Despite President Donald Trump’s attempts to spin his first 100 days as a shining success, he is more unpopular today than at any point in his first term, when his ratings were notoriously dismal. A batch of new polls released this week suggests Trump may be in even more political trouble than Republicans initially feared.
Only 37% of voters approve of how Trump has handled the economy, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos survey. Worse still, Reuters/Ipsos found that a majority of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of immigration, his signature issue. Trump’s growing unpopularity is fueling a wave of Democratic overperformance in recent special elections. Even Trump-aligned pollster Rasmussen Reports found Democrats now enjoy a 4-point lead in the generic congressional ballot.
None of those gains seem to matter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spent the week bashing the Democratic Party as a directionless mess.
None of those gains seem to matter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spent the week bashing the Democratic Party as a directionless mess that should work harder to meet MAGA extremists halfway.
“I don’t know what the party is,” Newsom told The Hill on Monday. “I’m still struggling with that.”
Newsom’s pessimism about Democrats’ future isn’t new, but it is consistently misguided. The governor clearly wants to position himself as a politician willing to speak tough truths to the party ahead of his presumed 2028 presidential campaign. That’s great! Democrats certainly need to have honest conversations about where we struggled in 2024. But those conversations should be based on data and discussions with our voters — not on Newsom’s chats with MAGA influencers like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.
That’s especially true when Newsom’s so-called strategy required Democrats to bash the transgender community and write off Trump’s illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had protected status to reside in the U.S., as a “distraction” from “real” issues. Newsom seems to think that Democrats can only win in 2026 and 2028 if they abandon the justice principles that are the foundation of our party. The polls say otherwise.
During the rough few months that followed Kamala Harris’ general election loss, Newsom crystallized his dim view of the party when many Democrats were questioning how the party could have possibly lost to Trump. He was joined in his pessimism by some Democratic elites like strategist James Carville, who blamed Harris’ loss on “woke” politics and urged the party to split from its progressive wing.
With the party’s favorability among voters scraping record lows in March, plenty of Democrats were willing to believe that the party needed a ground-up rebuild. But then a funny thing happened: The more voters saw Trump’s incompetence and cruelty on display, the more they told pollsters that Democrats were right on issues ranging from the economy to protecting Social Security to defending due process from Trump’s unlawful deportation scheme.
Central to Newsom’s argument is the idea that Democrats lost their core demographics in 2024 because they focused too heavily on social issues. It’s understandable that he would think that, because California saw a disproportionately large number of Latinos and younger voters shift toward the GOP last year. For Newsom, those 2024 shifts are Democrats’ new normal, and the only way for the party to survive is to shed its political skin in favor of something more center-right.
In fact, that shift might not be so permanent after all. An Economist/YouGov poll released last week found that Trump has already given up nearly all of his gains among young voters, where he boasts an impressive 57% disapproval rating. Trump’s support also cratered among Americans ages 30 to 44 (58% disapproval) and even among his base of older Americans. For the first time in his political career, a majority (52%) of Americans 65 and up dislike him.
The numbers are even worse among Latino voters. A Pew Research poll released Thursday found that nearly three-quarters (72%) of Latino voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance, compared to just 27% who support him. That’s a staggering drop-off from November, when Trump won a GOP record 45% of the Latino vote. Most of the Latinos Pew surveyed said they disapproved of Trump’s economic chaos and his draconian deportations of men like Abrego Garcia — the same “distraction” Newsom was all too eager to abandon just a few weeks ago. As it turns out, what voters wanted wasn’t for Democrats to soften their edges and make peace with the GOP. They simply wanted Democrats to fight back. Newsom’s rush to the center-right looks out of place amid the positive polling coming Democrats’ way. Newsom’s rush to the center-right looks out of place amid the positive polling coming Democrats’ way, and it highlights the real moral hazard that comes from being too quick to sell out your principles because of a few bad polls. That doesn’t mean Democrats should rely on Trump to fumble his way into a Democratic Congress in 2026. They will still need to make the case for Democratic leadership. But unlike Newsom seems to think, they don’t need to abandon their Democratic bona fides to get there. As congressional Democrats gear up for an all-out fight to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from sweeping GOP cuts, it will be critical to ground that economic argument in our values as Democrats. Voters are wary and weary of Trump’s nonstop chaos and open defiance of the rule of law. The data shows those voters are already rewarding the Democrats who have been courageous enough to draw sharp contrasts between our values and the GOP’s rotten circus. A few months ago, Newsom’s strategy of making nice with MAGA and scolding the left might have seemed like the path forward. Now it’s woefully out of step with what voters say they want. Newsom says Democrats need to “move beyond the guy or gal on the white horse that’s going to come save the day.” It’s time Democrats moved beyond Newsom’s self-sabotaging, defeatist view of the party he hopes to lead.
Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies. Find him on X, @themaxburns. 
