After years of lagging, here’s why Democrats are feeling good in 2026

For much of the past two years, the U.S. Democratic Party has been on the back foot, suffering painful electoral defeats to a ubiquitous Republican opponent, while grappling with a worrying decline in voter registration and an apathetic political base.

Summer 2025 polling data paints a grim picture, with surveys showing dismal results, Low approval rates for several years for the party’s performance in Congress.

The number of self-identified Democrats was also down sharply, particularly in some states crucial to winning the presidency, according to the data from all 30 states and Washington, D.C., which collect and report voters’ party affiliations.

Progressive columnists barrels of ink spilled while trying to identify why exactly the party was so unpopular with the voters – has the shift to the left taken place? race And gender, climate And firearms alienate moderate voters? Or was it because President Donald Trump, the political chameleon, had stripped the party of its grip on a multiracial working-class coalition?

Whatever the reason, the party was grappling with what some members described as “earthquake crisis“or a”existential threat” to its long-term viability. In July, approximately half of the voters surveyed said they would consider joining a third party.

But as 2025 draws to a close, the pendulum appears to be swinging in the Democratic direction.

Democrats show promise in off-year elections

Many of the party’s candidates rose to power in November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, two states that have been largely Democratic in recent years but appeared vulnerable just months earlier.

Trump did better than expected in New Jersey during the 2024 presidential campaign — losing to Kamala Harris by just six percentage points, far better than his own past performance and how other recent Republican candidates have performed there. This red wave has caused some analysts to wonder: Is New Jersey the next swing state?

But the Republican Party’s optimism quickly faded when ballots were counted in the Garden State’s gubernatorial election on Nov. 4.

Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a moderate, defeated her Republican opponent, winning by more than 14 percentage points.

Another centrist Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, cleaned house in Virginia, winning by 15 points in a state Harris had won by less than six a year earlier.

What followed those victories — and a strong showing by Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, who won New York’s mayoral election — was an uptick in polling elsewhere.

“These elections all went in favor of the Democrats – it’s what we call the canary in the coal mine,” Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, said in an interview with CBC News. “You’re starting to see cracks in Trump’s power.”

Even in Florida, once a troubled state and now deeply red after some COVID-fueled ideological and demographic shifts, a Democrat won Miami’s mayoral race this month by a strong majority. This is the first victory for a Democrat in this country in 28 years and it is a victory that local media are calling “auspicious” for a party that has long struggled to connect.

Trump’s approval ratings plummet

Nationally, Democrats are also seeing signs of life.

Trump’s approval ratings have fallen despite some successes like control crime And illegal border crossings. A Recent Marist poll shows Democrats with double-digit lead among voters heading into the 2026 congressional midterm elections — the first time in more than three years that Democrats have had such a lead.

The slowdown in the U.S. economy appears to be behind voter unease and Trump’s backlash, said Matthew Lebo, a professor of American politics at Western University in London, Ont.

While Trump boldly embarked on the Biden-era fight against inflation from “day one” of his presidency, Democrats are trying, with some initial results, to flip the script on affordability.

“It all comes down to advocating for an affordable accessibility program,” said Mamdani, whose campaign promises included free busing and child care.

Spanberger, meanwhile, has promised to use state powers to cap drug costs and lower energy rates to address cost-of-living challenges that Trump recently called “a hoax launched by the Democrats“.

“Right now, the Democrats are ahead, and that lead is expected to grow as more bad economic data comes out,” Lebo said in an interview.

“Democrats will be much more motivated to vote against Republicans and Donald Trump in 2026 than Republicans will be to maintain it,” he said.

Economic difficulties could influence the vote

Unemployment is rising, inflation is stubbornly high, tariffs have driven up the prices of almost everything – with data suggesting that more and more of these trade-related levies are being borne by consumers, not just the companies that initially pay them.

Experts from the National Bureau of Economic Research say import taxes have increased the inflation rate by 0.7 percentage points.

The stock market surged after Trump’s chaotic implementation of tariffs in April — the S&P 500, an index that tracks some of the 500 largest U.S. companies, is up about 18 percent year to date — but those gains haven’t been felt by all, or even most, voters.

As Bill Clinton’s former aide James Carville said during the 1992 presidential election: “It’s the economy, stupid.” »

Then-President George HW Bush, who had one of the highest approval ratings ever after leading the United States to victory in the first Gulf War, saw his support plummet as the economy faltered and fell into a recession.

Carville urged his protégé, Clinton, to go all-in on economic woes during the campaign — a strategy that paid off.

Could tariffs be a liability for Trump?

That’s what Michael Negron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Biden White House official at the National Economic Council, thinks his party should do again in the 2026 midterms.

Negron authored a recent report on the economic ramifications of Trump’s tariffsfinding that small business importers were paying about $25,000 more per month due to these levies than during the same period last year – a huge increase that was transmitted to consumers in certain cases.

As a result, Negron says many people now equate tariffs with inflation — causing some voters to rethink their allegiance to the president and his signature economic policies.

Persistent inflation is “one of the main factors behind the president’s unpopularity,” Negron said in an interview with CBC News. “Customs tariffs are a handicap for him.”

While protectionist Democrats have supported tariffs in the past and some party-aligned unions have also expressed support for Trump’s planNegron says the party needs to forcefully denounce Trump’s policies to appeal to voters worried about affordability.

During the campaign for the 2024 presidential election, Harris tried to portray Trump’s tariffs as a national sales tax. Although Negron says it “didn’t really seem to resonate with people” at the time, that has changed.

“Trump has taken this obscure tax tool and made it mainstream. People know what it is now and they don’t like what they see,” he said.

“Trump’s massive, sweeping tariffs are raising costs for everyone and hurting small businesses – and Democrats must be willing to say so.”