But data on likely voter turnout this election cycle points the other direction. According to a new analysis of pooled survey interviews from Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls since January 2026, Americans who say they are most likely to vote in November are actually more pro-Democratic than registered voters.

In fact, in every wave of our poll this year, the people likeliest to show up have leaned a little bluer than registered voters as a whole.

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Likely voters lean left lately

Our July poll has Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by 7 points among registered voters, 50% to 43%. That 7-point advantage itself would be enough to flip the House majority (Democrats need to win the popular vote by about 3 points to win 218 seats) and to make the Senate majority competitive, and would be a swing of 9 points since the 2024 presidential race (about the same swing as from 2016 to 2018).

But when we filter our polling data to the people who say they’ll definitely or probably vote in November, the Democratic Party’s lead grows to almost 9 points — a boost of about a point and a half on average across polls. The size of the premium bounces around from month to month (see image below), but the direction never changes. In all seven surveys since we started asking the turnout question in January, likely voters have leaned bluer than registered voters, by anywhere from one to two and a half points.

Since 2025, Democrats have done well in special and statewide elections in large part due to higher turnout from their voters than Republicans. My review of voter file data earlier this year found that turnout was responsible for anywhere between 25 and 40% of the gains the party had made since the 2024 election. Democrats are running ahead of Kamala Harris’s 2024 vote margin by about 12 points in state legislative and congressional special elections, according to tracking done by The Downballot.

We can run some similar turnout-vs-persuasion math with this polling. In our July poll, Democrats lead by 5 points in the generic ballot today among people who said they voted in the 2024 election (the grey line in the graph) — a swing of 7 points. High-turnout voters are currently 4-points more pro-Democratic, at D+9 (11-point swing since 2024).

A quick approximation of the turnout gap is to divide the swing among voters in the past election by the full real-world swing in the electorate (for now, we have to approximate it using the likely voter number). That’s 7 / 11, or roughly 64% of the swing coming from constant-turnout voters. In other words, the Democratic turnout advantage is responsible for a little over a third of their current margin in the generic ballot.

In this month’s poll, we also asked Americans several questions on their level of enthusiasm going into the year’s midterm elections, and whether they wanted Congress to be a check on the president or enable his agenda. Looking at both their demographics and party ID, Democrats look more engaged across the board. More charts and data on those points after the paywall.

Democrats aren’t just higher turnout this year. They’re also asymmetrically intense

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Here are the big takeaways:

• Wisconsin is the proof of concept for unrigging a broken system. Wikler’s home state was, until recently, a “democracy desert.” In 2018, Democrats won every statewide office and 54% of the state assembly vote — and got 36% of assembly seats, flipping exactly one. Years of organizing later, the state has a Democratic governor, a pro-democracy state supreme court, and new maps under which the party that wins a majority of votes can actually win a majority of seats. As Wikler puts it, that’s how democracy is supposed to work.

• No message would have saved Democrats in 2024 — and the loss was still agonizingly close. We talk about the difference between “micro” and “macro” theories of elections. When it comes to 2024, the macro: voters in every developed democracy were furious about high prices in 2024, and every governing party lost vote share — in fact, on average, slightly more than Democrats did. A shift of roughly 115,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — about one-tenth of 1% of ballots cast — would have made Kamala Harris president. The voters who moved were mostly passive news consumers reacting to their own cost of living, not to either campaign’s messaging. Wikler’s advice for Democrats tempted by a single-cause postmortem: don’t lose your soul. Go out into the world and find those voters and talk to them.

• Ben says the party’s brand is set by the fights it takes on. Wikler says most Americans get their news about Democrats from Republicans. One candidate quietly moderating on a hot-button issue does approximately nothing to fix its brand problem as an out-of-touch coastal machine. But big public fights present an opportunity. When Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, every elected Democrat fought back loudly — and in 2018, voters who called health care their top issue broke overwhelmingly Democratic. Wikler puts last year’s shutdown fight over ACA funding and opposition to the gas-price-spiking Iran war in the same category: fights that show, over and over, whose side each party is what really moves the needle.

• Democrats need to show up, in person. Democrats have lost about a third of their rural voters since 2008, by Elliott’s math, and thousands of local offices. Wikler blames three forces — the collapse of local news, algorithmic feeds, and the party simply not being present — and only the third is in the party’s power to fix. As WisDems party chair Wikler championed a model whereby the state party gave grants to local volunteer-staffed county “storefronts” where party members could relate to everyday voters, in person. He says 44 of the Biden campaign’s 100 field offices grew out of these storefronts. Elliott shares some ideas for taking that program nationwide.

• Democrats will get one shot to unrig the system. Wikler argues if Democrats win power in 2028, they will have a small window to enact key reforms to unrig American democracy and give power back to the numerical majority. He wants to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, reform the filibuster that currently waves through judges and tax cuts but blocks voting-rights bills and progressive priorities, expand the U.S. House and elect it proportionally from multi-member districts, add D.C. statehood, ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, and reform a Supreme Court that would otherwise strike down all of the above.
  
  Wikler cites Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling from November 2025 in the book — asked in their own words what their ideal party would fight for, 38% of Americans gave answers that don’t fit the left-right spectrum at all. Wikler says what people want is a party that fights for everyday people and makes their lives better.

Ben’s new book, This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, is out now wherever you get your books.

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This article reports results from the July 2026 Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. A methodology description is included at the end of this article. You can find toplines for this as well as our previous poll releases at the Strength In Numbers polling portal. Subscribers to Strength In Numbers have access to additional visuals and a full archive of crosstabs here. Readers can suggest questions for future polls in the comments section below!

The national average price of gasoline is back above $4 a gallon as fighting with Iran has reignited in recent weeks. President Trump’s response has not been to adjust his Middle East policy, but to hunt down price-gougers: On June 24, 2026, the Justice Department launched a probe of oil companies, then on July 3 urged state attorneys general to do the same.

Polls suggest voters aren’t buying the ruse. In our latest Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, fielded July 14–17, 51% of Americans say Trump and his administration are most responsible for the price of gas right now, whereas 12% put the blame primarily on oil and gas companies.

As the prospect of peace in the Middle East slips away, so too does his administration’s opportunity to repair some trust with the average voter. Despite some easing in the price of gas, inflation and the state of the economy remain Trump’s worst issues — and the country’s top problems. The president’s approval rating is accordingly at net -21 in our new survey, while Democrats score a 7-point margin on the generic ballot, their fourteenth straight poll leading the Republicans.

Below, I report full results from our monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight political tracking survey. This month we added a battery on gas prices, plus subscriber questions on Trump’s mental sharpness, who should pay for AI data centers, and the least-popular ways to fix the budget deficit. One notable finding: Trump, now 80 years of age as of last month, gets a “poor” rating on his mental sharpness as president from 46% of Americans — within a few points of the 50% who say that of Joe Biden’s presidency.

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Headline poll findings

• Gas prices: 59% say higher gas prices have forced them to cut back or delay other spending, and 51% say Trump and his administration are most responsible for the price of gas right now. 74% say local gas prices are higher than six months ago, and 47% say gas prices will have at least “some” influence on their 2026 vote.

• Job approval: 38% approve / 59% disapprove (net -21), roughly flat from June’s -23. 49% strongly disapprove, vs 17% who strongly approve.

• Generic ballot: Democrats lead 50–43 among registered voters (D+7) and 48–42 among all adults. The Democrats have led in all 14 of our polls since May 2025.

• Prices: Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation is -42 — still his worst issue by far, but the first wave all year the number moved his way by more than a point (from -46 in June). 36% name prices the single most important problem facing the country.

• Issue approval: underwater on 11 of the 12 issues we test; he breaks even only on border security (49/48).

• Party trust: Democrats lead on 8 of 12 issues — including prices, jobs, health care, and elections — and lead by 10 points on voters’ own most important problem.

• Direction of the country: 49% say things in America are going poorly and major, disruptive changes to the country’s political system are needed; just 8% say things are going well.

• Mental sharpness (subscriber question): 46% rate Trump’s mental sharpness as president “poor” — four points shy of the 50% who say that of Biden’s presidency (Strength In Numbers/Verasight, July 14–17). Trump keeps the edge on the top of the scale: 38% say excellent or good, vs 24% for Biden.

