement liberals understand the assignment. And "let's trigger those libtards!!!" will remain a powerful and winning campaign message for the GOP. Voters *may* give Dems a second look if they fear their jobs or Medicaid may be at stake, but they won't come back and vote for us unless we become MUCH less alienating and frankly we aren't close yet to where we need to be.
Tbh if I were Hakeem Jeffries, I would secretly court Elise Stefanik to change the aisle - like “look what Trump did to you and he threw you under the bus after all the loyalty you showed to him . And now Tariff has kicked in, I suspect you might lose the election as a GOP person. Now is the time for you to mend the relationship with former college mates you burned the bridge with”