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Tag: approval rating

  • Trump’s approval rating changes direction with urban voters

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    President Donald Trump is starting 2026 with a shift in an unlikely corner of the electorate: Americans living in the nation’s largest cities.

    A new Fox News poll—conducted January 23-26 under the joint direction of Democratic pollster Beacon Research and Republican pollster Shaw & Company Research among 1,005 registered voters nationwide—found the president’s job approval rising modestly among urban residents, a group that has been one of his weakest since he returned to office.

    Newsweek contacted the White House for comment via email outside regular business hours. 

    Why It Matters 

    For a Republican president, movement inside the U.S.’s major cities is rare, and even small changes can have disproportionate political consequences. 

    Urban areas hold dense concentrations of voters, drive statewide outcomes and often shape national political sentiment long before it shows up in election results.

    What To Know

    Trump gained ground with urban voters in the late-January Fox News poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, as approval in cities rose to 40 percent from 34 percent in December, while disapproval fell to 60 percent from 66 percent, according to the Fox News survey’s cross-tabs and top lines.

    Fox News’ end-of-year poll of 1,001 registered voters, conducted December 12-15 by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company, also had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3  percentage points.

    Both polls selected respondents randomly from a national voter file. Interviews were completed through a mix of landlines, cellphones and online survey links texted to a subset of voters.

    Although it is hardly friendly territory for the Republican president, this latest shift in how urban voters approve of how he is doing his job represents a meaningful movement.

    A president who improves from 34 percent to about 40 percent in American cities does not suddenly become competitive in these largely Democratic strongholds, but he becomes harder to defeat statewide.

    Urban softening can also bleed into adjacent suburbs, where political margins are often decisive.

    This month-over-month shift among urban voters came as Trump’s overall approval held at 44 percent nationally in the same Fox News series, underscoring movement inside a key geographic subgroup even as the top line stayed flat.

    Urban voters are one of the core subgroups tracked by Fox News in its national polling, which reports results by area—urban, suburban and rural—when subgroup sample sizes reach at least 100 respondents. 

    Because these area categories are weighted alongside age, race, education and region to reflect the registered voter population, shifts within urban areas can influence the overall approval picture.

    In plain terms: Within a month, more city-dwelling registered voters told Fox News they approved of Trump’s job performance, and fewer said they disapproved. 

    Even with that improvement, however, most urban respondents still gave the president negative marks.

    While Trump is still underwater by a wide margin, a six‑point increase inside such strongly Democratic territory signals that voter attitudes in the country’s biggest population centers may be shifting in tone, if not allegiance.

    Urban voters matter because they anchor Democratic strength. 

    When they budge, even slightly, it often suggests that broader perceptions of presidential performance are settling in—especially among groups that have been highly resistant to Trump since his return to office.

    What People Are Saying

    Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who helps conduct Fox News polls with Democrat Chris Anderson, said: “The president faces two difficult obstacles—the virtually unanimous and intractable opposition of Democrats and the stubbornness of high prices. Republican officeholders think the economic benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill will kick in later this year, which will be critical for GOP prospects in the midterm elections.”

    White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Newsweek in December: “Over the past year, the Trump administration has delivered critical progress to turn the page on Joe Biden’s economic disaster: cooling inflation, rising real wages, private-sector job growth, and trillions in investments to make and hire in America. The Trump administration will continue to build on this progress in the new year to continue delivering economic relief for the American people.”

    President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on January 22: “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense. … Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling.”

    He added: “Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”

    What Happens Next

    The question now is whether Trump can build on this movement, or whether it represents a temporary fluctuation within a group that historically has little affinity for him.

    Because both Fox News surveys used identical methods and margins of error, the December‑to‑January comparison is significant. But subgroup margins are always higher, which means future polls must confirm whether Trump truly is gaining ground among city‑based voters or whether these numbers plateau.

    Still, if the trend holds—even modestly—it could matter in tightly contested states where major metro areas dominate the vote count.

    In a polarized era, the center is dismissed as bland. At Newsweek, ours is different: The Courageous Center—it’s not “both sides,” it’s sharp, challenging and alive with ideas. We follow facts, not factions. If that sounds like the kind of journalism you want to see thrive, we need you.

    When you become a Newsweek Member, you support a mission to keep the center strong and vibrant. Members enjoy: Ad-free browsing, exclusive content and editor conversations. Help keep the center courageous. Join today.

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  • Donald Trump’s approval rating changes direction for first time in months 

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    President Donald Trump’s approval rating has shifted for the first time in months, according to new data from two national polls.

    Newsweek contacted the White House for comment via email outside regular business hours. 