• AI data centers (subscriber question): 64% of Americans say AI companies should pay for the new power plants and grid upgrades needed to run their data centers.

Select questions held for future release.

This is the first of several articles releasing data from the July Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. Subscribe to Strength In Numbers to get the rest in your inbox this week.

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Voters blame Trump for high gas prices

We asked voters to pick which individual or organization they thought was most responsible for the current high price of gasoline across the U.S. Respondents could pick between Trump, Joe Biden, the oil companies, foreign producers like OPEC, and “no one in particular, it’s just how the market works” as options — and a 51% majority of Americans picked the president and his administration. The next-highest answers, the oil companies and OPEC, draw 12% each.

Even a plurality of Republicans said Trump was most responsible for gas-price inflation, a surprising finding given the level of political polarization in America today:

And this is not an abstract concern for families. Overall, 59% of Americans say higher gas prices have forced them to cut back or delay other spending, according to the July Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll.

This will have consequences in the midterms. Nearly half of Americans (47%) say gas prices will have at least “some” influence on their vote for Congress this year — another 21% say “a little” — while 23% say none at all.

Back in May, our poll found Americans blamed Trump over Biden 41–16 for the high cost of living broadly. He has not recovered ground since.

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump claimed gas under Biden had hit “$5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon”. He spent years arguing voters should punish the president for the rising price of gasoline. Now, they are.

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Trump scores best rating on handling prices this year (it’s still at-42)

Trump’s overall job rating barely moved in this month’s survey: Among all adults, 38% say they approve and 59% disapprove of the job he’s doing as president, a net of -21 against June’s -23. That change is inside the margin of error, but matches other polls showing a similar slight reversion in public sentiment to the president over the last few months. Other July surveys include: Washington Post/Ipsos at 37/61 and CNBC at 40/59, with an all-time low of 38/60 on his handling of the economy.

Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation rose to -42 from June’s -46 — the first move his way all year as oil markets rebounded from a lull in the U.S. war against Iran (fighting has since resumed since our interviews were conducted). Trump’s position on prices is still his worst issue by 13 points; at -42, the next-worst, health care, polls at -29 for the president.

The rest of the issue-rating graph looks like it has all year: government funding -24, jobs and the economy -23, education -20, elections and democracy -20, foreign policy -20, trade -20, deportations -13, crime -12, immigration -12. He breaks even on border security, 49/48, as he has since January. (A tie is not really a win.)

And on the issue voters care about most, he’s still 42 points underwater.

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Prices are still the country’s top problem

36% of Americans name prices and inflation the single most important problem facing the country, unchanged from June and more than two and a half times the next-closest issues, elections and democracy (14%) and jobs (14%). Allowed to pick up to three problems, 58% include prices — jobs draw 40%, health care 35%, elections 24%.

As has been Trump’s position since he was elected, he fails with voters on their top issue. But it’s not just him; the whole GOP is in trouble. Consider this:

Democrats still lead on the issues voters care about most

Democrats lead on trust to handle 8 of the 12 major issues we test: health care by 20 points, education by 16, government funding by 16, elections and democracy by 10, prices by 7 (43–36, with 21% unsure — the highest don’t-know on the board), and jobs, trade, and foreign policy by 5 each. The three largest gaps on the board are all Democratic.

Republicans lead on four issues they have held a long-term, but typically much larger, advantage: Americans trust them more to handle border security (by 14), crime (R+9), deportations (+3), and immigration (+1 — effectively tied). If you are trying to figure out which of these advantages are most important, note that border security appears in 11% of respondents’ listed top-three issues in our poll and crime is at 19% — compared to 58% for prices. Republicans lead on the issues voters care about least.

These leads aren’t new, either. Democrats have held most of them for months.

In my opinion, the single most compelling measure we have on issue trust (and one no other pollster asks regularly) is trust on the problem each voter names as the most important to them — and there Democrats lead 47–37. That ten-point edge is in line with June’s nine and just below May’s series-high 13. The Democratic Party has three straight months of a durable, roughly ten-point advantage on the things voters say matter most.

Democrats have taken or are holding even on the two issues Republicans won on in 2024 — prices/jobs and immigration.

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Democrats lead the generic ballot for a 14th straight poll

Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot among registered voters 50–43, with 7% undecided, in our July Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. That +7 is the same margin as in June, and the third straight wave between D+7 and D+8. Among all adults the party leads 48–42. Across fifteen months and fourteen polls (we skipped December 2025), Democrats have led every single time we asked the generic ballot, by margins of between 5 and 10 points among registered voters.

And no, this isn’t a party-composition artifact — Democrats don’t just lead the generic ballot in our poll because our poll has too many Democrats. The partisan makeup of our samples is pinned to Pew’s NPORS benchmarks and barely moves from month to month. The Democratic lead in the generic ballot today is actually larger than their lead in leaned party identity (which assigns independents to the party they say they “lean” toward):

More on party ID weighting in a Data Lab post coming soon.

One question that really matters for November is whether Democrats have a similar or larger lead among voters who are likely to turn out in November. I’ll have those numbers on Wednesday.

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Nearly half the country still says things are going poorly

In what is becoming a frustratingly recurring negative finding in our polling, roughly a majority (49%) of Americans say things are going poorly and major, disruptive changes are needed to get the country back on course. That’s essentially unchanged from June’s 50%. Two potential angles here:

• Pessimism this broad is historically a dire warning for the party in power.

• This growing popularity of this anti-system sentiment may be part of the reason why the DSA is making such inroads in Democratic Party politics this year.

Subscribers’ questions: data centers, balancing the budget, and Trump’s mental sharpness

And now for the fun part. Each month, subscribers suggest questions and I pick a few to field. (Leave your suggestions for next month in the comments below!)

Who should pay for AI’s power bill? As tech companies race to build data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity, 64% of Americans say those companies should pay for the new power plants and grid upgrades needed to run them, not taxpayers. Just 4% say electric utilities should cover it by raising residential rates, 9% say the federal government should fund construction, and 10% say the costs should be shared.

The least-popular deficit fix. It is no secret that America is in an increasingly precarious fiscal position. But its government’s commitments to entitlement spending and other programs (increasingly, the military) put it in a bind. A lot of pollsters ask people how they want the federal government to fix its budget problem, but we asked Americans which of three options they think would be worst: raise taxes, cut spending, or nominally grow the deficit.

Over a third of adults (36%) said raising taxes, narrowly ahead of cutting spending on programs (30%. People were most willing to allow a flat increase the federal budget deficit. Voters would rather borrow than pay more or lose services. To be fair to them, there doesn’t seem to be any consequences to massive borrowing, anyway.

And Trump’s mental sharpness. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll in July 2024 found 44% of Americans thought Trump had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, against just 14% for Biden — a 30-point gap.

Today, Trump is 80 and has increasing bouts of trouble in public (he sleeps a lot during press conferences and frequently slurs his speech), and voters are taking note. Overall, 46% of Americans rate his sharpness as president as “poor” — within a few points of the 50% who retroactively said that about Joe Biden.

Trump does keep a real edge at the top of the scale — 38% rate his sharpness excellent or good, vs 24% for Biden — but confidence is still the minority position. Among independents who lean toward neither party (n=228, so roughly ±7 points), 48% each say the presidents are/were in poor condition.

I’m holding some questions in this month’s survey for release later in the week. On Wednesday, I’ll cover the midterm enthusiasm gap — who actually says they’ll show up in November, and what a likely-voter screen does to the parties’ generic ballot positions. On Friday, I’ve got a Deep Dive feelings about the SAVE Act. Most Americans back requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — but who says they couldn’t easily produce the documents, and what do Americans really believe about noncitizen voting?

Make sure you’re signed up to get those in your inbox.

And if this type of work is useful to you or you believe in supporting it for the public good, consider becoming a paid member of this Substack. Paying subscribers to Strength In Numbers make it possible for me to spend time on this original, independent, data-driven political journalism that’s not beholden to any corporation or billionaire donor. Support my work and get access to articles like this one for $10/month or $90/year.

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Methods statement: Verasight collected the data for this survey from July 14–17, 2026. The sample consists of 1,514 United States adults ages 18 and above. The data are weighted to match the June 2026 Current Population Survey on age, race/ethnicity, sex, income, education, region, and metropolitan status, as well as to a running three-year average of partisanship distributions from the Pew Research Center NPORS benchmarking surveys and population benchmarks of 2024 vote. The margin of sampling error is ±2.6%.

