Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found Trump’s approval rating is 25 percentage-points underwater among Americans overall, including a 21-point disapproval margin among registered voters. The same poll found Democrats’ advantage in overall support for Congress grew from two points in February to five points in the latest poll.
While Trump’s popularity is clearly flagging, the large gap between Trump’s disapproval ratings and Democrats’ smaller advantage in support for Congress has raised questions about whether the Democratic Party’s unpopularity will hamper its chances in this fall’s midterm election. In the last week, Lakshya Jain at the Argument posited that Democrats’ trust deficit on crime is keeping them from winning voters who don’t like Trump, while G. Elliot Morris argued most of the gap is due to “closeted Republicans” who Democrats shouldn’t expect to persuade anyway.
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll sheds some new light on these issues. It confirms the overall pattern: 93 percent of registered voters who approve of Trump support Republicans for Congress, compared with 79 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump supporting Democrats. But the poll also asked whether each party’s views are “too liberal,” “too conservative,” or “about right,” finding 53 percent of Americans said the Democratic Party is too liberal, up from 46 percent who said this in 2013 (A slightly smaller 49 percent said the Republican Party is too conservative, up from 43 percent in 2013)
Focusing on Trump disapprovers, 61 percent of voters who think the Democratic Party is “too liberal” support Democrats for Congress, compared with 90 percent among voters who don’t think the party is too liberal. When filtering out Republicans, 73 percent of Trump disapprovers who say Democrats are too liberal support Democrats for Congress, compared with 91 percent of those who don’t think the party is too liberal.
How much does that matter? Not much. A simple statistical model controlling for partisanship and 2024 vote finds that viewing the Democratic Party as too liberal is associated with a 5-to-7 point shift in which party voters support in the midterms. But that is on a 0-to-100 scale. If the share of voters saying Democrats are too liberal dropped by 10 points, Democrats would only expect to gain a half a percentage point in support.
The early stage of the campaign is likely a bigger reason for Democrats’ underperformance on the generic ballot. A 2010 political science paper describes a “balance” theory “where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation.” As the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party.”
