Democrats’ unfavorability rating reaches new, 16-year high as party keeps licking wounds following disastrous 2024: poll
Americans may not like the GOP, but they really don’t like the Democratic Party, a new poll has found.
The party of Jefferson, Jackson, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and Biden holds a 57% unfavorable rating among voters, according to the Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday, while just 31% of voters say they have a favorable view.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, has a 43% favorability rating among voters and a 45% unfavorability rating, per the poll.
The Democrats’ unfavorability rating is the highest since Quinnipiac pollsters began asking the question in November 2008. Similarly, the percentage of voters viewing the GOP favorably is the highest over the same period.
The brutal rating for Democrats comes as the party is licking its wounds from the 2024 election cycle, which saw all 50 states move to the right.
Internally, Democrats are also trying to find their footing on messaging. The party’s ex-leaders, former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, have laid low since Trump’s return.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has reportedly warned his colleagues that Trump will flood the zone with controversial pronouncements.
Instead of getting distracted, NBC reported, Jeffries wants House Democrats to focus on cost of living and other kitchen table issues.
Meanwhile, Trump’s initial moves are enjoying widespread popularity, with his dispatching of troops to the US-Mexico border getting 60% approval from voters who responded to Quinnipiac.
However, voters also favor citizenship being automatically granted to children born in the US by a margin of more than two-to-one, (61% to 30%), as the Trump administration has sought to strip the right from kids of illegal immigrants.
By a margin of 57% to 37%, voters disapproved of Trump’s sweeping pardon of roughly 1,500 Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants, though 74% of Republicans said they approved of that action.
Voters also disapproved of Biden, 82, issuing pre-emptive pardons to five members of his family — including first brother James Biden — by a two-to-one spread (62%-31%).
Americans also take dim view of Trump’s desire to annex Greenland, with 55% disapproving of the idea. Opinion is more divided on the question of retaking the Panama Canal Zone, with 45% disapproving and 45% approving, per Quinnipiac.
On tariffs, 48% of voters believe levies on imports will harm the US economy, while 42% anticipate they will be a net positive, the poll found.
Trump will start his second term with a net positive approval rating (46% approve, 43% disapprove), in contrast to the negative-eight spread (36% approve, 44% disapprove) at the time he took office in January 2017.
The poll sampled 1,019 registered voters nationally Jan. 23–27 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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