G. Elliott Morris prepared the topline document and this writeup for Strength In Numbers. Strength In Numbers had input on question wording, but all other methodological decisions were made and carried out by Verasight to ensure independence of the data-generating process behind these results. Verasight also reviewed the questionnaire.

You can download a full topline file, key crosstabs, and full methodology statement at the Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling portal. The paywalled section containing full crosstabs and more interactive graphics is updated.

If you have any questions about this poll or the release, please email polling[AT]gelliottmorris.com.

Have a suggestion for next month’s poll? Leave it in the comments below.

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The vibe has shifted back to the left.

Every year, the Pew Research Center conducts a large, national poll of U.S. adults to measure key partisan attitudes and other population characteristics that are useful for public opinion researchers. The National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) is fielded predominantly by mail (people can respond online, but they get invites mailed to them) and has a response rate of 30% — around 20-30x higher than your typical poll. That makes the results very reliable and (in theory) less subject to things like partisan non-response bias.

Pew on Tuesday, July 14 released their 2026 vintage of the NPORS. Most people are focused on shifts in the topline and among young people, who have moved left again. Pew finds 47% of adults now call themselves Democrats, 43% Republicans, and 10% Independents. Pew produced these graphs you might want to grok:

As mentioned, Pew finds a particularly large rebound in party ID among young people, who are heading back to their pre-2024 levels of Democratic Party loyalty.

This is in itself a big story. While party elites and strategists in Washington, DC, have been assuming young Americans are the dominant pro-Republican force that landed Trump in the White House in 2024, the data have been moving against them. The country now looks more like it did in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by nearly 5 points in the national popular vote, and Democrats won 50 seats in the U.S. Senate.

But hey, this is Strength In Numbers! You know I’ve got a take nobody else has pointed out yet. Where’s the messy graph with Elliott’s theme instead of Pew’s? Well, have I got a treat for you…

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As I mentioned, Pew conducts the NPORS largely as a public service for other pollsters. Their estimates of traits such as but not limited to party ID are useful to pollsters (like me! Thanks Pew!) who adjust their samples based on party ID.

Part of this public service is releasing the actual raw respondent-level “microdata” that constitute the survey. We can use that microdata to uncover more stories about the electorate. Even better, we can gather all the raw NPORS raw since Pew started running the survey in 2021! Chart-making ensures.

The story I want to show is about non-voters. Specifically, they have moved back toward Democrats in a big way.

Remember that Pew and others found in 2024-2025 that people who didn’t vote in that election likely would have supported Trump if they had turned out. This was a big shift since 2020 and 2016, when non-voters leaned toward Democrats.

At the time, people gave two explanations for this finding. One was that “low-propensity” voters had become much more conservative and open to Trumpism, especially on immigration policy. The other read — from people like me — was that the group was likely being moved instead by anti-incumbency bias, or “retrospective voting” as political scientists call it. Non-voters, under this theory, moved against Biden because of inflation and residual COVID trauma or whatever, just like the rest of the population, and would drift back toward Democrats as they saw what Trump 2.0 would look like.

Well, that is exactly what had happened. I was writing about non-voters shifting left as early as May 2025 and again last September. Now, Pew’s 2026 NPORS data backs me up: While non-voters leaned Republican by party ID by 4 points in 2024, they now lean Democratic by +12.

The Democratic lead in party ID now rivals what it was in 2020-2021, both overall and among low-turnout voters.

There’s a good lesson here not to overreact to short-term changes in American politics, as measured by election results. Winning a group in one year, under particular circumstances, does not mean you have won that group forever — and often the reasons given for winning are not correct.

I could write lots more about people reading too much into election results, but we’d be here all year. For now, let me know what other findings stood out to you in Pew’s new data or other coverage of it. I’ve personally got another wonky post cooking for the Data Lab about how weighting to past vote and party ID affects survey toplines. My MRP modeling, for example, takes Pew’s NPORS microdata as an input, and the new update would have shifted toplines if I hadn’t already predicted that party ID had moved to D+4!

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Over the last few election cycles, analysts have become obsessed with how these “double haters” vote. In 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump won voters who had unfavorable opinions of both him and his opponent by double digits, according to exit polls. He also won them in 2020, but the group was a much smaller slice of the electorate then.

How are the double haters feeling about 2026?

In our June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, we asked 2,000 Americans to rate both parties on a 0-to-100 “feeling thermometer” scale (where 0 represents “cold” and 100 “warm” toward a figure/party), and about one in five registered voters put both parties below 50. This is the group we’ll call the “double haters” for the midterms, though note it’s slightly different from the 2016/2020/2024 definitions that compare favorability of presidential candidates, not parties. (We can still use our 2026 polling data to establish a benchmark for 2024 — more on that below the fold.)

Our poll shows double haters favor Democrats for 2026 by 26 points, 55% to 29%, while everyone else splits about evenly: Democrats lead by 2 among voters who like at least one party. If you do the math on the generic ballot, currently around D+7 in our poll, this means that double haters are responsible for about 80% of the party’s national margin (26 * 0.21 = 5.46 / 7 = 78%).

And if we compare how the double haters feel now to their 2024 vote and partisan identity, the real story of 2026 starts to emerge. The Democratic advantage for the midterms is not built on voters who like the Democratic Party, but on those who call themselves independents and can’t stand either major party. Let’s run the numbers.

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Independents and non-voters powering Democrats’ double haters lead

When we asked the double haters how they voted for president in 2024, they split slightly in favor of the Democrats. According to our poll, 40% of the group (of 357 adults) said they voted for Kamala Harris, 29% for Trump, 15% for “someone else,” and 16% said they didn’t vote at all. (That 15% third-party share is roughly four times everyone else’s rate of about 4%, likely reflecting the hostility the group feels toward party nominees.)

And if you look at their party identity, double haters are not an overwhelmingly partisan bunch, either: just 19% call themselves Democrats and 18% Republicans, while 64% say they are “independent” or “none.”

So the fact that 55% of double haters now say they’ll vote for Democrats is a big deal. This means many are changing sides.

Most double haters who say they voted for Trump in 2024 are still voting Republican (71%), but about one out of every eight has flipped to voting Democratic for the midterms. That compares to a loyalty rate of 90% among Democratic double haters (and just 4% say they’ll vote Republican).

The more important groups, however, are the “other” voters and non-voters. Just under a third of double haters — 31% — were what I will call “unaligned” in 2024, meaning they voted third party or stayed home. Today that pool is breaking for Democrats 51% to 23%. Democrats are doing well in part because they have rallied their base, in part because Trump voters are tuning out, and in part because those voters who sat out in 2024 are swinging hard to the left. That’s a meaningfully different claim than “swing voters are swinging left.”

Before moving on, I also want to note that this finding holds when I tighten the definition of “double hater.” If instead of counting everyone who rates both parties below 50/100 in the group I count only those at 40/100 or lower, the Democratic lead grows to 28 points. At 30/100, the party’s lead grows to +32.

The more voters hate both parties, in other words, the harder they currently break for Democrats.

Meet the haters

It may also help you to understand more about who these double haters are. Lucky for you, we have lots of polling data on them and can break down their demographics in several ways.

Read more

I published a wonky article this morning under a new section of the Strength In Numbers website that I’m calling the Data Lab. The idea behind this section is to have somewhere to put unscheduled, short, chart-centric works or abandoned drafts, as well as niche, methods-heavy articles having to do with my polling operation, online where they can add some resolution to my reporting/how I operate this business. Put another way, my work generates a lot of stories that are (to put it generously) less interesting to the average reader — sometimes more geared toward industry folks, other times just charts from correspondence that would cause some of you to churn if they saturated your inbox — but nevertheless very engaging for the minority of readers who are very, very nerdy about surveys.

To spare those of you who care less about poll weighting methodology and more about poll results, everyone has been automatically opted out of emails for posts I publish in this new section. If you’re a true sicko for polling, there are instructions for how to enable notifications for Data Lab posts in the piece linked below. And you can always keep up to data at this publication’s website at gelliottmorris.com/s/lab.

The regular Deep Dive comes out tomorrow, and next week I’ll have poll results back from our July survey with Verasight. I then return from paternity “leave” the week after that, and Strength In Numbers returns to full editorial output for the midterms!

