Surprised? NBC News readers might be if they only read their Sunday news report about their latest poll numbers.
We'll get back to that momentarily. NBC News chose to frame these poll results in the hoary pox-upon-both-houses narrative, while informing their readers of the shocking fact that independents matter in elections. About the closest they come to hitting the real news is in the equally shocking news that voters see both parties negatively:
As party primaries kick off ahead of the pivotal battle for control of Congress this fall, Democrats — and especially Republicans — say they are prioritizing ideological alignment instead of electability when they pick candidates, according to a new national NBC News poll.
Meanwhile, the nation overall has a negative view of both parties, led by independents.
Rather than go into the data and discuss just how unpopular the two parties are – especially in relation to one another – NBC News punts that until deep into the article. The analysis spends most of its analysis discussing the split in both parties between purity and electability, which is interesting but also hardly news. After a series of pull quotes from surveyed voters, we finally get to this:
Distrust of the institutional Democratic Party among some Democratic voters helps explain why the party continues to receive historically low ratings.
Just 30% of registered voters in the new NBC News poll view the Democratic Party positively, compared to 52% who view it negatively. By comparison, 37% of registered voters view the Republican Party positively while 51% view it negatively — a higher rating, but still underwater.
The lower marks for Democrats are driven in no small part by dissension among their ranks, with 62% of Democrats viewing their party positively, compared to 77% of Republicans who view the GOP positively. Independents have low marks for both parties, as 13% view the Democratic Party positively and 16% view the Republican Party positively.
We then get pull quotes about how the party doesn't fight Donald Trump enough, yada yada yada. However, the data from NBC's own poll suggest that the fight might be part of the problem, especially when one considers Democrats' approval ratings among respondents relative to others. Democrats only get saved from dead last because NBC's pollsters decided to troll respondents by including Iran in the survey:
NBC shows AI with worse poll numbers than ICE https://t.co/gvatu6b5HC pic.twitter.com/RnMB5McvnJ
— Nick Field (@nick_field90) March 8, 2026
Well ... at least they beat Iran. That's all they beat, however.
In fact, ICE beats them rather easily. In fact, ICE's positive rating is eight points higher than the Democrat Party's. Their negatives are four points higher as well, but the overall effect shows that Americans see ICE – and clearly, immigration enforcement – as more popular than Democrats. What did NBC News have to say about that in their analysis?
Nothing.
ICE never gets mentioned in the poll analysis, despite the sharp controversy around their efforts. The word "immigration" does not come up one single time. Democrats have shut down the Department of Homeland Security over ICE's enforcement activities, a shutdown that has begun to impact air travelers over the last few days. And yet NBC News doesn't consider this polling result significant enough even for a single mention. Why, it's almost like they didn't read their own data ... or don't like what it tells them, and us.
It's interesting to note who else outranks Democrats in this poll. Donald Trump beats Democrats by ten points in the gap and eleven points in terms of positive reaction. On the latter, Trump comes in second with his 41% to "Pope Leo the Fourteenth," who barely edges Trump at 42%. (I guess NBC doesn't trust its readers to grok Roman numerals.) If we rank this list in terms of positive reactions, a pattern emerges:
- Pope Leo XIV
- Donald Trump
- JD Vance and ICE (tie)
- Republican Party
- Stephen Colbert
- Marco Rubio and Kamala Harris (tie)
- Sanctuary cities
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Democrat Party
- Gavin Newspom
- Artificial Intelligence
- Iran
The pattern shows that Republicans are resonating better than Democrats, perhaps in large part because of the immigration enforcement that NBC ignores. The negative reactions we see are largely a result of a neurotic, Pavlovian response to Trump rather than to the policies he's pushed during his term. And that makes sense, considering the key role that immigration and border enforcement played in the 2024 election and the continuing popularity of closing borders and deporting illegal aliens.
Not that NBC News can be bothered to connect those dots, of course. They're too busy pushing Democrats to fight harder and ignore what voters actually want because Orange Man Bad, etc etc.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left's lies, new legislation wasn't needed to secure our border, just a new president.
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