Can Democrats rebuild trust with voters?
Like in 2020, the electorate will be looking for some normalcy after the chaos of Trump
Following a panel hosted by the New England Council at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics on Friday, someone asked me, “What do Democrats need to do to win in 2026 and 2028?”
If I had to boil it down to one word, it would be: trust. The vast majority of voters cast ballots for either one party or the other year in and year out, wether or not they’re officially registered with that party. But what about that narrow sliver of voters in the middle? I’m sure they will look at Democrats with some questions:
Can we trust what you say?
Can we trust that you will be competent?
Can we trust that you will focus on repairing the damage to our government rather than trying to enact the next New Deal or the Great Society?
Can we trust that you will try to rebuild our relations with the rest of the world?
These voters in the middle have a healthy skepticism about what the political parties say. Democrats, however, have lost a lot of credibility in the past four years and will have to work to regain it. They were either oblivious or pretended to be oblivious to an aging, declining president until it was obvious for all the world to see during that June debate with Donald Trump last summer. They named a bill that had virtually nothing to do with inflation “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
So it’s critical that Democrats convey to voters that they’ll be competent in governing next time, rather than ideological.
President Trump left office in January 2021 with a Gallup job approval of just 34 percent and never reached 50 percent during his term. In January 2021, a CNN poll showed that 55 percent saw Trump’s presidency as a failure (41 percent labeled it a success). The recession officially ended in April 2020, eight months before Biden took office, so Biden was playing with house money. But then Biden’s presidency sailed into the political Bermuda Triangle of the border, the botched U.S. exit from Afghanistan, and a 40-year high inflation rate.
Biden’s own Gallup approval rating plummeted from 56 percent in June 2021 to 42 percent that October, never to rise above 45 percent again. His political viability had pretty much evaporated before his administration’s first birthday. This past January, during Biden’s last month in office, CNN’s pollsters asked whether his presidency had been a success or a failure. Only 38 percent said it was a success, while 61 percent called it a failure—even more dismal than their assessment of Trump’s at that point four years earlier.
Democrats will need to reassure those swing voters that if put back into power, they’ll focus on restoring the services that so many people have relied upon.
The 2020 election was not about Biden but about Trump. Voters didn’t seek a president who would do things that were “historic” or “transformational.” Back in the 2020 election campaign, a wired-in Republican strategist summed up the essence of the polling and focus group research he had conducted, telling me that voters “want to know who will make their lives normal again.” Not an apt description of the past four years.
One of the things that has kept Trump’s numbers from plummeting has been that a majority of Americans agree, at least in principle, with the general direction that he is headed. But they think he takes things to an extreme, and they don’t like his approach. Most Americans do believe that previous presidents had not been sufficiently diligent about having some semblance of control over our Southern border, but they think he has gone too far. Most believe that previous presidents did too little to keep the federal government from getting bloated; they believe these cuts have gone too far and have been administered too recklessly. They believe we have not always negotiated the best trade deals and that some countries have taken advantage of us, but that doesn’t mean Americans support widespread tariffs they know will increase prices.
Is there a Democrat out there who can run like the Joe Biden of 2020, while convincing voters he won’t govern like the Joe Biden of 2021?