    Why It Matters

    As economic anxiety and public debate over foreign policy continue to dominate the national agenda, the change in Trump’s approval rating could have implications for both the White House and congressional prospects ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

    What To Know

    The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll—conducted online on January 4 and 5—surveyed 1,248 U.S. adults nationwide. 

    The poll showed Trump‘s overall approval rating climbing to 42 percent, up from 39 percent in December. 

    It marks his highest approval rating since October. The margin of error for this survey was about 3 percentage points.

    Similarly, a recent InsiderAdvantage poll gave Trump a positive net approval rating of 8.4 points, the strongest since August. 

    In that survey, 49.5 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s job performance, 41.1 percent disapproved, and 9.1 percent were undecided. 

    The poll surveyed 800 likely voters on December 20 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percent.

    Recent polling aggregates confirm that the president’s approval rating remains underwater, though there has been a modest uptick compared to late 2025. 

    As of January 6, Decision Desk HQ’s national average places approval at 43.2 percent and disapproval at 53.3 percent, while Ballotpedia’s index shows a similar split of 42 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval. 

    At the time of writing, VoteHub’s live tracker reported that 42.5 percent approved and 53.9 percent disapproved, reinforcing the consensus that disapproval still exceeded approval by double digits. 

    Still, this represents a slight improvement from November’s lows near 41 percent. The shift is incremental rather than dramatic, leaving the president with a persistent net-negative rating.

    Decision Desk HQ’s polling tracker combines all credible public polls that meet the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s standards into an average, focusing on recent data, limiting the impact of campaign-funded polls and smoothing trends as more polls come in to give a clearer picture of public opinion.

    Similarly, Ballotpedia’s index averages the latest polls from trusted national sources over the past 30 days to give an up-to-date picture of public opinion, updating daily as new results come in.

    VoteHub, meanwhile, averages recent polls from reputable pollsters, giving more weight to newer polls, to provide a clear and simple snapshot of public opinion.

    What People Are Saying

    Scott Tranter, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, told The Hill: “Roughly a year in, he’s right in the middle. He’s right where, basically, he’s been all year, which is unremarkable. It’s remarkable because it’s unremarkable.” 

    InsiderAdvantage pollster Matt Towery said in a December analysis: “Interestingly, our recent job performance surveys have shown the number of undecided respondents at an unusually high number. This tells us that some voters, particularly independents, remain unsure as to his accomplishments so far. This suggests he has work to do as he and the GOP enter the midterm season.”

    White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Newsweek last month: “President Trump and every member of his administration are clear-eyed about the fact that Americans continue to reel from the lingering effects of Joe Biden’s generational economic crisis.

    “Turning the Biden economic disaster around has informed nearly every action the Trump administration has taken since Day One, from unleashing American energy to cut gas prices to signing historic drug pricing deals to cut costs for American patients. 

    “Much work remains, and every member of the Trump administration continues to focus on recreating the historic job, wage, and economic growth that Americans enjoyed during President Trump’s first term.”

    Desai also previously told Newsweek: “President Trump inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation from Joe Biden’s incompetence, and his administration has rapidly cooled inflation to a 2.5 percent annualized rate. Americans can count on inflation continuing to fall and real wages continuing to rise.”

    President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social in December: “The polls are rigged even more than the writers. The real number is 64 percent, and why not, our Country is ‘hotter’ than ever before. Isn’t it nice to have a STRONG BORDER, No Inflation, a powerful Military, and great Economy??? Happy New Year!”

    What Happens Next

    The slight uptick in Trump’s approval rating coincides with major diplomatic and military actions—most notably the U.S. strike on Venezuela—and ongoing debates over economic performance, cost of living and party leadership heading into the midterm elections. 

    Polls show persistent concern among Americans about both economic and foreign policy developments, with majorities worried about prices, affordability and the U.S.’s role overseas. The administration’s policy decisions—both domestic and international—and the country’s day-to-day economic experiences are expected to be decisive in shaping public opinion and influencing the 2026 midterms.

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  • News Analysis: Trump’s math problem: Rising prices, falling approval ratings

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump made dozens of promises when he campaigned to retake the White House last year, from boosting economic growth to banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports.

    But one pledge stood out as the most important in many voters’ eyes: Trump said he would not only bring inflation under control, but push grocery and energy prices back down.

    “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” he said in 2024. “Your prices are going to come tumbling down, your gasoline is going to come tumbling down, and your heating bills and cooling bills are going to be coming down.”

    He hasn’t delivered. Gasoline and eggs are cheaper than they were a year ago, but most other prices are still rising, including groceries and electricity. The Labor Department estimated Thursday that inflation is running at 2.7%, only a little better than the 3% Trump inherited from Joe Biden; electricity was up 6.9%.