Do you have ideas for future dispatches? Leave them in the comments below! (Comments on this post have been unlocked for all readers.)

Elliott

This is the inaugural post for the Strength In Numbers Data Lab, a new section of this publication for sharing extra charts, deep polling nerdery, and writing about methods work etc. for the devoted reader of this newsletter. If you download the crosstabs of our monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, this one’s for you.

The idea for this section is simply to publish more, less polished, and more technical content, both because I know there are many people who are hungry for more content and because there’s stuff I want to keep off the full email list. See, a lot of the analysis I do behind this scenes never makes it into a proper article suited for 70,000+ readers, whether that’s because of the editorial calendar, it’s just one chart, or a reader asks a question that deserves a real answer but is too niche for most subscribers. I tend to file these extras away or send them off as emails where they die in private. That’s a big no-no from a blogging point of view (Always Be Posting) so from now on I’m going to be sharing that work here, outside the Strength In Numbers home vertical (and your inbox) but still public for the real sickos.

Emails for posts on the Data Lab vertical are off by default, but you can easily toggle them on here.

Like the main site, most Data Lab posts will be free, but I’ll reserve the occasional longer article for paying subscribers as a bonus for making all of this possible. Upgrade your subscription for full access.

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Finally, as the staff here at Strength In Numbers continues to grow, I’m hoping the Data Lab will also be home to contributed musings from our survey research assistants and other polling professionals mining SIN data for insights. If that’s the type of thing that interests you, email me.

Short programming note: I’m coming back from paternity leave in two weeks, on July 27, when Strength In Numbers will return to full editorial strength and I’ll have the results of our new July poll to share. David and I return for our first summer podcast/Substack live show that Thursday, July 30. Get signed up so you don’t miss out!

With all that out of the way, let’s dive in:

What’s up with people who disapprove of Trump but don’t vote Democratic?

After my May piece on cross-pressured voters, a reader named Laurence asked on the SIN Discord for me to run some special numbers on our polling microdata. That piece was written in response to some bad punditry about Democrats’ midterm polling — the broader point I was making was that you shouldn’t expect everyone who disapproves of Trump to vote for Democrats for Congress, and grading them against that expectation was unfair/misleading

Laurance wanted me to take the Trump disapprovers who still aren’t voting Democratic and carry at least one Republican “anchor” — a 2024 Trump ballot, Republican party ID or lean, or conservative self-ID — and split them up by which anchors they carry. How does each combination vote on the generic ballot? In other words, don’t just count the anchors — ask which ones actually hold.

I recommend you read the piece linked above to get a better idea of how this works, but basically what we’re doing is looking at the subset of people in our poll who say they disapprove of Trump but aren’t voting Democrat and trying to figure out why — and, importantly, how many of those voters Democrats might actually win.

To answer Laurence’s question, I stacked all six of our Strength In Numbers/Verasight monthly polls from January through June 2026 into one big mega poll. This gives us 8,818 registered voters and enough sample to slice the disapprovers thinly.

And here’s where the microdata is really powerful (and why I think what we’re doing here at SIN is so cool). If you sort voters by Trump approval and generic-ballot vote and then count the GOP anchors in each cell, we find that among disapprovers who are undecided, 40% carry one or more GOP anchors. Among disapprovers who say they’ll vote GOP, 90% have Republican anchors. That’s the group I called “closet Republicans” in my May piece. There are a lot of disapproves who look more like Trump supporters/Republicans than Democratic voters, all else being equal.

Now to Laurence’s actual question: here’s the generic ballot for each anchor combination, split by Trump approval:

This chart is great, even if it takes a while to grasp, because now we can see how your anchors condition your behavioral response to Trump’s presidency. Disapproving of Trump when you’re otherwise a solid Trump voter doesn’t mean you’ll become a Democratic voter in the midterms.

Here are the numbers: Voters carrying all three anchors (a Trump ‘24 ballot, Republican in party affiliation, and conservative self-ID) are still voting Republican 76% to 16, so disapproving of Trump barely dents them. Voters who pulled the lever for Trump in ‘24 and call themselves Republicans but not conservatives stay Republican too, at 63% to 26.

But drop the party label and everything changes. Disapprovers who voted for Trump in 2024 yet call themselves neither Republican nor conservative now go Democratic 62% to 22, an outright flip. The Trump-plus-conservative-but-not-Republican cell (second column, second row) points the same direction, at 50% Democratic to 29 Republican (though it contains just 24 respondents across six months of polling, so treat that finding as directional).

The pattern is hard to miss. The subgroups that keep “Republican” in their identity stay Republican by 37 points or more in the generic ballot even while disapproving of the man leading their party, — while both subgroups without it defect to the Democrats by a margin of 30-plus points. Party identity is doing a lot of work, even among Trump voters.

This is why I called this group “closet Republicans,” and I think that characterization stands.

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The usual caveats apply: this analysis pools six monthly waves of data, so some of the underlying data may be out of date, and some of these breakdowns have only a few dozen voters in them so I wouldn’t take the exact estimates to the bank. But I think the broader point about GOP identity stands — and, more to the point of the Data Lab, I think I’ve answered Laurence’s question now!

If you have a question you want me to answer with our poll, leave it in the comments below or on the SIN Discord and it might become a future dispatch.

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Related Articles

Welcome to the Data Lab, a new section of Strength In Numbers for extra charts, general polling wonkery, and methods work that doesn’t fit neatly into the normal editorial vertical of the full site/doesn’t get the full editing treatment before publication. If you’re familiar with laboratory science, the idea is basically to open-source the lab notes for all the polling I run and explore stuff like survey experiments in more detail. If you’re the type of person who wants to know how our polling is done or reads election forecasting methodologies, the Data Lab is for you.

The Data Lab will also be a place for general miscellany that committed readers will be interested in, but might marginalize the wider audience. I also cut a lot of charts from the full newsletter that I’d like to share somehow, and have some insights into running a Bayesian model-driven polling operation and independent media company that I think folks will find interesting. Finally, as the staff here at Strength In Numbers continues to grow, I’m hoping the Data Lab will also be home to contributed musings from a network of survey research assistants and other polling professionals mining SIN data for insights. If that’s the type of thing that interests you, email me.

In terms of content mix, the goal is that well above half of Data Lab posts will be free. Occasional deeper dives will be paywalled for members, whose support makes all of this possible. Upgrade your subscription for full access:

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The Data Lab is intentionally opt-in for the true Strength In Numbers sickos, so if this at all sounds interesting to you, go to your settings for this publication and opt in to emails from the Data Lab. You should see a menu like the one in the screenshot below with a button to click to enroll in the new vertical. (And you might as well sign up for podcast notifications while you’re at it!)

The first Data Lab post is coming this week. If you have a suggestions for something else I should write, or a question about my polling, leave that in the comments below! Comments are unlocked for all readers.

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For Platner, withdrawing is the right choice — and for the sake of the Democrats’ chance of winning the Senate majority, it’s also the smart one. The reality of Platner’s campaign is that he was already polling poorly relative to expectations — numbers that are now likely to only get worse.

Plater was also always only the better of two bad options that entered the primary. His opponent in the Democratic primary, incumbeacnt governor Janet Mills, also polled poorly against current Republican Senator Susan Collins and is also viewed as too old to run for the seat. (Of course, it’s also likely now that Platner would have lost the primary and polled worse in hypotheticals vs Collins had voters known who he really was.) Being the better of bad options is a powerful argument in a party primary, but not an absolute statement of candidate quality. Nor is it a powerful argument in a general election.

In nominal terms, Platner was always a bad pick. Maine’s Democratic Party now has the option to organize effectively to find and put forth a better option. As a short bonus post on the blog today, let me show you the data on Graham Platner — and, hopefully, his exit.

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Platner is/was one of Democrats’ worst recruits

For this data I’m going to rely on the new election “nowcast” model we published over at FiftyPlusOne earlier today (yes, that means three articles from me today).1 This model takes polls in a given state, adjusts them for things like pollster “house effects,” recency and the like, then infers what would happen in unpolled seats and simulates the outcome of the election as if it were held today. Here’s that post if you want to read more (it’s free).

