Why everyone hates the Democrats right now, explained in 3 charts

If there’s one thing a large majority of Americans have consistently agreed on this year, it’s that the Democratic Party sucks. Unfavorable views of the party seem to keep rising with every passing month of President Donald Trump’s second term and that discontent has reached a new height this summer. More than 60 percent of American adults view the Democrats with derision, according to weekly tracking polls conducted by YouGov. Looking at this another way, positive views of the Democratic Party have now crumbled to a historic low, with only about one-third of the country seeing them in a good light, per Wall Street Journal polling that shook the political world in July. It’s a broad-based dislike: Republicans, independents, and disaffected Democrats are dragging down the party’s brand. But the reasons for this dislike are varied. Since there’s no one explanation for why everyone seems to hate the Democrats right now, it’s useful to break this question up into a few charts to visualize the complicated position of the Democratic Party in 2025. Democrats are frustrated with their party The biggest contributor to the negative position of the Democratic Party right now comes from depressed Democrats who are frustrated with their party. Poll after poll shows a unique, historically unusual dynamic where Republicans are very satisfied with the state and performance of their political party while Democrats are significantly less happy with their own side. A summer Gallup poll summed up this development: 91 percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of the GOP — up from 87 percent in October 2024 — while 73 percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of their party — down from 92 percent in 2024. It’s a highly unusual dynamic, Gallup notes; Republicans tend to be more unfavorable toward their party, so this unity is surprising. Democrats, meanwhile, historically tend to be more supportive of their party. The first way to think of this difference is to see the associations that Democrats have with their party. For most of the last year, Democratic voters were sending signals to their leaders that they wanted more aggressive resistance and opposition to Trump — something they feel like their party is not doing well. Consider this chart with responses to a prompt from an August Associated Press-NORC poll. Per the AP, one-third of Democrats have negative views of their party, largely to do with the party’s inability to respond to Trump. “Weak,” “tepid,” “ineffective,” and “broken,” came up the most among Democrats and were used by Democrats to describe their party much more frequently than by Americans in general. [Media: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/c7rnk/2/] In other words, Democrats dislike their party because they think they are incapable of resisting Trump; other Americans dislike the party for other reasons. This matches other trends. Pew Research Center data from this spring showed an overwhelming majority of Democrats thought it was “extremely” or “very” important that their leaders resist Trump and his policies. That was most pronounced among very liberal Democrats, 85 percent of whom said this resistance was “extremely” important — higher than the response from liberal, conservative, or moderate Democrats. And polling from Strength in Numbers/VeraSight suggests that this cohort of very liberal/progressive Democrats might be the Americans bringing down the party’s favorability at the moment. Democrats are divided on what direction their party should go Ideologically, there’s evidence that the party’s negative perceptions are motivated, in part, by its members not being united on what direction their party should go. After many pre- and post-election surveys found that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party suffered from being viewed as too radical or too liberal, discussions within the party centered on whether the party needed to ideologically change direction. Gallup studied this question earlier in the year and found mixed results, but definitive significant changes from four years ago. Democrats, and Democratic-leaning independents, are divided over whether the party should change or not. [Media: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/zP7kv/2/] More of these partisans want the party to be more moderate than in 2021, but a majority would still prefer it stay the same or move left. This, again, matches trends in other polls and correlates with surveys finding that a majority of Americans think their party is “somewhat” or “very” divided, while Democrats themselves are split in half on that question. Dislike of a political party flows from there. If you think your party should moderate, but is not, you’ll probably be upset at it overall. If you think the party should be more liberal, but it’s not, the same reasoning applies. Republicans, meanwhile, are pretty happy with their party right now: 43 percent think the party should not change. Americans, and Democrats, really dislike Democratic party leaders Relatedly, a third way to visualize this dislike for the Democratic Party is to see it as a reflection of the unpopularity of its leaders. If the party base, and American voters in general, have strong negative feelings about a party’s elite — those spokespeople who stand in for and speak for the party — then it makes sense for those feelings to be applied to the party in general. Here, Elliot Morris’s Strength in Numbers analysis of favorability of political figures is clear. While most politicians and figures are unpopular, Democratic ones are especially unpopular. [Media: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Atiel/2/] A similar dynamic emerges when looking at Democrats in Congress. They are viewed much more negatively in general by their own voters than Republicans are by their own voters. Meanwhile, individual Democratic representatives and Democratic candidates tend to be viewed more favorably than Democrats as a whole or Republican candidates and the Republican Party. This suggests some degree of voters not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They like individual Democratic representatives while disliking party leadership and the party brand. This would also explain why Democrats continue to see a modest advantage on the generic congressional ballot — voters are still more likely to vote for a Democrat in next year’s midterm elections, even if they dislike the party as a whole. In addition to these three buckets of explanations, there are some more natural dynamics at play: Partisanship and polarization explain why Republicans still strongly dislike the Democratic Party, while it’s normal for a political party to go through a period of wandering in the wilderness after a presidential loss (Democrats were in a similar polling position in 2017 before surging in the fall into 2018). So while Democrats seem to be hated by everyone right now, they aren’t doomed yet.