Friday musings

Reasons for hope

1. The public opinion analyst G. Elliott Morris has new data up at his substack. According to Morris’ aggregate of polls, Trump is now at -21.4%, the low point of his presidency and the lowest ever for a president at this stage¹ (The Economist has Trump at -20, Nate Silver at -18 and the Times also at -18). Americans hate Trump’s agenda. He’s about 35 points under water on fighting inflation, likely the single issue that contributed most to his election victory in 2024. Across the board, on item after item, Trump is unpopular and getting more so.

2. I know some (or many) will say that public opinion doesn’t matter. I understand the feeling. And it’s true that, whatever public opinion says, we’re stuck with this monstrous administration for the next 33 months. Indeed, as Trump becomes more unpopular, his instincts become only more destructive. It’s a bad combination. But I think it’s wrong, or too simplistic to say that public opinion doesn’t matter. As Josh Marshall has argued repeatedly, political power is unitary. Weakness in one realm begets weakness in others. Put another way, as Trump’s power diminishes in important respects, more actors of various kinds, from elected officials, to courts to civil society (including entities like law firms) are willing to stand up to him. And the more that happens, the more he loses and the more others feel empowered to challenge him. Asserting that fact is not a claim that he cannot or will not continue to do terrible damage. He will. But that damage can at least be mitigated. And it can and will empower ordinary folks, civil society institutions and public officials around the country to ensure that Trump and his minions do not get the final word on future elections.

3. On a related note, the No Kings marches that have taken place around the country, and are bringing out millions of people, also matter, as long as one has a proper sense of proportion about their meaning and effects. If you define success or failure in terms of their ability to stop Trump and his administration from continuing to do harm, or getting this Congress to behave differently, then no, they won’t accomplish those things. But that should not be understood as their purpose. A more useful way to think about them is as means of forging solidarity among the majority of Americans who reject this administration. And it is important to remind ourselves that, on the question of Trump’s agenda, we are the majority. That matters because we humans are social creatures. We are emboldened by our connections and diminished when we feel alone and isolated. That might sound airy/fairy to some (or many :)). But I encourage folks to, at a minimum, be open-minded about the possibility that more people will feel fortified and encouraged by such displays in the present to take on the fights in the future that need to be fought. I think that’s already evident in the community organizations being stood up all over the country, that brought out the extraordinary response to the administration’s invasion of Minneapolis and in countless other successful acts of resistance. As many have said, the future is yet unwritten. No one act of protest will determine its content. But mass mobilizations, alongside all the other actions people are engaged in, give us a fighting chance to write a better story.

4. There’s lots of handwringing out there about Democrats’ persistent, relative underperformance on the generic ballot. That Trump’s poor standing in the polls should translate into a bigger lead for Democrats on generic ballot questions, about which party’s candidates for Congress Americans are more likely to vote for later this year. Even the polling results so far, disappointing though they may be, show Democrats with a mid-single digit advantage which, were that to be the final result, would almost certainly be good enough for them to retake the House in 2027. Regardless, I wouldn’t read too much into those. It’s true that the Democratic Party remains an unpopular brand, one factor in the meh polling data. It’s also true, in my opinion, that its Congressional leadership is, on the whole, pathetic. But there are reasons to believe that the current numbers may understate Democrats’ strength going into the Fall. In several dozen special elections around the country over the past year, in Red, Blue and Purple places alike, Democrats are outperforming their 2024 margins by something like a dozen points and, as happened in the November 2025 races across the country, winning in places and by margins almost no one expected. It’s also clear that those results are, in part, a result of a surprising number of Republicans crossing over to vote for Democratic candidates. Presidents always face headwinds in midterm elections. Trump’s party got hammered in 2018 and that is the usual pattern (though to a surprising extent, that’s not what happened to Democrats in 2022). In addition, voters are in an especially sour mood this year, whether judged by the University of Michigan’s venerable consumer confidence measures or other polling about the direction of the country. All of this bodes poorly for the incumbent party, which is further reflected in the record number of retirements of GOP incumbents ahead of the November elections.

5. That a man without a conscience and with a long public record of fantasizing about violent retribution against those he deems his enemies managed to convince a good number of people that he was anti-war in some principled and therefore enduring way has been one of the greater feats of recent American political history. Before the 2024 election, Mehdi Hasan tried to set the record straight, though Democrats’ own profound failings in this arena, plus Trump’s success as a liar obscured the reality. In any event, that jig is obviously up. The current moronic war, which even an idiot could see from the outset was ill-advised, gets only more absurd by the day, including the now growing possibility that, even as its military capabilities are being degraded substantially, Iran’s geopolitical position may well end up having been enhanced by the war. Meanwhile, the short term impacts, including rising energy prices, compounded by Trump’s almost spitefully counterproductive approach to energy more broadly, plus the further betrayal of almost every aspect of his 2024 promises, will only add to Trump’s and the GOP’s problems in 2026.

6. I know I repeat myself on this point, but it’s really important that we resist the tendency to give in to demoralization. We (yes, I am being presumptuous here — sue me) are in better position to mitigate at least some further terrible harms than we were a year ago. And there is a real opportunity to claw back from Trump some of the political power he has arrogated to himself, both through elections and through the many other means I’ve already mentioned. I said in a post a few weeks ago that Trump can’t steal the 2026 midterms, try though he might. I remain relatively hopeful about that fact but it will help for us all to fortify one another in whatever ways we can as elections approach. Reminding ourselves that we are in a much stronger position now, in the ways I’ve outlined above, is one small way to do that.

1. As Morris points out, if you count this as a second consecutive term, a couple of presidents, including the younger Bush, were worse at this stage. But Trump’s standing is historically bad by any measure.