FiftyPlusOne

New FiftyPlusOne polling nowcast: House and Senate polls reflect D+7-8 national environment

Graphics for this article were edited by Katie Marriner…

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15 days ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · FiftyPlusOne and G. Elliott Morris

Crucially, one thing the nowcast does is measure how competitive each Senate race is relative to expectations. Those expectations are set by taking the traditional partisan lean of each seat and shifting it by some amount that makes the resulting numbers, on average, predictive of current Senate (and House) polls. As the piece at 50+1 explains, that number today is 7.4 points — meaning we would expect Maine, which leans to the left by 8 points in presidential elections, to poll at D+8 + D+7.4 = D+15.4 with completely neutral candidate quality between the nominees.

Platner, who was polling at just two points ahead of Collins in the polling released before the latest allegations against him, is quite a ways below that benchmark. This is visualized well via this plot:

Note that the Maine dot is far below the dashed line — which indicates the expected polling today at every value of seat partisan lean — but also the solid black line, which indicates what we’d expect for Maine in a tied national election. Given we’re looking at a D+7-8 national environment, Platner being at just D+2 is a huge miss and red flag.

Platner was also polling quite poorly compared to other Democratic nominees. The table below shows the top five and bottom five Democratic candidate effects for each House and Senate race that has been polled in the last 90 days:

Platner is/was the single worst Democratic candidate for Senate in 2026 as per current polling and the 50+1 nowcast. And that’s before polls have the chance to adjust to yesterday’s news.

The only Democratic candidates polling worse are in Montana and South Dakota, where there are three-way races against both Republicans and independents who have siphoned off some otherwise Democratic-leaning supporters. Democrats are also polling worse than expected in Michigan, where voters will decide on August 4 who will face off against the lone Republican candidate, Mike Rogers.

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A new nominee could be decisive for Senate control

One question you might have after looking at these numbers is: so what? Democrats are polling well in plenty of other Senate races, from Texas to Iowa to Alaska and North Carolina — where they are almost certain to pick up a GOP seat. So what if they flub Maine? And they have a potential effective pickup in Nebraska, where independent candidate Dan Osborn is hoping to knock off Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts.

Well, let’s do the math. Democrats currently hold 47 seats in the Senate, and they need 51 for a majority to overcome JD Vance’s veto (or 50 if Osborn takes Nebraska away). Democrats are very, very likely to win NC, bringing them to 48, but are shaky in Michigan, which would cancel out the gain. Then they need 2-3 of Maine, Texas, Ohio, or Iowa, where they are even or ahead, or Alaska, where they are slightly behind, but ranked-choice voting makes results a little more unpredictable. In total, Democrats need to run the table in about 40-60% of competitive Senate races, which parties often do in “wave” elections.

But in a close race, every seat counts. If Democrats lose ground in Minnesota or Georgia, where they are also protecting ground, or Ohio and Iowa slip away from them, they are going to wish for a high-quality candidate in Maine. To directly quantify this, we can run our nowcast prediction model assuming Democrats in Maine nominate a candidate of different quality: one who directly replicates Platner’s skill (-10), one where polls put Maine at D+7, and one with Maine polls at D+15 — what you’d expect for a race with no candidate residual for either party.

The chart below summarizes the probability of Democrats winning the majority in an election held today with different candidates running in Maine. Going from the lowest- to highest-quality Democratic candidate is worth about 11 points in win probability today:

This may seem a bit underwhelming at first, but stick with me. The 11-point range (47% → 58%) is “small” because even the best-case scenario for Collins right now is probably a tied race; Even the harshest scenario — Collins repeating her 2020 overperformance — leaves Democrats winning Maine 59% of the time (a D+8 state in a D+6 year is hard to lose even with a −14 candidate effect once you add in the uncertainty about how polls translate to votes.)

But I would also argue that an 11-point increase in win probability is not small! Especially when what’s at stake is control of the United States Senate.

The other way to look at this is to see how often each of the following states tips the outcome of the Senate to the Democrats. Maine supplies the Democrats’ 51st seat in 10% of its wins, making it the third most important state to the party’s majority. Ignoring Maine, in other words, reduces Democratic win probability by about 1 in 10.

Figuring out how to get a high-quality candidate into the Maine Democratic seat is thus a problem worth taking very, very seriously.

One aside before we get there: Some will read the results above and remark that since Susan Collins is an above-average opponent (she typically beats the state’s partisan lean by multiple points), Platner is # ackshually a good challenger. I think this is too clever by half. For one thing, Collins’s overperformance is not an act of God, but inherent to the competition she faces and how the state Democratic Party runs its campaigns (more on that below).

And second, candidate overperformance typically decays over time — by about 63%, per my modeling, from year to year. That means even if you are giving Collins an inherent boost, it’s something like 10 points, not the 20-point residual she had in 2020. Do that, and the expected margin in Maine is D+5 — still three points higher than Platner was polling.

Finally, a sufficient rebuttal is that it is the job of parties to put forth candidates that compete on an equal footing with others. And it is also the job of candidates to meet the partisan benchmarks that are, on average, highly predictive of election results. Yet, Platner was not doing as badly as he could have been. That does not negate the fact he lagged expectations in absolute terms.

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Democrats can do better than Graham Platner

By now, some of you are bound to be thinking that, well, given the choice between Platner and Mills, Democrats probably made the right choice at the time — so this isn’t really their fault. I agree in part: I don’t think this is the fault of Democratic voters, but it is a red mark against the Democratic Party — specifically the Democratic Party of Maine.

As scholars of international elections will tell you, the job of a political party in an election is to put forward the candidate (or, in countries where you elect multiple members in your electoral district, candidates) that has the best chance of winning the next election and to represent the interests of party members. That means organizing debates, an orderly voting process, and — yes — vetting candidates!

State party committees in America have practically abdicated their role in nominating procedures. They mostly just collaborate with state electoral administrators so they don’t have to organize their own conventions or other modes of selection.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! State parties can be as competent as they want!

Maine election law provides a mechanism for replacing a general-election nominee after the primary. If Platner withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July — this year, July 13 — the Maine Democratic State Committee can name a replacement, and the party then has until July 27 to make that pick. And the law is nebulous enough that they can maybe just… pick however they want. They could even embark on a two-week memberhsip drive to collect contact information from likely member-voters, and then vote electronically on a new nominee using ranked choice voting! The options for a good nomination process are practically endless! Yeah, the party committee has to agree on them, but let’s flex our creativity and American exceptionalism on this our country’s 250th birthday.

And if Platner misses the July 13 window, the door essentially shuts. After that, the law allows a swap only for something like death or an incapacitating illness, and Platner stays on the ballot no matter how the campaign unravels.

In a Senate election that might — indeed, might probably — be decided by one seat, Platner’s name remaining on the ballot is a disaster scenario.

The good news is that Democrats can probably find another nominee to take his place. Recall that Platner’s appeal was never really about Platner: the surveys had him running ahead of Mills because he tapped a genuine populist, anti-establishment current that is currently animating a lot of American politics. Democrats might pick former state Senate President Troy Jackson — a fifth-generation logger with deep working-class roots — and, if he polls well, Democrats flip from underdogs to win the Senate to slight favorites.

The moral case for Platner stepping aside is straightforward, and most of his own party has already disavowed him, so I think that will happen sooner rather than later.

What the data adds, then, is the strategic point that he was never a good nominee in the first place. Maine’s state Democratic Party is now in the dream position of being unburdened by primary voting rules and able to pick whoever its members want to maximize their odds of satisfying Democratic voters and winning the general election in November. At least, if they act before July 13.

Can Maine’s Democrats get their act together? Can American parties start acting like functional organizations, like their European counterparts? Or will they get another Platner… or worse?

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Read more about our new nowcasting model at 50+1 here.

FiftyPlusOne

New FiftyPlusOne polling nowcast: House and Senate polls reflect D+7-8 national environment

Graphics for this article were edited by Katie Marriner…

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15 days ago · 22 likes · 4 comments · FiftyPlusOne and G. Elliott Morris

And if you want more analysis of politics and polling, subscribe here at Strength In Numbers. I publish new analyses three times a week.

Footnotes

It is possible for me to publish articles like this premium weekly Deep Dive thanks to paying members, who get frequent premium posts delivered directly to their inboxes plus have early access to new data products and community of interested readers, data practitioners, and industry insiders via a private Discord server. Join our community today and get premium insights — and support this work.