    And that has given the president a major political problem: Many of the voters who backed him last year are losing faith.

    “I voted for Trump in 2024 because he was promising America first … and he was promising a better economy,” Ebyad, a nurse in Texas, said on a Focus Group podcast hosted by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell. “It feels like all those promises have been broken.”

    Since Inauguration Day, the president’s job approval has declined from 52% to 43% in the polling average calculated by statistician Nate Silver. Approval for Trump’s performance on the economy, once one of his strongest points, has sunk even lower to 39%.

    That’s dangerous territory for a president who hopes to help his party keep its narrow majority in elections for the House of Representatives next year.

    To Republican pollsters and strategists, the reasons for Trump’s slump are clear: He overpromised last year and he’s under-performing now.

    “The most important reasons he won in 2024 were his promises to bring inflation down and juice the economy,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. “That’s the reason he won so many voters who traditionally had supported Democrats, including Hispanics. … But he hasn’t been able to deliver. Inflation has moderated, but it hasn’t gone backward.”

    Last week, after deriding complaints about affordability as “a Democrat hoax,” Trump belatedly launched a campaign to convince voters that he’s at work fixing the problem.

    But at his first stop, a rally in Pennsylvania, he continued arguing that the economy is already in great shape.

    “Our prices are coming down tremendously,” he insisted.

    “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done,” he said, implicitly dismissing voters’ concerns.

    He urged families to cope with high tariffs by cutting back: “You know, you can give up certain products,” he said. “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.”

    Earlier, in an interview with Politico, Trump was asked what grade he would give the economy. “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he said.

    On Wednesday, the president took another swing at the issue in a nationally televised speech, but his message was basically the same.

    “One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” he said. “Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. … Inflation is stopped, wages are up, prices are down.”

    Republican pollster David Winston, who has advised GOP members of Congress, said the president has more work to do to win back voters who supported him in 2024 but are now disenchanted.

    “When families are paying the price for hamburger that they used to pay for steak, there’s a problem, and there’s no sugarcoating it,” he said. “The president’s statements that ‘we have no inflation’ and ‘our groceries are down’ have flown in the face of voters’ reality.”

    Another problem for Trump, pollsters said, is that many voters believe his tariffs are pushing prices higher — making the president part of the problem, not part of the solution. A YouGov poll in November found that 77% of voters believe tariffs contribute to inflationary pressures.

    Trump’s popularity hasn’t dropped through the floor; he still has the allegiance of his fiercely loyal base. “He is at his lowest point of his second term so far, but he is well within the range of his job approval in the first term,” Ayres noted.

    Still, he has lost significant chunks of his support among independent voters, young people and Latinos, three of the “swing voter” groups who put him over the top in 2024.

    Inflation isn’t the only issue that has dented his standing.

    He promised to lead the economy into “a golden age,” but growth has been uneven. Unemployment rose in November to 4.6%, the highest level in more than four years.

    He promised massive tax cuts for the middle class, but most voters say they don’t believe his tax cut bill brought them any benefit. “It’s hard to convince people that they got a tax break when nobody’s tax rates were actually cut,” Ayres noted.

    He kept his promise to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history — but many voters complain that he has broken his promise to focus on violent criminals. In Silver’s average, approval of his immigration policies dropped from 52% in January to 45% now.

    A Pew Research Center survey in October found that 53% of adults, including 71% of Latinos, think the administration has ordered too many deportations. However, most voters approve of Trump’s measures on border security.

    Republican pollsters and strategists say they believe Trump can reverse his downward momentum before November’s congressional election, but it may not be easy.

    “You look at what voters care about most, and you offer policies to address those issues,” GOP strategist Alex Conant suggested. “That starts with prices. So you talk about permitting reform, energy prices, AI [artificial intelligence] … and legislation to address healthcare, housing and tax cuts. You could call it the Affordability Act.”

    “A laser focus on the economy and the cost of living is job one,” GOP pollster Winston said. “His policies on regulation, energy and taxes should have a positive impact, but the White House needs to emphasize them on a more consistent basis.”

    “People voted for change in 2024,” he warned. “If they don’t get it — if inflation doesn’t begin to recede — they may vote for change again in 2026.”

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    Doyle McManus

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  • Column: What a surly California governor’s race can — and can’t — tell us about the Biden-Trump rematch

    Column: What a surly California governor’s race can — and can’t — tell us about the Biden-Trump rematch

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    It was a choice few relished, in a dismal election season.

    The incumbent was deeply unpopular, spending his entire campaign on the defensive as he struggled to sell voters on his accomplishments.

    His opponent, a wealthy businessman, was equally disliked. At one point during the contest he was dragged into court to face fraud charges.

