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I Disagree: The Democrats' Low Poll Numbers DON'T Mean They're Losing [1]
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Date: 2025-05-01
On Wednesday, Mark Sumner posted a piece titled, “Democrats are losing the most important fight in history.” After talking about how the Trump’s standing with the public is sinking, Sumner writes:
But Republicans are not scared. They look at the polls and see no reason to abandon Trump; no reason to shift their positions; no reason not to back tariffs, prison camps, and political persecutions. Because if there's one thing polling worse than Trump, it's the Democratic Party. … Trump is sinking, but the Democratic Party is sinking more than Trump.
With all due respect for Mr. Sumner, whose good works I’ve enjoyed, I believe that in this column, he misreads the situation: the two sets of low numbers — the Trump Republicans’ poor polling, and the Democrats’ poor polling — are entirely different creatures, with entirely different implications for the question of who’s “winning the most important fight in history.”
Trump and his Party are unpopular because of what they’ve done with their recent victory. The Democrats get low polls because they’ve failed to win a must-win election.
The low Trump numbers reflect people wanting to them out of power. The low Democratic numbers reflect people wanting them to show they’ve got what it takes to WIN.
I’m less than delighted with the Democrats — not so much because of the catastrophic loss of the 2024 election but because of more than thirty years of the Democrats failing to protect the nation from the rising force of Fascism. But I still recognize that, in today’s America, they are the only major political force that stands for any decent values, that attempts to serve the common good, that honors its oath of office. And every election night, I pray that they will succeed.
My disagreement with Mr. Sumner, however, is not based my assumption that my feelings are representative of the people gauged by those polls. Rather, we’ve got some big picture data that seems to bear out my contrary view— that the Democrats are well-positioned to score big gains in that important fight.
I don’t know how the Democrats’ favorability number was in Wisconsin a month ago. But I do know that in the crucial election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Democrat won by ten points. I don’t know what the poll numbers in Virginia show about how Virginians feel about the Democratic Party. But I do know that the political experts that I read think that Abigail Spanberger is the odds-on favorite to win — and win big — in this fall’s election for the state’s governor.
There’s plenty of time between now and the 2026 mid-terms. Who knows what all might happen. But my reading of the sentiment in the nation now is not that people will reject the Democrats, but that they’ll turn to them as the only alternative to the catastrophe that Trump and his servile Republicans are inflicting on the nation.
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