More than one in three Democrats consider their party “weak” and “ineffective” as it struggles to come to terms with Donald Trump’s administration, according to a new poll.
Asked to name the first word or phrase that came to mind when they considered their party in a survey for Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 23 percent of Democrats came up with positive attributes.
That compared to 41 percent for Republicans who had something good to say about their party, although almost one in five said they saw the GOP as “greedy.”
Among the wider public, both parties were poorly received, with four in 10 using adjectives like “dishonest” or “stupid” to characterize them and some expressing a desire for the emergence of a third major party to meet their needs such as Elon Musk’s “America Party,” which has been slow to get off the ground.
The poll’s findings serve as a warning to both Democrats and Republicans ahead of elections in New Jersey and Virginia this fall and in advance of next year’s midterms, although it is the former that appears to be bearing the brunt of the resentment amidst the fallout from last November’s presidential win for Trump.
“They’re spineless,” Cathia Krehbiel, a 48-year-old Democrat from Indianola, Iowa, said of her party, blasting its leadership’s response to the administration’s policies as “scattershot.”
“I just feel like there’s so much recently that’s just going abhorrently wrong,” she said. “And they speak up a little bit and they roll right over.”
Only two in 10 Democrats described their party in a positive light post-Biden, with just one in 10 valuing it as “empathetic” or “inclusive.”
Speaking for independents, Jim Williams, a 78-year-old retiree from Harper Woods, Michigan, said that although he was “disappointed” by the Democrats, he was more concerned by the state of the GOP, which he said had “lost it” under Trump.
“All he does is bully and call names,” Williams said. “They’ve got no morals, no ethics. And the more they back him, the less I like them.”
While Republicans were more positive about their side, typically praising them as “hardworking” and “patriotic,” the phrases “greedy,” “for the rich” and even “corrupt” also cropped up.
“There’s a lot of pain, but the pain is the result of 12 years of misuse and misguided leadership from the Democratic Party,” said conservative Samuel Washington, 65, of Chicago. “I’m feeling really good about Republicans and the direction that they’re going.”
The findings tally with another poll from the left-leaning super PAC Unite the Party last month in which Democratic voters also labelled their party “weak,” “woke” and “out of touch.”
A third survey, conducted for CNN by SSRS, found that 72 percent of Democrats were “extremely motivated” to cast their ballots in the midterms, revealing a hunger for change and the chance to register their disapproval over Trump’s actions
As for the president himself, his approval rating was reported last week as having fallen to 40 percent, its lowest level so far since his return to the White House in January.