    The year was 2002, and Democrat Gray Davis was struggling mightily to win a second term as California governor.

    “The night before the election, his favorability was only 39%,” his campaign manager, Garry South, recollected. “That’s something you don’t forget.”

    Strategists for Joe Biden can no doubt relate. For the past many months, the president has dwelled in similarly abysmal polling territory. The latest aggregation of nationwide surveys pegs his approval rating at 38%.

    No two elections are alike. But there can be striking similarities, like the parallels between that surly California contest 22 years ago and Biden’s tough reelection fight.

    Davis clawed his way to a second term despite his wretched approval rating, which is not to say that Biden will win in November. (If he does, he won’t face the risk of being ousted less than a year later, the way Davis was recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

    Even strategists for Davis can’t agree on the lessons gleaned from the Democrats’ uphill reelection effort.

    South said that campaign convinced him Biden will ultimately prevail. “I’ve gone through this before,” he said.

    Paul Maslin, the pollster for Davis’ 2002 race, is less certain. He makes no predictions beyond his expectation the presidential race will be close. The only similarities Maslin sees between then and now are the candidates’ lousy approval ratings and voters’ sour mood.

    But even if past experience is no guarantor of future results, history can inform the way we view existing circumstances — which suggests that, as difficult as things look today for Biden, the president can’t be counted out.

    Mainly because of who he’s running against.

    “It’s a binary choice,” said South. “Yes, there are other candidates in the race. But in the final analysis, it’s between Biden and Trump.”

    David Doak, the chief ad-maker for Davis’ reelection campaign, agreed. He, too, tends towards a glass-half-full assessment of Biden’s chances, suggesting a race between two disliked candidates “is a very different equation than if you’re lined up against someone popular.”

    In 2002, Davis faced Republican Bill Simon Jr. The political neophyte was a bumbling candidate who ran a terrible campaign. Compounding his difficulties, Simon was slapped just a few months before election day with a $78-million fraud verdict. (The case involved his investment in a coin-operated telephone company, which, even then — five years before the iPhone was introduced — was a head-scratcher.)

    Though the verdict was overturned after just a few weeks, the political damage was done and Davis limped past Simon to a narrow victory.

    As it happens, Trump has also been tied up in court. He’s spent the last several weeks gag-ordered and squirming as his salacious behavior is examined in forensic detail at a hush-money, election-fraud trial in New York.

    But Maslin, the number-cruncher for Davis’ campaign, warned against getting too carried away with comparisons.

    For starters, he pointed out, California was a solidly Democratic state, giving Davis a considerable advantage even as his support flagged amid a recession and rolling blackouts. Biden doesn’t have that partisan edge in the roughly half-dozen toss-up states that will decide the presidential race.

    Moreover, Maslin noted, Simon was a little-known commodity, which left the Davis campaign free to define him in harshly negative terms. Trump, by contrast, has been America’s dominant political figure for nearly a decade. His reputation, for good and ill, is firmly fixed; there are plenty of voters who won’t be dissuaded — by rain, sleet, snow, a sexual-assault verdict, multiple criminal indictments — from voting for Trump come November.

    Perhaps most significant, Biden is the oldest president in American history and, at 81, very much looks it. Davis’ age — he was 59 when he sought his second term — was never remotely a campaign issue.

    “There are many millions of voters who, even if they appreciate Biden’s achievements, still question his ability to serve on the job, much less for four more years,” Maslin said. “I’m not saying that’s accurate, but that’s what they’re thinking.”

    Davis, for his part, expects Biden to be reelected, given his record and the contrast he offers to the wayward, unprincipled ex-president. Biden, he noted, has been repeatedly underestimated.

    “I experienced that when I ran for governor,” said Davis, who was considered an exceeding long-shot before he romped to victory in the 1998 Democratic primary. “Everyone told me I had no chance to make it, so I know the fire that burns inside you when people say that.”

    He’s loath to offer the president advice — “he’s got access to the best minds in the world” — but Davis had this to say to hand-wringing Democrats: “We have a winner. Stick with him. Get excited about him.”

    “Because,” the former governor added, “another four years of Trump and you’re not going to recognize this country.”

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    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

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    As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.

    In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.

    The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.

    Read: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.

    But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.

    That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls has been stuck at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. In the lastest Fox News poll, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.

    In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.

    But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.

    One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.

    The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.

    One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.

    Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”

    Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.

    Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”

    The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.

    Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.

    Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said they believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”

    That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.

    Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign.

    Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.

    Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.

    Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.

    “This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, Oh, he’s just a showman.”

    A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.

    “He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.

    Read: The Americans who need chaos

    Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. In the new CBS/YouGov poll, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: A survey of battleground states released yesterday by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.

    Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.

    In the 2022 election, Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • How Biden Might Recover

    How Biden Might Recover

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    A press release that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign issued last week offered a revealing window into his advisers’ thinking about how he might overcome widespread discontent with his performance to win a second term next year.

    While the release focused mostly on portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to legal abortion, the most telling passage came when the Biden campaign urged the political press corps “to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.”

    That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term, especially if the president faces a rematch with Trump. With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.

    It’s common for presidents facing public disappointment in their performance to attempt to shift the public’s attention toward their rival. All embattled modern first-term presidents have insisted that voters will treat their reelection campaign as a choice, not a referendum. Biden is no exception. He routinely implores voters to compare him not “to the Almighty” but “to the alternative.”

    But it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less. The other recent presidents with approval ratings around Election Day as low as Biden’s are now were Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Both lost their bids for a second term. Continued cooling of inflation might allow Biden to improve his approval rating, which stands around 40 percent in most surveys (Gallup’s latest put it at only 37 percent). But if Biden can’t make big gains, he will secure a second term only if he wins more voters who are unhappy with his performance than any president in modern times.

    The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.

    Read: Republicans can’t figure it out

    If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.

    “I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

    Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice. Buffeted by disappointment in their tenure, both Carter and Bush decisively lost their reelection bids despite their enormous efforts to convince voters that their opponent could not be trusted with power.

    In this century, it’s become somewhat easier for presidents to overcome doubts about their performance by inflaming fears about their rival. Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004 had more success than Carter and the elder Bush at both mobilizing their core supporters and attracting swing voters by raising doubts about their opponent.

    Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.

    Read: Will Republicans pay a price for extremism?

    While more voters than in the past appear willing to treat presidential reelections as a choice rather than a referendum, Biden may need to push this dynamic to a new extreme. Obama and Bush both had approval ratings right around 50 percent in polling just before they won reelection; that meant they needed to convince only a slice of voters ambivalent about them that they would be even more unhappy with their opponent.

    Biden’s approval rating is much lower, and he is even further behind the majority approval enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 before they won decisive reelections.

    Those comparisons make clear that one crucial question confronting Biden is how much he can improve his own standing over the next year. The president has economic achievements he can tout to try to rebuild his support, particularly an investment boom in clean energy, semiconductors, and electric vehicles tied to the trio of major bills he passed. Unemployment is at historic lows, and in recent months wages have begun rising faster than prices. The latest economic reports show that inflation, which most analysts consider the primary reason for the public discontent with his tenure, is continuing to moderate.

    All of these factors may lift Biden, but probably only modestly. Even if prices for gas, groceries, and rent stop rising, that doesn’t mean they will fall back to the levels they were at when Biden took office. Voters appear unhappy not only about inflation, but about the Federal Reserve Board’s cure of higher interest rates, which has made it harder to purchase homes and cars and to finance credit-card debt. Biden also faces the challenge that some portion of his high disapproval rating is grounded not in dissatisfaction over current conditions, but in a belief that he’s too old to handle the job for another term. Better economic news won’t dispel that doubt.

    For all of these reasons, while Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.

    Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”

    For Biden, the key group could be voters who say they disapprove of his performance in office, but only “somewhat,” rather than “strongly.” The Democrats’ unusually good showing among those “somewhat” disapproving voters was a central reason the party performed unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterm election. But in an NBC national survey released earlier this week, Trump narrowly led Biden among those disenchanted voters, a result more in line with historic patterns.

    Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

    Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)

    But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.

    In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

    Poll results such as those scare Democratic strategists perhaps more than any other; they indicate that some voters may be growing more willing to accept what they didn’t like about Trump (chaos, vitriol, threats to democracy) because they think he’s an antidote for what they don’t like about Biden (his results on inflation, immigration, and crime.) Jim McLaughlin, a Trump-campaign pollster, told me earlier this year that because of their discouragement with Biden’s record, even some voters who say “I may not love the guy” are growing newly receptive to Trump. “The example I had people use is that he is like your annoying brother-in-law that you can’t stand but you know at the end of the day he’s a good husband, he’s a good father,” McLaughlin said.

    The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.

    Trump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Republicans Can’t Figure It Out

    Republicans Can’t Figure It Out

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    Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls.

    Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights, and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers. Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi.

    The results extended the most striking pattern from the 2022 midterm election, when Republicans failed to match the usual gains for the party out of the White House at a time of widespread public dissatisfaction with the president. Democrats, just as they did last November, generated yesterday’s unexpectedly strong results primarily by amassing decisive margins in urban centers and the large inner suburbs around them.

    The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues.