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Democratic Socialists are on a roll. In New York’s June 23 primaries, candidates allied with the Democratic Socialists of America won in 9 of 10 races the organization fielded a candidate in, including three congressional districts in New York City where they also knocked off two incumbent Democratic House Reps. Then last week the socialist-red wave hit Denver, where 29-year-old Melat Kiros beat Rep. Diana DeGette, who has represented Colorado’s 1st District since 1997. The DSA is now on track to hold at least five seats in Congress next year, up from two a year ago.

But it wasn’t just the DSA running up the score — and it’s not really socialism that’s on the menu. For example, Sen. John Hickenlooper won renomination in Colorado by just 53-47 over a more mainstream progressive Democratic challenger Julie Gonzales, despite massively outspending her. By election analyst Stephen Wolf’s count, only two Democratic senators since 1972 have lost a primary for re-election to a challenger from their left. Hickenlooper came dangerously close to becoming the third.

In response to these victories Trump told the annual Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month that the winners are “not social democrats” but “hardcore, godless communists,” and called them “the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” Axios reported on June 30 that the GOP sees a rebooted Red Scare as its best midterm message. Trump railed against communism in a July 3rd front of Mount Rushmore and urged the Senate to pass his restrictive voting laws bill so Republicans could hold office “for 100 years.”

This all has drawn a lot of attention to the current fracture within the Democratic Party. Is it really about socialism and ideological conflict, as Trump and centrist Democrats both want you to think, or something else? I went back through 18 months of our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling and spent dozens of hours analyzing politicians’ websites, social media pages, campaign addresses and congressional floor speeches to find an answer.

The hard data on this subject is pretty clear — but before I give you any answers answer, I wanted to flex the type of insights you can generate when you run your own polls to understand politics for the public.

One thing nobody has shown yet is that the revolt against establishment Democrats is not confined to left-wing voters. In this week’s Deep Dive I show these DSA candidates are polling well not just among people who call themselves progressives, but center-left voters and moderates, too. And I analyze the actual speech they’ve campaigned on to understand why.

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Democrats want their leaders to fight, not move left or right

My answer to this article’s central question is that the current factor driving many Democrats to support left-wing candidates isn’t ideology, but a revolt against the party’s leadership and political establishment more broadly. The central conflict is less over seizing the means of production and more akin to what I’ve called the anti-system axis in American politics. Let me explain what I mean by this, and why I think the data conclusively shows Democratic primary voters aren’t being drawn primarily to the leftism of these DSA candidate, but rather their anti-party orientation.

First, consider that polling data shows relatively few Democrats think their party has moved too far to the left: just 14% said so in our July 2025 poll, and a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll put that share at 20%, with 55% saying the party is about where it should be.

What Democrats do say is that their party is feeble. In an early 2026 poll, I asked self-described Democrats to grade their own party on a list of traits, like whether it governs competently, cares about “people like you,” or is ideologically extreme. On a 1–10 scale, Democrats scored their party 7.0 on “competent,” 7.2 on “principled,” and 7.5 on “empathetic,” but just 5.4 on “tough.” And in the same poll, 57% of Democrats called their own party out of touch. Just 58% said it “has strong leadership” and a plurality said it should do more to fight Donald Trump.

When we asked Democrats in April, in their own words, what bothered them most about their party, the top answer was “too weak / not fighting enough,” at 30%, well ahead of everything else.

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Data: Even moderate Democrats prefer left-wing figures to party leadership

One of the assumptions underpinning the current discourse about the Democratic Tea Party is that anti-system, DSA candidates are only winning support among left-wing Democrats.

Our polling shows this isn’t true.

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However the Republicans are also unpopular, with an equally bad net favorability of -15 — and Democrats currently lead in polls of U.S. House races by about 6 percentage pointson average. So this toxic national brand is not preventing it from winning national races — at least not when the president of the opposing party is himself polling closer to -20/-25.

What’s more concerning is the Democrats’ position in the states. The second problem with the party’s brand is that it is essentially the same in Brooklyn as in Omaha — LA as in Laredo. An unpopular national brand means an unpopular brand in both swing states and those that lean Republican — and elect the majority of members of the U.S. Senate. Due to key losses for incumbents the party now needs to win the national popular vote by about 6 points to win the median Senate seat. And since only a third of the Senate is up each cycle, they need to do that three cycles in a row.

The trend here is disastrous for the party’s chances of controlling the Senate:

While the Democrats’ weak hand in the Senate is not all due to its national brand, the fear is that in a close race — say, 51-49 in the topping-point — a toxic reputation could cost the party power. And at the presidential level, the 2024 election was only decided by a point and a half. Would Kamala Harris have fared better with a popular party brand behind her? It seems likely she would have.

So what is the party doing about this?

For the better part of the last decade, and especially since Trump’s re-election in ‘24, Democrats have been arguing about where the party should stand ideologically. A very vocal, well-funded, powerful bloc of PACs and media elites wants it to “moderate” its issue positions and move to the middle. Others want it to turn left. That’s probably not the solution in, say, Missoula, but another potent sentiment in 2026 is the desire for lawmakers ro “fight harder” against Donald Trump and the cost of living, and that can read as ideological. An anti-Trump affordability agenda sells.

But what if this is the wrong way to think about voters entirely? What if the endless ideology talk is, as I’ve argued before, mostly noise? Instead of asserting with scant evidence that triangulating the perfect mix of issue positions will be the single fix to all the party’s problems, this post uses hard data and statistical analysis to arrive at an answer. When we actually do the work of testing how voters react to various candidates with different profiles, what do the numbers say about the path forward for Democratic candidates?

In our June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, we gave every respondent a description of one of four hypothetical U.S. House races and tested them against the same generic Republican. On the Democratic side, voters saw either a generic, party-line candidate with unnamed positions, a candidate with a popular policy platform, a candidate with a record of independence from party leaders to deliver for constituents, or one with deep ties to a local community.

In this week’s Deep Dive, I dig into the results. For those Democrats who want to separate their image from the national party’s toxic brand, what is the best, empirically grounded strategy?

The rest of this Deep Dive is for paying subscribers. That includes the results of the experiment, a description of the statistical model I built to test effects, and what this all means for how Democrats should run in 2026 and 2028. This is original polling and analysis you won’t find anywhere else, and your support is what makes it possible for me to publish.

And the best Democratic candidate is…

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Our June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll asked Americans to rate a dozen political figures on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 representing a completely “cold” feeling toward the person and 100 representing a “warm” feeling. Who’s popular — and who’s not — is fairly revealing.

This turns out to be an incredibly timely survey question. Last Tuesday, June 23, three Democratic candidates for U.S. House seats that were endorsed by Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, won their primaries. Of note, former New York City comptroller Brad Lander buried incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman — whom Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House, had personally backed — by more than 30 points, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old organizer, unseated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat by 3. Claire Valdez, a New York State Rep., won a primary for an open seat spanning Brooklyn and Queens by 20 points.

Also of note: all three of the above Mamdani-endorsed winners are allies or members of the Democratic Socialists of America. As such, the results were immediately interpreted as evidence for a Tea-Party-esque movement among Democrats to support lefty candidates and punish the establishment. After the wins, the DSA shared the graphic below, from a CNN segment, on Twitter/X:

Centrists in the Democratic Party have responded to Tuesday’s losses by pointing out that, yeah, the DSA might be popular among Democrats, but it’s not popular among the general public — so these wins ought to be viewed as a cautionary tale about ideological polarization. Liam Kerr, who helps run the centrist Super PAC WelcomePAC, posted the following results from a Marquette University Law School poll:

Reading the piece and social media posts, Kerr also appears to be trying to popularize the line that only 5% of Americans rate the DSA as “Very Favorable.” That’s true, if a bit misleading in terms of data: Only 12% of Americans rate the Republican Party and Democratic Party favorably, per YouGov. Twelve percent is higher than 5% but not anything to write home about. In general, all party organizations are very unpopular:

I’ll have more fresh data about the Democratic Party’s brand problem, and what to do about it, tomorrow.

I find discourse on this subject severely lacking in a few ways, but mostly that it centers on favorability toward parties but doesn’t deal at all with politicians. If, for example, Zohran Mamdani is more popular than the DSA, then it’s not right to characterize all DSA politicians as “toxic,” as Kerr does. And this can have consequences: One of the things Trump benefited from in 2024 was that voters viewed him more favorably than the Republican Party.

