By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, August 06, 2026
For the foreseeable future, any Republican president will
be, at minimum, deeply disliked by most Democrats, and any Democratic president
will be, at minimum, deeply disliked by most Republicans. The grassroots of the
opposition party will outright hate and detest the president.
Donald Trump began his presidency with very little
approval among Democrats (–70 on the YouGov poll) and now has almost none (–92 in the
same survey). It was a similar story in Trump’s first term: He started with a job
approval among Democrats around 10 percent and finished around 5 percent.
Joe Biden experienced the same dynamic: He started with a job approval among Republicans around 10
percent and finished around 5 percent, coming awfully close to zero every now
and then.
It hasn’t always been like this. Ronald Reagan’s job
approval among Democrats ranged from 20 percent to 40 percent for almost all of his presidency. Bill Clinton’s job approval among Republicans ranged from 15 percent t0 40
percent. George W. Bush’s job approval among Democrats underwent a post-9/11 surge to
80 percent, but by 2004 it was around 20 percent and then declined to 10
percent. Barack Obama’s job approval among Republicans started around 40 percent but quickly dropped to 10 to 15
percent and stayed there.
It is just about impossible to imagine a 2028 Republican
ticket that has more than minimal support among self-identified Democrats, and
vice versa. The only Democrat with any significant level of support among
Republicans is Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who is a strange outlier; a
June Quinnipiac poll of registered voters in Fetterman’s home state
found that 77 percent of surveyed Republicans said they approve of Fetterman .
. . while just 19 percent of Democrats do.
Back in 2023, surveys found that about 38 percent of Kentucky Republicans approved of the
job that Democratic Governor Andy Beshear was doing.
It is extremely difficult to find any Republican with
significant support among Democrats; perhaps Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski comes closest. (If you’re thinking
of Maine’s Susan Collins, as of last May, 88 percent of Maine Democrats said that Collins
did not deserve to be reelected.) For a long stretch, Vermont Republican
Governor Phil Scott — who was simultaneously one of the country’s most popular governors and one of its
lowest-profile nationally — had a high job approval among Democrats; a late June poll found about 30 percent of Vermont Democrats
intended to vote for his reelection.
Even if the 2028 presidential race featured a Democratic
ticket of Beshear-Fetterman and a Republican ticket of Scott-Murkowski, a
significant portion of the grassroots of each party would likely convince
itself — or be convinced by media in our polarized political environment — that
the opposing party was a threat to all they hold dear and that this was
the most important presidential election of our lifetimes. Try to imagine a
world where Fox News Channel prime-time hosts declare, “You know, the
Democratic nominee isn’t that bad,” or MS NOW hosts conclude, “The Republican
nominee has some real strengths and appealing qualities.”
When you outright hate the president, it’s a short step
to outright hating the people who voted for him. When you detest your political
opponent, it becomes very easy to conclude, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into
what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic,
xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Or perhaps you take your guidance from our current president: “[Charlie Kirk]
did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I
disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
And when you outright hate the electorate that voted for
the president . . . well, your love for your country declines. Poll after poll
this year has shown that on average, Democrats feel significantly less
patriotism than do Republicans. A Gallup survey in late June found that “70 percent of
Republicans, 28 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats say they
are extremely proud to be American.” The YouGov survey conducted around the same time found: “The
vast majority (96 percent) of Republicans say they are proud to be Americans,
compared to just 58 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Independents. One
percent of Republicans, 23 percent of Democrats, and 21 percent of Independents
are not proud to be Americans.”
Many Democrats feel like the rest of the country betrayed
them by voting for Trump, in many cases for a third time. A September 2025 poll found that “40 percent of Kamala Harris
voters say it is acceptable to cut off a family member over political
disagreements. Nearly half of young progressives say it is reasonable to sever
friendships. By contrast, only 11 percent of Donald Trump voters said the same.”
A May study from UC Irvine psychologists found that “47 percent
of Democrats reported having experienced a political breakup, compared to just
29 percent of Republicans. Independents fell in between, at 39 percent. . . .
Among those who reported a political split, 66 percent of Democrats said they
were the one who ended the relationship, compared to only 27 percent of
Republicans.”
This brings us to Michigan’s Senate race pitting
Republican Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
NR’s editors note that El-Sayed’s agenda is primarily one
of abolishment: abolishing private health insurance, the filibuster, the
Electoral College, ICE, and Israel. Despite his denials, he has also called for
abolishing the police. El-Sayed wants to end lifetime
Supreme Court appointments, impose term limits, and allow each presidential
term the same number of Supreme Court appointments.
Asked about his supporter Hasan Piker’s “America deserved
9/11” comment, El-Sayed said that Piker’s comments had been taken “out of context.” (Take a moment to try to imagine a
context in which “America deserved 9/11” is not morally reprehensible.)
