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For much of the past two years, the US Democratic Party has been on the back burner, suffering painful electoral defeats against a ubiquitous Republican opponent while struggling with a worrying decline in registered voters and an indifferent party base.
The survey data from the summer of 2025 gave a gloomy picture because the surveys showed gloomy, multi-year low approval ratings for the performance of the party in Congress.
The number of self-identified Democrats has also fallen sharply, particularly in some key states needed to win the presidency, according to the data from 30 states and Washington, DC, which collect and report on the party affiliation of voters.
Progressive columnists spilled vats of ink trying to identify why exactly party was so unpopular with voters — made a shift further to the left race and sex, climate and weapon alienate moderate voters? Or was it because President Donald Trump, the political chameleon, stripped the party of its connection to a multiracial coalition of the working class?
Whatever the reason, the party engaged in what some members said was “seismic crisis” or “existential threat” on its long-term viability. In July, approximately half of all polled voters said they would consider joining a third party.
But in the final days of 2025, the pendulum seems to be swinging in the Democrats’ direction.
Democrats are making promises in off-year elections
Many of the party’s candidates won power in November’s special elections in Virginia and New Jersey, two states that have been mostly Democratic blue in recent years but had looked vulnerable just a few months earlier.
Trump did better than expected in New Jersey in the 2024 presidential campaign — losing to Kamala Harris by just six percentage points, far better than his past performance and how other recent Republican candidates have fared there. That red wave led some analysts to wonder: is New Jersey the next swing state?
But GOP optimism quickly faded when ballots were counted in the Garden State’s Nov. 4 gubernatorial election.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a moderate, trounced her Republican opponent, winning by more than 14 percentage points.
The first major American election since US President Donald Trump took office again was a clear success for the Democratic Party. Andrew Chang describes how victories in key races in Virginia, New Jersey, California and New York unfolded — and explains how the momentum in these local and state elections offers lessons for Democrats on how to stand up to Trump. Images courtesy of The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
Another centrist Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, swept Virginia, winning by 15 points in a state Harris won by less than six points a year earlier.
What followed those victories – and a strong showing by Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York mayoral election – was a surge in public opinion elsewhere.
“This election has all gone in Democrats’ favor — this is the so-called canary in the coal mine,” Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, said in an interview with CBC News. “You’re starting to see the cracks in Trump’s power.”
Even in Florida, once a swing state now deep red after some ideological and demographic shifts fueled by COVID, a Democrat won Miami’s mayoral race this month by a landslide. It was the first victory of the Democrats there in 28 years, and the local media called it “a good sign” for a party that has long struggled to connect.
Trump’s declining ratings
Nationally, Democrats are also seeing signs of life.
Trump’s approval rating has fallen despite some successes such as crime control and illegal border crossings. AND a recent Marist poll shows Democrats with a double-digit lead among voters heading into the 2026 congressional midterm elections – the first time in more than three years that Democrats have held such a lead.
The slowing U.S. economy appears to be causing voter unease and Trump’s backlash, said Matthew Lebo, a professor of American politics at Western University in London, Ont.
While Trump valiantly tried to kill Biden-era inflation on “day one” of his presidency, Democrats are trying, with some early results, to flip the script on affordability.
“It all comes back to pushing for an accessibility agenda,” said Mamdani, whose campaign promises included free buses and kindergarten.
Spanberger, meanwhile, has vowed to use state powers to cap drug costs and lower energy prices to address cost-of-living challenges that Trump recently called “a hoax started by the Democrats.”
“Right now the Democrats are ahead, and that lead should grow as more bad economic data comes out,” Lebo said in an interview.
“Democrats will have a lot more energy in 2026 to get out and vote against Republicans and Donald Trump than Republicans will have to support him,” he said.
Economic struggles could affect the vote
Unemployment is rising, inflation is stubbornly high, tariffs have raised the price of almost everything – with data suggesting that more and more of these trade charges are being borne by consumers, not just the businesses that initially pay them.
Experts from the National Bureau of Economic Research say that import taxes have increased the inflation rate by 0.7 percentage points.
The stock market rallied after Trump’s chaotic introduction of tariffs in April — the S&P 500, an index that tracks some of America’s 500 largest companies, is up about 18 percent year-to-date — but those gains have not been felt by everyone, or even by most voters.
As former Bill Clinton staffer James Carville famously said in the 1992 presidential election, “It’s the economy, dumbass.”
Then-President George HW Bush, who had some of the highest approval ratings ever after leading the US to victory in the first Gulf War, saw his support collapse as the economy faltered and entered recession.
During the campaign, Carville pressured his protégé, Clinton, to go all-in on economic problems—a strategy that paid off.
Could tariffs be a liability for Trump?
That’s what Michael Negron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former Biden White House official at the National Economic Council, thinks his party should do again in the 2026 midterm elections.
Negron is the author of a recent report on the economic consequences of Trump’s tariffsfinding that small business importers were paying about $25,000 more per month because of these fees than they did during the same period last year—a huge increase that transmitted to consumers in some cases.
As a result, Negron says many people now equate tariffs with inflation — and that’s prompting some voters to reevaluate their allegiance to the president and his economic policies.
Persistent inflation “is one of the fundamental drivers of the president’s unpopularity,” Negron said in an interview with CBC News. “Tariffs are an obligation for him.”
While protectionist Democrats have supported tariffs in the past and some partisan unions have also expressed support for Trump’s planNegron says the party needs to forcefully denounce Trump’s policies to appeal to voters concerned about affordability.
During the campaign for the 2024 presidential elections. Harris tried to pass off Trump’s tariffs as a national sales tax. Although Negron says at the time, “it didn’t seem like it was really resonating with people,” that has changed.
“Trump has taken this obscure tax tool and made it mainstream. People now know what it is and they don’t like what they see,” he said.
“Trump’s broad, sweeping tariffs raise costs for everyone and hurt small businesses — and Democrats need to be willing to say so.”