So what can we learn from the hard data on how people feel about America’s most well-known politicians and party organizations? And does that tell us anything about the supposed Democratic Tea Party, and where the parties are headed in 2028? (At the very least, can we make a chart of politician favorability ratings that looks really cool?) Let’s run the numbers!

You can read our previous poll releases at the Strength In Numbers polling data hub. Paying subscribers to this newsletter have access to additional trend charts and a full archive of crosstabs at this link.

Read the full poll

Left-leaning politicians are the most popular Democrats, with one exception

Every few months, I ask Americans in our poll to rate the country’s leading political figures on a “feeling thermometer” scale — a 0-to-100 scale where 100 represents as warm and favorable as possible and 0 is as cold as can be. This is an alternative to the poll question that is popular in lots of media analysis asking if a respondent feels someone is “very” or “somewhat” un/favorable. (I find the distinction here somewhat nebulous.) I compile these ratings each year for a piece announcing America’s most popular politicians, per these ratings.

In June, we tested 19 figures and party organizations. The results are shown in the graphic below:

Americans view warmly, on average, to one political figure: Barack Obama. Everyone else is either slightly or significantly below a 50-50 rating.

After Obama comes a tight cluster of Democratic-aligned figures, all above an average rating of 40/100. We see Bernie Sanders at a 45, Zohran Mamdani at 44, the Democratic Party itself at 43 (very surprising result, IMO), Pete Buttigieg at 43, Jon Ossoff at 42, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and — the lone Republican to crack the top tier — Marco Rubio all at 41.

The bottom of the list is mostly Republican. Tucker Carlson is the single most disliked figure we tested, at 28. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (at 30), Speaker Mike Johnson (33), and Elon Musk (36) all sit near the floor. And Donald, at 38, is tied with his own vice president, JD Vance, and just below the Republican Party as a whole, at 39.

The only Democrats to poll worse than Donald Trump are the party’s Congressional leadership: Chuck Schumer is at 30 and Hakeem Jeffries at 36. Americans rate Gavin Newsom the same as they rate the Republican Party overall, at 39/100.

This is not the first time we’ve seen Democrats top the list of America’s most well-known politicians and key 2028 contenders. Here’s how each figure’s rating now compares to their past rating in Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling:

None of these are big swings, and most sit within the polls’ margins of error.

One caveat to keep in mind: By design we only ask Americans who know of each figure to rate them, but recognition of each varies widely. Take Jon Ossoff for example: over half of respondents (55%) say they didn’t know who he was, so his 42% rating could change as he becomes better known. The better-known a figure, the more their rating reflects views of the whole public (and the harder it is to move).

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How each party sees key 2028 contenders

The overall thermometer scores above tell you who Americans like overall, but not who has more purchase with their own party. The latter matters more if, like so many analysts are trying to do now, we want to benchmark 2028 or understand the unfolding “Democratic Tea Party.”

So in the graph below, I separated out our poll sample by self-described party affiliation and calculated how each party’s base feels about its top 2028 contenders.

Among Republicans, there’s a two-way tie at 68/100 between JD Vance and Marco Rubio. Notably, that’s lower than the highest ratings Democrats give their leading candidates. But the more interesting result is Tucker Carlson’s mean rating of 40/100. That serves as a good reminder that the MAGA media wing of the GOP does not speak for the rest of it. And if Carlson is going to try to run for president, as some people think he might, he’s going to have to either get those numbers up or get a new party.

On the Democratic side, the pattern is clear: The party’s left-leaning stalwarts and next-generation insurgents are more popular than its relatively more moderate wing (I would hesitate to call Gavin Newsom a moderate in absolute terms). Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani top the field at a mean rating of 72/100, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just behind at 70.

Trailing them is the party establishment: Kamala Harris is at 68, Pete Buttigieg at 67, and Gavin Newsom at 64. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff brings up the rear at 61 — though nearly half of Democrats still say they don’t know who he is, so I wouldn’t take that 61 to the bank.

Democrats want to vote for Democrats who fight

As for the DSA/Tea Party discourse, note that Democrats are generally feeling warmest toward fighter-coded figures such as AOC and Mamdani and less favorable of the establishment. It’s not surprising, then, that in New York City of all places, two fighter-coded candidates managed to knock off incumbents who garnered high-profile endorsements from party leadership. Across all the New York primary elections last week, the DSA won 9/10 key races.

Contra the messaging being pushed by MAGA Republicans, however (Trump is trying to paint all Democrats as communists now), I do think this is about fighting Trump and the weakness of the Democratic establishment, and not really about ideology. That’s how you get Jeffries and Schumer — certainly not “moderate” in any typical ideological framework — at a 30/100 feeling thermometer rating.

In general, polls have shown the big problem for Democrats today (such that there is a “problem” when you’re winning the midterms in a blue wave) isn’t being seen as woke, but as weak. And the apparent real-world demand among Democrats and independents who lean toward Democrats for “fighters” is proof this polling is picking up on something real.

Democratic primary voters have evidently decided they want candidates who put their full energy into fighting Trump and raising the standard of living. That’s true in New York City, and in the feeling thermometer ratings. That may change by the time the 2028 primaries really heat up, but for now it’s worth reading this data clearly: The average Democrat feels about 10% warmer toward Zohran Mamdani than Gavin Newsom.

The June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll surveyed 2,087 U.S. adults online between June 17 and June 22, 2026. The margin of error for the full sample is ±2.2 percentage points; subgroup margins (such as ratings among co-partisans) are larger. Full methodology and crosstabs are available at gelliottmorris.com/poll.

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Subscribers to Strength In Numbers have access to additional visuals and a full archive of crosstabs here.

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This is a fun article to write. Each month, I let Strength In Numbers subscribers suggest questions to put on the monthly poll I conduct with Verasight, a high-quality online and mixed-mode pollster, and I pick a few of them to run. Here is a list of all the questions readers suggested we ask in 2026, which I also frequently consult.

I like to do this for two reasons. First, because it helps keep the questions attuned to what people actually care about in a given moment. Second, because the questions are often quite fun!

This month, one subscriber suggested asking voters whether they think there are currently grounds to impeach the president. I thought that was a good question — different enough from the usual question “Do you think Congress should impeach the president?” to be potentially additionally revealing of public opinion, and it gives us the opportunity to ask the people who say “yes” what Trump did that they think warrants impeachment.

A majority of 53% of Americans say there are grounds for Congress to impeach President Trump, according to our June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll — including 40% who say “yes, definitely” — while 39% say there are not grounds to impeach him (28% “definitely not”). Here we used a slightly different question from the one in our April poll, when 55% said Congress should impeach the president (not whether someone thought there were “grounds to impeach”).

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Americans say Trump should be impeached over corruption, abuse of power, and the war in Iran

To understand why people thought this, we let the people who said there are grounds to impeach explain in their own words. Then, I coded their open-ended answers into categories based on broad themes in the data.

The most common reason voters think Trump should be impeached, named by 30%, was corruption and self-enrichment. People mentioned things such as generally profiting from the office, violating the emoluments clause, the president’s Boeing jet from Qatar, his crypto ventures, and more. Just as many, another 30%, pointed to cases of abuse of power — including defying court orders, weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies, and usurping powers of Congress.

In third place, at 20%, voters said Trump should be impeached over the war in Iran — with respondents objecting that he bombed another country without congressional approval. Smaller but meaningful shares cited his incompetence (17%), his criminal record as a convicted felon (16%), and his ties to Jeffrey Epstein (16%). And about one in six (17%) didn’t name a specific charge at all — they simply answered “everything,” or said there were too many reasons to list.

And here’s a sampling of what voters wrote in their own words:

“When I look up corruption in the dictionary, Donald Trump’s picture is there.”

“Total disregard for the rule of law, refusal to obey court orders, usurping the powers of Congress for himself.”

“He is using his job as the president to make deals that will enrich him and his family.”

“He went beyond his constitutional powers and held a war for over 60 days without asking Congress for approval.”

“Corruption. Not consulting with Congress before starting the Iran War. Using the DOJ to prosecute his personal enemies. And about 100 other reasons.”

