Politico published a story yesterday saying that Democrats are counting on a blue wave to carry them back to power next year. Unfortunately for Democrats there are already warning signs that wave may not happen.
Recent polling shows Democrats are still struggling to regain their footing with voters who lurched right in 2024, and that’s compounded by growing gaps in fundraising, an increasing number of messy primaries and a congressional map that Republicans are redrawing to make it harder for Democrats to win.
“I don’t see a blue wave,” said Matt Taglia, the senior director of Emerson College polling, a non-partisan group that routinely administers political opinion surveys. “It’s more like a blue trickle.”...
“Vulnerable House Democrats are sitting on our turf,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “They’re getting blown out of the water in the money race, they’re eating their own in messy primaries, the Democrat Party’s approval ratings are at rock bottom, they are consistently on the wrong side of wildly popular issues, and they’ve completely lost touch with hardworking Americans.”
Some polling does show that President Trump's approval ratings are down quite a bit since the start of the year. However, Newsweek has a story out today suggesting Trump is in better shape according to one well-respected pollster.
President Donald Trump's net favorability rating is even among American voters, according to the latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll.
The survey found that 45 percent of voters view Trump favorably, while another 45 percent view him unfavorably. Six percent said they were not familiar enough to say and another four percent said they were not sure.
"The TIPP Poll has the much-coveted distinction as the most accurate poll of this century, being the only poll to accurately predict the winner of the last five U.S. presidential elections," TIPP Insights says.
Whatever the case, it seems Democrats have not been able to capitalize on whatever polling declines the president is seeing. Their party's approval is at a low not seen in decades.
Even as Trump’s approval has tanked, about 63 percent of voters hold negative views of Democrats, marking a three-decade nadir for the party, according to a recent poll released by The Wall Street Journal. And Democrats’ projected wins are modest: Separate polls conducted by Emerson College and YouGov show that in a generic matchup between the parties, they are ahead by just 2 percentage points.
That's a long way from the +6 matchup Democrats had going into the 2018 midterms when they picked up 41 House seats. And of course any pickups they achieve could be balanced out by losses in Texas assuming a plan to redistrict the state goes through. Concern over this plan is why Texas Democrats fled the state and are currently hiding out in Illinois.
Meanwhile, there are concerns that there will be another blue vs. blue battle in some of these races between the establishment Dems and the more progressive challengers. Those fights, including loud arguments over Israel's war in Gaza, could splinter the party and result in fewer victories. This kind of infighting also divides donors who haven't been giving as readily to Democrats lately.
Republican fundraising nearly doubled that of the Democrats in June, according to reporting by The Hill and a Fox News Digital review.
The Hill reported that the Republican National Committee raised a grand total of $16.2 million in the month of June, far outstripping the Democratic National Committee’s $8.6 million during the same period.
The RNC currently has a war chest totaling $80.78 million, while the DNC has $15.22 million on hand, according to the outlet.
Setting aside the party machinery, you can see the same fundraising divide in districts being targeted by each party.
Republicans are racking up more cash than Democrats as both parties prepare to fight over dozens of House battlegrounds.
Ten of the nearly three dozen targeted House Republicans raised at least $1 million in the quarter. Meanwhile, just one of the 25 GOP-targeted incumbent Democrats raised that much...
“House Republicans are steamrolling vulnerable Democrats in the money race, and it’s not even close,” NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement. “While Republicans build a war chest to grow the majority, Democrats are leaderless, divided, and banished to the wilderness — and now their donors are closing their checkbooks.”
Why are Democratic donors closing their wallets? There are lots of possible explanations for that. One in the contentions issues that divide the party. Another could be the lack of results despite $1.5 billion spent in the last presidential election. And yet another is probably the constant demands for money from loosely affiliated PACs which donate very little of the money raised to actual candidates. In short, donors big and small have reasons not to give.
Of course it's still a long way from August 2025 to November of next year and a lot of things could change between now and then. But, at least for now, the blue wave is not looking very likely.
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