    “The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”

    The surprising results yesterday could not have come at a better time for Democratic leaders. Many in the party have been driven to a near frenzy of anxiety by a succession of recent polls showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump.

    Yesterday’s victories have hardly erased all of Biden’s challenges. For months, polls have consistently found that his approval rating remains stuck at about 40 percent, that about two-thirds of voters believe he’s too old to effectively serve as president for another term, and that far more voters express confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy than in Biden’s.

    But, like the 2022 results in many of the key swing states, the Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party. “Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me in an email last night.

    Even more than a midterm election, these off-year elections can turn on idiosyncratic local factors. But the common thread through most of the major contests was the Democrats’ continuing strength in racially diverse, well-educated major metropolitan areas, which tend to support liberal positions on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those large population centers have trended Democratic for much of the 21st century. But that process accelerated after Trump emerged as the GOP’s leader in 2016, and has further intensified since the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

    Across yesterday’s key contests, Democrats maintained a grip on major population centers. In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear carried the counties centered on Louisville and Lexington by about 40 percentage points each over Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

    In Ohio, abortion-rights supporters dominated most of the state’s largest communities. That continued the pattern from the first round of the state’s battle over abortion. In that election, as I wrote, the abortion-rights side, which opposed the change, won 14 of the state’s 17 largest counties, including several that voted for Trump in 2020.

    The results were equally emphatic in yesterday’s vote on a ballot initiative to repeal the six-week-abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed, and Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed, in 2019. The abortion ban was buried under a mountain of votes for repeal in the state’s biggest places: An overwhelming two-thirds or more of voters backed repeal in the state’s three largest counties (which are centered on Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati), and the repeal side won 17 of the 20 counties that cast the most ballots, according to the tabulations posted in The New York Times.

    Democrats held the Virginia state Senate through strong performances in suburban areas as well. Especially key were victories in which Democrats ousted a Republican incumbent in a suburban Richmond district, and took an open seat in Loudoun County, an outer suburb of Washington, D.C.

    The race for an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat followed similar tracks. Democrat Daniel McCaffery cruised to victory in a race that hinged on debates about abortion and voting rights. Like Democrats in other states, McCaffery amassed insuperable margins in Pennsylvania’s largest population centers: He not only posted big leads in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but he also built enormous advantages in each of the four large suburban counties outside Philadelphia, according to the latest vote tally.

    Read: America’s bluest state loves its Republican governor

    From a national perspective, the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature probably offered the most important signal. The Virginia race presented the same competing dynamics that are present nationally. Though Biden won the state by 10 percentage points in 2020, recent polls indicate that more voters there now disapprove than approve of his performance. And just as voters in national polls routinely say they trust Trump more than Biden on the economy and several other major issues, polls found that Virginia voters gave Republicans a double-digit advantage on economy and crime. Beyond all that, Youngkin raised enormous sums to support GOP legislative candidates and campaigned tirelessly for them.

    Yet even with all those tailwinds, Youngkin still failed to overturn the Democratic majority in the state Senate, and lost the GOP majority in the state House. The principal reason for Youngkin’s failure, analysts in both parties agree, was public resistance to his agenda on abortion. Youngkin had elevated the salience of abortion in the contest by explicitly declaring that if voters gave him unified control of both legislative chambers, the GOP would pass a 15-week ban on the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

    Read: Why deep-red Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor

    Youngkin and his advisers described that proposal as a “reasonable” compromise, and hoped it would become a model for Republicans beyond the red states that have already almost all imposed more severe restrictions. But the results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”

    Youngkin’s inability to capture the Virginia state legislature, even with all the advantages he enjoyed, will probably make the 2024 GOP presidential contenders even more skittish about openly embracing a national ban on abortion. But Timmaraju argued that yesterday’s results showed that voters remain focused on threats to abortion rights. “Our job is to make sure that the American people don’t forget who overturned Roe v. Wade,” she told me.

    None of yesterday’s results guarantees success for Biden or Democrats in congressional races next year. It is still easier for other Democrats to overcome doubts about Biden than it will be for the president himself to do so. In particular, the widespread concern in polls that Biden is too old to serve another term is a problem uniquely personal to him. And few Democrats really want to test whether they can hold the White House in 2024 without improving Biden’s ratings for managing the economy. Trump’s base of white voters without a college degree may be more likely to turn out in a presidential than off-year election as well.

    But a clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”

    Yesterday’s results did not sweep away all the obstacles facing Biden. But the outcome, much like most of the key contests in last fall’s midterm, show that the president still has a viable pathway to a second term through the same large metro areas that keyed this unexpectedly strong showing for Democrats.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

    Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

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    Even before Donald Trump announced he was seeking the presidency again, last week’s election results showed Republicans how difficult it will be to escape the former president’s gravitational pull.