Yesterday our Noah Rothman wrote,
The GOP has a steep hill before
them in Michigan, but it’s one that they must climb. This is no ordinary race.
The consequences of failure extend well beyond the bounds of American electoral
politics. The race is a proxy fight — a referendum on America as a
civilizational proposition. It’s an up-or-down vote, and we cannot afford to
see it fail.
Over at the Free Press, Eli Lake wrote that El-Sayed’s
buddy Piker “represents a strain of American politics that demonizes the
republic.”
Between now and Election Day, you’re going to see
Republicans contending that “Abdul El-Sayed hates America.” He’ll deny it and
insist that the charge is an Islamophobic slur. But I think a more precise way
of making the argument is that El-Sayed hates America’s current constitutional
structure and form of government, to say nothing of its current political
consensus (to the extent it has a political consensus). El-Sayed wants the
Overton window to be not merely widened but dramatically relocated along the political
spectrum.
As do many of his most ardent political allies. The Democratic Socialists of
America platform calls to abolish the U.S. Senate and “replace the
President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and
subordinate to Congress.”
You cannot want to eliminate the Senate and make the
executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress and simultaneously be willing
to take the oath to which every elected member
of Congress swears at the start of his or her term: “I will support and
defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic.”
In a recent television interview, the co-chair of the DSA, Megan
Romer, affirmed that her party’s agenda includes abolishing borders and giving
amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally, abolishing prisons, and
instituting government or public ownership of most large corporations. (If you
abolish prisons, what do you do with someone who defies the law by establishing
a prison?)
Our Charlie Cooke examined this agenda and concluded that
what the DSA really wants to abolish is America as we have always known it:
The American system of government
is built atop the presumption that the government exists to secure the natural
rights of the people, and little else besides. The DSA’s vision represents a
perfect inversion of this premise. Romer and her friends want to shirk all the
basic responsibilities of the state — national defense, territorial integrity,
policing, the protection of individual liberty — while micromanaging all of the
private tasks that have traditionally been the preserve of civil society.
Running Apple and Denny’s is in; maintaining an army and navy is out. Providing
housing is included; superintending the punishment for murder is proscribed. “A
wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson submitted during his First
Inaugural, “shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but “shall leave
them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.” Evidently, the DSA prefers
the opposite course.
We should point out that the ideas of the DSA fringe are
not nearly as far on the fringe as they ought to be. Our Dan McLauglin noticed
that Pete Buttigieg — Harvard, Oxford, U.S. Navy, former McKinsey consultant,
the epitome of the white-collar Democratic establishment — is on board with a
lot of the DSA-style constitutional overhaul:
In an interview on Steven
Bartlett’s podcast,
The Diary of a CEO, Buttigieg comes
out yet again for destroying the American systems of electing presidents
(the Electoral College), Congress (single-member House districts), and our
Supreme Court (via Court-packing). Buttigieg shot to prominence in 2019 by
pushing Court-packing, which reminds us that no, it’s not a response to Dobbs
or other post-2020 decisions. He tells Bartlett that “our entire existence
has been about creating a different kind of political system and introducing it
to the world,” but now we should be “reforming, tuning up, changing that
political system.”
There’s a whole bunch of reasons to be upset with
Republicans and the Trump administration. (See Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter, or below.) But what
the Democrats are offering is not a course correction to the pre-Trump status
quo. They want to toss out and replace large swaths of the U.S. Constitution,
because in their minds, any constitution that allows the election of Donald Trump
twice must be a failure.
ADDENDUM: In the entirety of the 2018 Texas Senate
race, Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke, with then-record fundraising and
unprecedented gushing national coverage, never led Republican incumbent Ted
Cruz in any public poll. Not a single time.
In this year’s Texas Senate race, between Democratic
candidate and bizarre reanimated Howdy Doody doll James Talarico and Republican candidate
and human slug Ken Paxton, Talarico has led the last three public polls. Two more of the seven most recent
public surveys have shown ties.
The most recent YouGov poll shows Paxton trailing by two
percentage points. Meanwhile, every other Republican running statewide leads by
three to seven percentage points.
This is not a Texas Republican Party problem. This is a
Ken Paxton problem. You’re already hearing people getting ready to blame the
National Republican Senatorial Committee if Talarico wins. Hey, at any point do
we hold the candidate responsible for his own atrocious behavior, scandals, and
lousy campaign? How about the president who endorsed him over an incumbent who would have
waltzed to reelection?
Democrats can win in a deep-red state if the Republican
nominee is awful enough. Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in Alabama in 2017. Character matters, and a
candidate with awful character can fumble away a winnable race in the
friendliest territory. But apparently this is a lesson that Republicans do not
want to learn.
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