This is from the WSJ, which is paywalled. To put this in a broader perspective, the combined “favorability” of both parties is -41% (Rs at -11%, Ds at -30%), which is the worst combined ratings for the two parties since this poll began in 1990.
This is consistent with the general, precipitous decline in support for the traditionally dominant center-right and center-left parties throughout Europe. I have a good deal to say about that in the 2025 John S. Sullivan Lecture I delivered at Capital University, titled The Decline of Political Authority: Legal and Political Challenges in Western Democracies, 2015-2025. I’ll be posting that soon.
From the WSJ article:
The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.
The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party….
“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”
The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.
“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”…
Because anger is a stronger motivator to vote than satisfaction, the angry town-hall gatherings suggested to many Democrats that the next election could look something like Trump’s first midterm, in 2018, when Republicans lost at least 40 House seats and their majority in the chamber, restoring Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s office. …
But the new Journal survey shows that the political environment today looks different now than in Trump’s first term.
At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district….
Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate—and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.