    Widespread voter resistance to a Republican Party refashioned in Trump’s image offset disenchantment with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance and allowed Democrats to post one of the best first-midterm showings for the sitting president’s party in more than a century. In almost all the key battleground states, the same powerful coalition of voters who opposed Trump in the 2018 and 2020 elections delivered stunning rebukes to GOP candidates running with the former president’s endorsement or in his polarizing style, or both.

    David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame

    The results were much better for Republicans running in red states and districts. But for party strategists operating anywhere outside the most reliably conservative terrain, the election’s message was unequivocal. In those contested areas, “there is no road back to relevance if Donald Trump continues to be the dominant figure in the Republican Party and especially if he is our nominee in 2024,” Dick Wadhams, the former GOP chair in Colorado, told me.

    Trump’s unusually early presidential announcement, though, made clear that he will not surrender his grip on the GOP without a fight. Last night’s announcement speech itself was instantly forgettable, a rambling greatest-hits collection of familiar priorities (building a border wall), bombastic descriptions of American carnage (“the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities”), and well-worn grievances (“I’m a victim”) delivered with surprisingly little emotion or energy. He pointedly denied responsibility for the GOP’s disappointing showing last week, instead blaming “the citizens of our country [who] have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through.”

    Yet Trump’s greatest obstacle to a comeback may be the widespread belief among party leaders, donors, and key figures within conservative media that continued hostility toward him is the principal reason Democrats last week succeeded at holding the Senate, adding control of more governorships and state legislatures and minimizing their losses in the House of Representatives, even though Republicans are poised to capture a slim majority in the chamber.

    Such a strong performance is exceedingly rare for the party in the White House during the president’s first midterm. Over at least the past century, it is unprecedented for that party to do so well when the president faces as much discontent as Biden does now. Since 1900, the only other examples of the incumbent party running at least as well as Democrats did this year came for presidents who were soaring in popularity, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the early New Deal), John F. Kennedy in 1962 (after he defused the Cuban Missile crisis), Bill Clinton in 1998 (amid the backlash to the Republican Congress’s moves to impeach him), and George W. Bush in 2002 (after 9/11).

    This year, though, just 44 percent of voters nationwide said they approved of Biden’s job performance, while a 55 percent majority disapproved, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Biden, the exit polls found, did not receive majority support in any of the states with the most closely watched gubernatorial and Senate races, and in some of those states (including Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona), his approval rating barely peaked above 40 percent.

    In the 21st century, as I’ve written, there are very few examples of Senate (and even gubernatorial) candidates from the president’s party winning elections in states where his approval rating had fallen that low. Yet Democrats rolled to unexpected victories in many of the key swing-state races, including Senate contests in Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and governor’s races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (Democrats also led in the Georgia Senate race heading for a December runoff between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.) In more reliably blue states, such as Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York, Republicans were uniformly frustrated in their hopes for breakthroughs in Senate and governor’s races (though the GOP did flip several New York House districts).

    Read: Trumpism is toxic

    GOP governors did score decisive reelection victories in Republican-leaning states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas. GOP Senate candidates also won in states with large populations of non-college-educated white voters (particularly Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina). Exit polls showed GOP candidates continuing to benefit from the electoral advantages Trump has bequeathed them: dominant majorities among white voters without a college education, nonurban, and white Evangelical voters, as well as a higher floor of support among Latino voters, particularly men.

    But the overall ledger showed more bright spots for Democrats. And given Americans’ broadly negative views on Biden and the economy, the only plausible explanation for that success is many voters’ unwavering resistance to the Trump-era GOP. Democrats successfully painted many Republican nominees (including most of the high-profile contenders Trump endorsed) as extremists, citing their opposition to legal abortion and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory. Outside the conservative heartland, Democrats in most key statewide races maintained a winning edge among the groups that most resisted Trump: younger voters, college-educated white voters, people of color, and secular adults, with women in each group tilting more toward them than men.

    Most striking, the exit polls found that Democrats carried a plurality of independent voters nationally and won them by bigger margins in most of the marquee contests. “I think, at the end of the day, our crazy was more repelling than their crazy,” Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP consultant, told me.

    Nationally, nearly six in 10 voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, and they voted almost four to one for Democrats. Among independent voters, Trump’s national unfavorable ratings rose to two-thirds overall, nearly three-fourths among women. Among women especially, that was a far more negative rating than independents gave to Biden.

