Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
People attend a rally against the Trump administration’s 90-day funding freeze and job cuts at health agencies in Washington, on February 19, 2025.
Just about the worst thing that can befall a political party is to have the electorate think it’s not focused at all on the public’s primary and immediate concerns. That pretty much explains what happened to the Democrats in last November’s elections. It also pretty much explains what’s happening now to the Republicans since Donald Trump has staked a claim on renaming bodies of water and building casinos on the Gaza Strip.
The public’s belief that the Biden administration had a blind eye to our southern border for most of his presidency was at least arguably grounded in fact. Biden did focus on the economy, but more on the long-term supply side (infrastructure, reindustrialization) than on the public’s short-term difficulties (coping with high prices).
Instead, some recent polling makes clear that Biden and the Democrats generally were, and still are, viewed as focusing on issues quite remote from economic anxieties that keep many Americans up at night. Polling of voters in what had once been Midwestern “factory towns” by Celinda Lake shows that 45 percent believed the Democrats were “obsessed with LGBT transgender issues instead of focusing on kitchen table economic issues.” Correspondingly, another 33 percent said that the Democrats “have no real economic plan.”
The number of elected Democratic officials who actually fit both those descriptions was, and is, minuscule, of course. However, Democrats have championed the civil rights of minorities, very much including gays, lesbians, and transgender Americans. And, crucially, Republicans and right-wing media have so magnified those Democratic positions in all their propaganda that their championing of these rights could seem an obsession to millions of Americans. Several pollsters I’ve met with currently believe that the Democratic brand is now so underwater that leaders and institutions with enough credibility to attack Trump and the Republicans on economic and privacy issues, where he and his party are very vulnerable, aren’t Democratic politicians or party organizations, but rather unions and kindred working-class and mainstream groups (small businesses, farmers, and so on).
The recent set of polls that have demonstrated the rising opposition to Donald Trump, and to his and his party’s agenda, are registering the same kind of brand damage that afflicts the Democrats. What’s different about the Trump decline is that it hasn’t been hastened or deepened by the other party’s attacks, as was certainly the case when the right hammered on the Democrats’ “obsession” with trans issues. Trump’s decline, by contrast, has been hastened and deepened by Trump himself, who dominates all media to the point that he’s “won the day,” in terms of public attention, on every day since January 20. The more he keeps winning the day, however, the more he keeps losing public support.
The chief reason Trump was elected was to deal with costs of living—food, housing, health care, gas—that are rising beyond many Americans’ ability to meet them. A Pew poll released last week shows these problems remain uppermost in our compatriots’ minds. Sixty-three percent identify inflation as an overriding problem; 67 percent say the same about the affordability of health care; and 72 percent single out “the role of money in politics.” None of these are concerns that Trump or his court are addressing, save in the negative: By making the world’s wealthiest man his hatchet-man-in-chief, Trump has brought the “role of money in politics” to new heights.
I’ve yet to see a poll that shows what the public thinks are Trump’s signature issues, but precisely because they’re so outlandish, so strikingly petty, so overwhelmingly vengeful, so far removed from those that even his supporters want from him, I think I know what would be on that list: Pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists, even the violent ones (opposed by more than 80 percent in last week’s Washington Post-Ipsos poll), renaming the Gulf of Mexico, clearing Palestinians out of Gaza and building hotel-casinos there, backing Putin and holding him blameless for the Ukraine war, threatening to annex Canada—the list goes on and on. Not surprisingly, that same poll shows 57 percent of the public believes that Trump “has exceeded his presidential authority.” And crucially, it shows the public disapproving of Trump’s handling of the economy by a 53 percent to 45 percent margin, and disapproving of his actions as president by the identical 53 to 45 margin—which shows how essential economic performance is to the public’s assessment of presidents these days.
Even worse for Trump, the University of Michigan’s survey of American consumers shows that they expect prices will rise at a 3.5 percent yearly rate over the next decade, which, Bloomberg reports, is the highest rate of consumers’ inflation fears since 1995.
Like Biden, then, Trump is viewed as not solving the economic conditions that beleaguer most Americans, and like Biden, the issues with which he is identified are far afield from those that concerned the electorate that made him president. Ironically, right-wing media has played a decisive role in the disastrous branding of both these presidents. In Biden’s case, it was Fox, talk radio, and the trolls and bullies of social media that, along with Republican pols, made the Democrats into the party pre-eminently of trans boys in girls’ sports.
In Trump’s case, it was Fox, talk radio, and the trolls and bullies of social media that so cocooned the MAGA faithful in its own obsessions and authoritarian values, as well as Trump’s peculiar obsessions with annexations and the like, that he can believe there is actually significant public support for his most unpopular and bizarre campaigns.
So it’s damaged brand against damaged brand. And it’s time for progressive social institutions—unions first and foremost—to make the case for the kinds of policies that do address the public’s real and legitimate economic fears, which could, one hopes, compel the Democrats to put those policies front and center.
