A Tea Party-Style Backlash Is Yet to Materialize for Senate Democrats

The first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term brought intense backlash to Democrats in Congress from activists alarmed by a perceived lack of pushback from party leaders to the new Republican order, leading many to question whether primary voters might jettison Democratic incumbents in a fashion reminiscent of the GOP’s own tea party revolt of the early Obama era.

But as Morning Consult’s latest quarterly 50-state approval rankings show, when it comes to each Democratic senator’s backing from the base, there’s hardly any sign of such a backlash. Instead, nearly all of the party’s incumbents — especially those up for re-election this cycle — are retaining much of their base popularity.

And in a potential signal of an increasingly favorable political environment leading into the 2026 midterm elections, a number of those Democratic incumbents are actually growing their popularity among Republican voters.

Since the fourth quarter of 2024, Democratic senators have only seen an average decline of 2 percentage points to their net approval ratings (the shares who approve minus the shares who disapprove) among Democratic voters, up slightly from a 3-point drop measured in the first three months of 2025. For comparison, the average Republican’s intraparty approval rating declined by 5 points in early 2021 amid blowback from the party’s losses of the presidency and Senate control in the 2020 election.

This year, there’s really only one glaring outlier, and it doesn’t especially come as a surprise. Sen. John Fetterman’s staunch defense of Israel and validation of the GOP’s hawkish position on immigration has helped his image among Republicans. It also coincided with a massive 33-point decline to his net approval rating since the end of 2024. 

Fetterman’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the role he campaigned for in 2022 has been well documented in recent months, raising questions about whether he’ll ultimately choose to seek re-election when he’s up again in 2028. But there are nine Democratic incumbents set to face primary voters next year, and as we previewed above, they’re all in considerably better shape than he is.

In each state where an incumbent Senate Democrat is on the ballot next year, at least 7 in 10 Democratic voters approve of their job performances, capped by Cory Booker’s 81% approval rating among Democrats in New Jersey.

At the same time, Democratic incumbents are being boosted by modest improvements among Republicans as voters in Trump’s party nationwide have become less adverse to Democrats who represent them since the first three months of 2025.

Among the 15 incumbent senators who improved their numbers among Republican voters the most, 13 are Democrats, including three who are up for re-election next year: Chris Coons of Delaware, John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.

When it comes to the Senate’s most vulnerable 2026 Democratic incumbent, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, sentiment hasn’t changed much throughout the early part of Trump’s term. But he remains popular with voters in his state, including among a chunk of the GOP’s electorate.

More than a third of Georgia Republicans (35%) approved of Ossoff’s job performance in the second quarter, along with nearly half of independents, resulting in a 53% approval rating for the freshman Democrat.

Ossoff is in a far better position at this point in the cycle than the other vulnerable incumbent who could face voters next year, Republican Susan Collins of Maine. Voters in the senior appropriator’s home state are 15 points more likely to disapprove than approve of her job performance (54% to 38%). That’s down from a 9-point deficit in the first quarter and the lowest on record since our quarterly tracking began in 2017.

This leaves Collins among the most unpopular senators in the country, just behind former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, driven in part by her subpart standing among Republican voters.

Notably, Collins is less popular in her moderate Maine than Trump, while Ossoff is more popular than the Republican president in his swing-state perch.

The bottom line

Our data on incumbents suggests an improving environment for the Democratic Party — especially given the softening among Republican voters, which could signal a relative lapse in energy that is customary for parties in power during midterm cycles. In addition to helping endangered Democratic incumbents like Ossoff hold on to their seats, that lapse could also have knock-on effects in states with key open-seat races such as Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

To have any chance at all of regaining Senate control next year, Democrats will need to win all four of those open-seat races. The fact that nearly all Democratic incumbents aren’t facing much, if any, backlash from their own base suggests an environment where the party may be able to limit the internal division and acrimony during the nominating process and position its candidates well for the general election.

A clean sweep in those states would just be a start: Democrats would also need to pick up Collins’ seat (it’s unclear if she’ll seek re-election) and two others that look like much bigger long shots in Texas and Iowa.

It may be that the best-case scenario for Senate Democrats next year will be to tighten the margins in their chamber, but the latest quarter’s data suggests that the road to that outcome is relatively straightforward.