Congressional Democrats Emerge Relatively Unscathed From Their Worst News Cycle in Years

The Democratic Party took a beating from its activist base in recent weeks as their approach to President Donald Trump’s second administration came under scrutiny during the year’s first big legislative showdown over government funding.

But there’s little evidence the Democratic voter base is turning on its congressional leaders , even as the party’s Capitol Hill contingent faces its worst news environment in years, according to Morning Consult’s ongoing tracking.

After a handful of Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, ignored many of their colleagues’ wishes and provided Republicans the necessary votes to prevent a government shutdown, our latest survey showed voters were 22 percentage points more likely to say they’d seen, read or heard something negative than positive about Democrats in Congress (44% to 22%) over the past week. 

That’s the largest net negative we’ve measured in three years of nearly continuous weekly tracking, beating a 21-point record low we measured in January 2022 right before Republicans took control of the House for the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency.

The trend is similar among Democratic voters. At the start of Trump’s presidency, Democrats were 30 points more likely to say they’d consumed positive than negative coverage about their party in Congress, but that gap shrunk to 19 points in our latest survey (41% to 22%).

This has prompted some Democrats to focus on the party’s leaders — especially Schumer, who Politico reported is facing a “painful post-mortem” over a strategy that “exposed major fissures within the party,” including some calls for him to step aside. 

While that Washington narrative is accurate, it’s worth noting that there’s little evidence of much backlash from actual voters.

The favorability ratings for Schumer, the most famous congressional leader and intraparty antagonist in this story, have declined a bit over the past couple months among Democrats, but the shutdown kerfuffle doesn’t appear to have had much immediate impact. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who publicly condemned Schumer’s decision to advance the GOP’s spending bill and refused to endorse his continued leadership, has seen his standing go virtually unchanged, with the bulk of the Democratic electorate nationwide expressing no opinion about him. 

And more broadly, Democrats in Congress as a whole have seen only marginal movements in their popularity among the base, leaving them on similar footing as Republicans are with their own voters — and similarly popular among the broader electorate as well.

This isn’t to say there is no base malaise for Democrats to grapple with, given how concern over a party’s direction is normal following an electoral loss.

In May 2017 for example, after a few months of Trump’s first term, 24% of Democratic voters said their party was off on the wrong track. Nearly eight years later, 31% of Democratic voters say the same, up only slightly from two months prior, when 26% said the same. 

And like in early 2017, a majority of Democrats in the electorate (56%) still see their party headed in the right direction. 

The bottom line

Despite their potentially valid handwringing over legislative strategy against Trump, the Democratic establishment’s detractors might want to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Internal fighting is uncomfortable when it breaks into the open, but coming debates over big policy issues — instead of a likely fruitless and ultimately painful shutdown fight over which Democrats were poised to shoulder much of the blame — will give Democratic leaders a chance to paint a clearer contrast with the GOP without damaging the livelihoods of federal workers for whom they say they’re fighting. 

Already, our tracking shows that the larger electorate has increasingly trusted congressional Democrats to handle the economy, trade and energy as the president’s approval rating, both overall and on those issues, has weakened since January, suggesting the politics of this Trump era are continuing to move in their favor.