    Election results showed that the white-collar suburban areas across blue and swing states that rejected Trump remained locked down against GOP candidates this year, even amid the pervasive discontent over the economy.  In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate John Fetterman matched Biden’s elevated advantage over Trump in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia; Warnock did the same in the populous Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, outside Atlanta. In 2020, Biden became the first Democratic candidate since Harry Truman in 1948 to carry Maricopa County (centered on Phoenix and its suburbs) when he won it by about 45,000 votes; as of this morning, Senator Mark Kelly led there by nearly 100,000 votes. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet almost exactly matched Biden’s massive 2020 margins in Denver and its big surrounding suburban counties.

    Especially striking was that these suburban areas broke as badly against GOP candidates who tried to define themselves as centrists, including the Senate nominees in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.

    In Colorado, the GOP nominated Joe O’Dea, a moderate, energetic candidate who explicitly distanced himself from Trump. Yet he too was swamped. To Wadhams, that pattern is a clear signal that in Democratic-leaning and swing states, virtually no individual Republican can wash off Trump’s stain on the GOP image.

    Heading into the election, Wadhams told me, the key uncertainty in Colorado was whether “those vast numbers of unaffiliated voters who had voted so strongly Democratic and anti-Trump in 2018 and 2020 would … give strong Republican candidates a serious look in 2022,” now that Trump is no longer in the White House. On Election Day, he added, “I got my answer, and the answer was no.” The lesson, he said, “is that even among the unaffiliated voters who I thought we had a shot at, they ultimately said, ‘Those Republicans are still crazy; they are still in the hip pocket of Donald Trump.’”

    House elections produced the same pattern. Republican House gains were concentrated in the least urban districts, where Trump has always been strongest, including sparsely settled distant suburbs and pure rural areas, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. But the GOP’s overall House success was constrained because the party still faced a virtual brick wall of resistance in the central cities and inner suburbs of the large metro areas that repeatedly rejected Trump: With about 10 races still to be called, Democrats have won 129 of the 140 seats in the three most urban districts, according to figures Bump provided to me.

    Such disappointing results have led more GOP leaders than at any point in Trump’s political career to publicly declare that the party must now move beyond him. Trump will likely also face much more serious resistance from party elites and leading conservative media outlets. His announcement speech had a musty feel, which may preview the difficulty he could face convincing GOP voters that his day has not passed. And in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump could face a challenger more formidable than any he swept aside in 2016.

    But, still, displacing Trump may not be so easy. Compared with the Democrats, the GOP presidential primary rules favor winner-take-all systems that benefit the candidate with the largest block of support, even if that’s less than a majority, Benjamin Ginsberg, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, told me. That could benefit Trump because even if the disappointment over last week’s results shrinks his potential ceiling of support, he retains a dedicated floor among non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical white Republicans. In 2016, as I wrote at the time, Trump pulled away from the field to become the presumptive nominee at a point where he had not won 50 percent of the vote in any state and had captured only about 40 percent of all ballots cast.

    A second challenge is whether anyone, including DeSantis, can consolidate the college- educated Republican voters most resistant to the former president. Some early 2024 polls already show Trump attracting only about one-third of Republicans holding a four-year degree or more. But that’s about as much support from them as he captured during the competitive stage of the GOP race in 2016; he won because he amassed a dominant advantage among non-college Republicans (many of whom are also evangelical Christians), while those with degrees splintered among many alternatives, such as John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

    That could easily happen again, particularly if candidates who position themselves as more centrist on social issues, such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, run. Both men are probably too moderate (or at least perceived that way) to win a GOP presidential nomination, but they could siphon away too many of the voters that a more viable alternative like DeSantis would need to overtake Trump.

    Then there is the grueling practical reality of running against Trump, who has shown himself willing to say and do almost anything. In 2016, he bludgeoned Cruz and Rubio so relentlessly that they still seem broken in a manner reminiscent of Game of Thrones. DeSantis might fare better, but until someone actually runs against Trump, it’s impossible to guarantee that they can handle the jackhammer pressure. Nor is it clear that the donors and strategists who now insist that the party must move on from Trump will remain steadfast if he threatens to trash the nominee or run as an independent should he lose.

    Another wild card is a possible indictment of the former president, from investigations by either the Justice Department or the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. An indictment could cause more Republican voters to reflexively rally around him. But it could also make some back away, either because his behavior offends them, or more likely, because they conclude that his legal troubles would further degrade his capacity to win a general election.

    Last week’s results signaled plenty of vulnerabilities also for Biden, including the national-exit-poll finding that two-thirds of voters do not want him to run again. But if the 2022 election demonstrated anything, it is that many Americans who are disappointed in Biden will stand with him and his party nonetheless if the alternative is to entrust power to a Trump-era GOP that they view as a threat to their rights, their values, and democracy itself. That’s the ominous prospect for GOP officials in swing states nervously watching Trump storm into the party’s next presidential nominating contest.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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