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There’s nothing Republicans enjoy more than polls illustrating the unpopularity of the Democratic Party. So they had great fun with a new survey from The Wall Street Journal this week showing the party’s “image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades … with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.”

The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.

For one thing, such findings appear to offset or even obliterate the unpopularity of Donald Trump and his agenda, reminding us that he has always thrived as the lesser of evils:

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.

More broadly, Republicans hope such numbers show that their party’s return to power in 2024 didn’t just represent an opportunistic moment at the expense of an unpopular Biden-Harris administration, but one of those big realignments offering political dominance for years, maybe even decades.

But it doesn’t take more than a few moments of reflection to understand all this Dead-Donkey Blues is mostly an illusion. Democrats suffer from the hatred of the opposition party and the disappointment of their own troops. That doesn’t mean “voters” as a whole prefer Republicans to Democrats, as G. Elliott Morris explains in more detail:

The WSJ reports that Democrats are 19 points underwater in party image compared to Republicans. That’s indeed pretty bad. But does it mean, e.g., that voters won’t vote for Democrats in next year’s elections? In fact, no! The very same Wall Street Journal poll that got branded as the party having its “worst ever” image also shows the Democrats up three in the generic congressional ballot. That’s a six-point swing from their last poll in 2024 and would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives……

How can the Democrats have such a poor rating while winning the House popular vote? What’s going on here is that a lot of Democratic voters don’t like the party brand, but still think of themselves as Democratic voters, and will vote for the party above alternatives

Indeed, Morris has a more precise idea of where the self-loathing among Democrats is located:

In our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling, there is a large mass of left-leaning Democrats who are bringing down the party’s favorability rating. In our data, about 20% of the Democrats who call themselves “very liberal” have an unfavorable view of the party. That compares to just 8% of “very conservative” Republicans who view the GOP negatively.

It’s not too hard to figure out that left-leaning Democrats are most likely to believe that their elected representatives aren’t “fighting hard enough” against Trump and also may feel little solidarity with their party’s largely centrist leadership. But they aren’t going to vote Republican in the foreseeable future. Yes, there is always some risk that a discouraged ideological party base will not turn out at the polls as it should, but polls that measure enthusiasm for the midterms are showing a Democratic advantage, the Independent noted recently:

Nearly three-quarters of Democratic voterssay they are “extremely motivated” to cast their ballots in the 2026 midterm elections, a dramatic uptick from four years ago, polling shows.

Just six months after Republicans took control of the White House and Congress, 72 percent ofDemocrats and Democratic-aligned voterssay they are “extremely motivated” to vote in the next election, aCNN poll conducted by SSRSthis month found. By contrast, only 50 percent of Republicans say the same.

You don’t get extra votes for loving your party and its candidates or fewer for preferring them with reservations. Right now Democrats are strongly favored to win most of the competitive off-year races in 2025, including the New Jersey and Virginia governorships, and nothing quite ameliorates a sense of defeatism like winning a few elections. The advent of competitive gerrymandering that Trump has triggered with his redistricting power grab in Texas may also help stimulate positive vibes among Democrats who can cheer retaliation in California or other states instead of simply mourning the inability of congressional Democrats to do much of anything.

Democrats don’t need to be a wildly popular party. They just need to win, and that will take care of most of their morale problems.

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