How Democrats Can Crush the Midterms
Trump has offered up the issues on a silver platter.
DONALD TRUMP’S APPROVAL RATING is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden’s was at this point in his term. Meanwhile, the share of Americans who strongly disapprove of the president broke 46 percent for the first time ever. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president’s approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50 percent, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018 elections. By contrast, when presidents enjoy approval above 50 percent, as in 2002 and 1998, the president’s party can actually gain seats in an off-year election.
So the Democratic party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November.
That’s good—but not good enough. The stakes are so high that a win isn’t sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.
If I were designing a Democratic party to please former Republicans like me, it probably wouldn’t be able to hold on to large chunks of its base,1 so what follows is not my personal fantasy political agenda, but instead some practical suggestions about framing on a few issues that would be both popular with independent voters and acceptable to traditional Democrats.
The easiest issue, perhaps surprisingly, is immigration. Since 2024, Democrats have been snake-bit on the subject, afraid that their instinctive pro-immigrant positions were unpopular enough to lead voters to select a snarling villain vowing mass deportations. They fell silent for a while and still seem unsure how best to position themselves. They can exhale. What the polls over the past year suggest is that most Americans are not white-supremacist goons like Stephen Miller, ready to trash the Constitution in the name of purifying the Volk.
Instead, voters actually believed (naïve at best, I know) that Trump would only deport “the worst of the worst.” Many a focus group participant has lamented that they thought Trump was only about deporting criminals. As they watched the inhuman treatment of gardeners, veterans, children, and American-citizen protesters, they soured fast. Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, fully 60 percent of respondents told NBC they disapproved of Trump’s immigration policies, 49 percent strongly so. Asked who deserved most of the blame for clashes and unrest in Minnesota cities, 57 percent cited the Trump administration versus 19 percent who named protesters. Asked whether ICE should be maintained in its current form, abolished, or reformed, 72 percent chose abolish (29) or reform (43). That is as close to national recoil as we are going to get in an era when so much of the GOP is MAGAfied.
Other surveys have found that even Republican voters have relatively warm feelings toward legal immigrants—71 percent of 2024 Trump voters had a positive view of legal immigrants, compared with 72 percent of all voters.
If Democrats present themselves as opposing the brutal tactics of ICE and CBP and favoring firm border controls, they should find themselves in the sweet spot. Messages like Billie Eilish’s “No one is illegal on stolen land” are unhelpful. This is the moment for Democrats to express their idealism about America as a haven for the oppressed and a melting pot—or salad bowl or potpourri plate or whatever—for people of all races, creeds, and countries of origin. By all means, get angry about the savagery; stress that law and order means that first and foremost the state cannot be the lawbreaker. But also add that borders are not notional and chaos cannot be permitted to prevail along the Rio Grande.
THE OTHER BIG ISSUE on voters’ minds is inflation, or in Democratic parlance, “affordability.” The reality is that politicians cannot actually bring prices down, as Trump promised to do in 2024, except by crashing the economy. Still, some voters presumably believed him (perhaps they overlap with those who thought he would only deport criminals)—but in any case they are disillusioned now. Some Democrats may be tempted to run on taxing the rich to pay for health care or rental assistance or other expenses of daily life. This is a comfortable old shoe for Democrats, but as a political strategy it hasn’t been terribly successful. Middle-class voters often fear that they will be labeled as rich. Besides, taxing the rich will not bring down prices, as the experience of high-tax states like California, New Jersey, and New York demonstrate.
On the other hand, voters have already concluded that tariffs are making life more expensive. The issue is a layup—if Democrats can get out of their own way. Nearly 60 percent of Americans blame Trump for rising prices, and 65 percent disapprove of his tariffs. Fifty-nine percent of independent voters say the tariffs have hurt the economy and their personal finances. Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs. Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.
President Biden whiffed on tariffs, choosing to keep most of Trump’s first-term tariffs in place, which leaves a legacy for Democrats to explain or live down. And the progressive wing of the party represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has long favored tariffs as a way to protect American workers from competition from low-wage nations. This muddies the waters. Democrats can head into the midterms saying they’re for “targeted tariffs” and in opposition to Trump’s chaotic tariffs, and maybe that will be effective, but wouldn’t a full-throated repudiation of the international trade war be cleaner?
Democrats can run as the party of competition, prosperity, and global alliances. Above all, cutting tariffs is one of the only levers governments can pull that will actually reduce prices, and since price sensitivity is very much on voters’ minds, does it make sense to temper that message at all? Some Democrats have already adapted. All House Democrats voted in favor of a resolution that would end the national emergency excuse for tariffs, and three Republicans joined them. This is the moment. Tariffs bad—full stop.
FINALLY, A VULNERABILITY that Democrats must overcome is seeming soft on crime. Here again the Trump administration has handed them a golden opportunity. MAGA is so fixated on ethnic cleansing that it is pulling Justice Department officials off crime-fighting to pursue immigration cases. A memo from then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed officers who had been working on transnational organized crime, money laundering, and major drug trafficking networks to focus instead on assisting ICE. Ditto for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. In fact, roughly 25 percent of FBI agents (and 40 percent in larger field offices) have been diverted from fighting financial crimes, public corruption, cybercrime, and complex corporate investigations and pulled into immigration enforcement. Most maddening are the thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents who’ve been pulled from investigations of child sex abuse to assist with deportations—as if the administration needed more ways of signaling that it’s okay with child sex trafficking.
Democrats should stress that diverting federal agents from crime-fighting toward grandma-snatching is making Americans less safe. The funds appropriated for ICE would be far better deployed to local police departments. Bill Clinton’s promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the ’90s and cut against the Democrats’ soft-on-crime image. The slogans write themselves: More Cops, Less ICE.
The voters are the last redoubt in the fight to reclaim American democracy and decency, and the Democratic party, the world’s oldest political party since the advent of universal suffrage, is the only entity that can carry the burden. If they can win a resounding victory in the House and Senate in nine months, there is hope for us.
Then again, maybe that assumption is flawed: Base voters tend to be the most reliable—that’s why they’re the base.