For years, Fox News and other Republican Party propagandists have suffused airwaves, talk radio and social media, successfully painting Democrats as incompetent or frail on issues. With an endless legion of talking heads barking GOP marketing under the guise of independence, "manhood" or “real America” even centrist voters were more apt to declare themselves “Independent” rather than “Democrat.”
At least until now.
Today, thanks to the doings and policies of President Donald Trump, the share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year, the New York Times now reports.
“The latest (Gallup) data shows Democrats with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they identify with and when independent voters are asked which party they lean toward,” reports the Times. “The findings come as President Trump’s approval rating has been below 40 percent for months, and as polls have found that Democrats are competitive across key Senate races in states that went heavily for Mr. Trump in past years.”
According to the Times voters have bounced between parties over the last several years, with Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party holding a reliable advantage over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents as recently as 2024. The current Democratic edge, however, is now “far wider than recent Republican leads” and similar to the one the party held in 2020, when Biden won the presidency and the party claimed the House and the Senate.
Democrats — long the punching bag in on-the-street political conversations — appear to have Trump and his economy to thank for the current surge in voters fleeing to their ranks.
“What we are seeing now is similar to the end of the George W. Bush administration, when he was pretty unpopular,” said Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup. “Democrats had a big lead in party identification, which was then a prelude to the 2006 and 2008 elections, which were big victories for Democrats.”
Probably most despairing of all for Republicans is the fact that data from Pew Research Center shows that this growth for Democrats is largely driven by groups that had previously supported Trump. This includes Hispanic voters, young men and young women.
“In 2024, young voters had a one-percentage-point Republican lean — the only time that group has favored Republicans this decade,” reports the Times, adding that this year the Democratic advantage among the same group is a whopping 16 percentage points, compared. This is a huge shift from roughly two years ago when editors marveled that disaffected youth were “going MAGA” or conservative for the first time since the Reagan generation.
Among Hispanic voters, the Democratic edge has increased by nine percentage points over the same period.
Even worse for the Republican Party, this quarter’s share of self-proclaimed Democrats is similar to the final quarter of the 2018 midterm cycle, when nearly 49 percent of Americans identified as Democrats. It was that year, the Democratic Party gained more than 40 seats in the House, said the Times.