The striking thing here is not just that a narrow majority says there are grounds to impeach Trump, but that voters see so many different reasons for impeachment. For some people, the issue is corruption. For others, it is abuse of power, the war in Iran, the courts, the Justice Department, the president’s ties to and handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, or simply the accumulation of everything he’s done in the last 15 months.

Sure, impeachment looks unlikely right now. But whether Congress ever acts on this sentiment is a separate question. At least among the public, the belief that there are already grounds to impeach the president is not a fringe view. It is, in fact, the majority position.

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The June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll surveyed 2,087 U.S. adults online between June 17 and June 22, 2026. The margin of error for the full sample is ±2.2 percentage points. Full methodology and crosstabs are available at gelliottmorris.com/poll.

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Intro

A clear majority of Americans support a deal to end the war between the U.S. and Iran, our latest Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds. According to the survey, which was conducted June 17–22, 2026, adults back the deal by a margin of more than two to one: 59% of U.S. adults support the deal to end the war, while just 24% oppose it.

But Americans do not think the deal is good, or that the war was successful. Rather, our poll indicates voters support the agreement because they see it as ending a war few supported. Only 18% of Americans say the U.S. actually achieved its goals in Iran, while nearly half — 46% — say the country should never have gone to war in the first place. Overall, 61% of adults say they are not confident the deal will stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, as the Trump administration claims.

While the war — and its effect on gas prices — led to a large decrease in Trump’s approval rating, the announcement of the deal (even if it doesn’t stick) and a drop in prices at the pump have not yet helped him. Overall, 37% of U.S. adults approve and 60% disapprove of his job performance as president, identical to May’s reading and still among the worst readings we’ve recorded since we began tracking the question a year ago.

So June looks less like a turning point than a brief reprieve for the president. The president remains underwater on 11 of 12 issues we test, Democrats still lead the generic ballot, and the public still trusts Democrats more on the issues it cares about most.

Below, I report results from our monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight political tracking questions. This month, we also asked respondents about the war in Iran, conducted a survey experiment testing different ways Democratic candidates can distance themselves from their party’s national brand, and fielded two questions subscribers asked us to field: one on impeachment and one on which group of Americans voters think Trump’s policies have actually helped. The Iran and group-benefit results are covered here, while the other questions will get their own articles.

Headline poll findings

• Iran: 59% of Americans support the deal to end the war with Iran; 24% oppose. But only 18% say the U.S. achieved its goals, 46% say it never should have gone to war, and 61% are not confident the deal will stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

• Job approval: 37% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance; 60% disapprove (net -23, unchanged from May)

• Generic ballot: Democrats lead Republicans 50% to 43% among registered voters — a 7-point margin — and 48% to 42% among all adults.

• Direction of the country: 50% say things are going poorly and major, disruptive changes are needed to get the country back on course. Just 8% say things are going well.

• Prices: Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation is -46 — still by far his worst issue. Perhaps the good news for the president is that for the first time in 2026 his rating didn’t get worse since last month. 36% of Americans name prices as the single most important problem facing the country.

• Issue approval: Trump is underwater on every issue we tested except border security, where he sits at net +2 (48% approve, 46% disapprove).

• Party trust: Democrats lead Republicans on 8 of the 12 issues we tested, including the top voter priorities — prices, jobs, health care, and elections and democracy.

• Who Trump’s policies helped: 63% of Americans say the wealthy and large corporations have benefited more than average Americans from Trump’s policies; just 8% say average Americans have come out ahead.

This is the first of several articles releasing data from the June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. Subscribe to Strength In Numbers to get them in your inbox.

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Americans support the Iran deal because they want out, not because they think the war worked

On paper, Trump’s deal to end the war with Iran is one of the president’s rare policies a clear majority of Americans support. Overall, 59% of the public says they back the deal — including 27% who support it strongly — while only 24% oppose it. (The remaining 17% say they are not sure.)

But their support is a vote to end the war, not for the president’s handling of it. A 46% plurality of adults said the U.S. should never have gone to war with Iran in the first place. Just 18% said the U.S. achieved its goals and the deal is the right move, while another 14% said the war failed, but ending it is still right. Responses and question wording included in the image below:

Voters also aren’t sure the deal will even accomplish the goal the Trump administration now claims it started the war for: to destroy Iran’s capability of developing a nuclear weapon. We asked respondents how confident they are that the deal will actually stop Iran from building a nuke, and 61% said they were not confident, with 28% saying “not too” confident, while 33% were “not at all” confident. Just 7% think the agreement will be successful.

This polling is very revealing about the state of public opinion on the U.S.-Iran war. Voters are relieved the shooting has stopped, but they doubt anything was accomplished and do not give the president credit for the cessation of hostilities. As we also found in our May poll, this month’s survey found a majority of Americans with an opinion think Trump shouldn’t have started the war in the first place. That is hardly a victory.

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Democrats hold their lead in House generic ballot

Turning to the midterms, the Democrats lead Republicans on the House congressional ballot by a margin of 7 points, 50% to 43% among registered voters. That is within the margin of error of our poll’s reading of an 8-point margin for the party in May. Among all U.S. adults, the lead is D+6 (48% to 42%). 7% of registered voters say they don’t know who they would vote for.

Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll since we began fielding in May 2025. Across 13 monthly polls (we skipped December 2025), Democrats have never trailed, with margins ranging from +5 to +10 points among registered voters.

Trump’s rating for handling prices finally stopped falling — but he’s still underwater on almost everything

Our poll finds Donald Trump’s overall approval rating among U.S. adults stable at 37% this month, with 60% of Americans disapproving of how he’s handling his job as president:

For the first time all year, Trump’s net approval on prices didn’t fall this month. His rating on inflation sits at -46, a technical 1-point improvement from May’s record -47. The president’s net rating on every issue is shown in the graph below:

While the president may be pleased that he has stopped the bleeding, that is a long way from a good rating. In raw percentage terms, just 25% of Americans approve of how he’s handling prices, while 71% disapprove and 54% disapprove strongly. That is a tough number to post on the issue people say is the most important to them (see next section).

The president’s numbers are similarly bad pretty much everywhere else. He is underwater on 11 of the 12 issues we tested. His health care rating fell to -32 (from -28 in May), and on government funding and social programs, he has slipped to -25. He’s stuck in the low-to-mid 20s nearly everywhere else — including -25 on jobs and the economy, -23 on trade, -22 on foreign policy, -21 on elections and democracy, and -20 on education.

The one exception, as in most of our recent surveys, is on border security — where the president is in positive territory at a net rating of +2 (48% approve, 46% disapprove). Yet he is still negative on related issues, including immigration at -12, crime and public safety (-10), and deportations (-10). It is a simple truth but worth repeating: this is not the political environment the president entered office with a short 15 months ago.

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Prices are still the country’s top problem

When we ask Americans to name the single most important problem facing the country, 36% say prices and inflation — down a few points from May’s record 39%, but still nearly three times the next-closest issue. Tied for second place, 13% name jobs and the economy, and 12% name elections and democracy as their top issues. Following that, 8% say health care is most important to them.

When we let respondents name their top three problems instead of forcing a single choice, the dominance of the cost of living is even clearer. Nearly six in ten — 59% — name prices, well ahead of jobs and the economy (40%) and health care (34%). Elections and democracy come a distant fourth at 22%.

The problem for Trump — and the Republicans ahead of the midterms — is the same one it’s been since early in the president’s second term: The issue Americans care about most is also the issue where the president is weakest.

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Democrats still lead on the issues voters care about most

When we ask voters which party they trust more to handle each issue, Democrats lead on 8 of 12 policy areas. Their biggest edges are on health care (D+20), government funding and social programs (D+17), education (D+15), and elections and democracy (D+11). And they’ve taken the two issues Republicans ran and won on in 2024: prices and inflation (D+8) and jobs and the economy (D+7). Again, those latter two are the same two issues voters now rate as the country’s biggest problems.

On the other end of the spectrum, Republicans lead on four issues, all in their traditional wheelhouse: border security (R+17), deportations (R+6), crime and public safety (R+6), and immigration (R+4).

Compared to our May survey, the Republicans have recovered a few points on the margin for some issues, but the differences are not statistically significant:

There is one additional number worth flagging for Democrats. As I wrote about last week, one question we ask here at Strength In Numbers that no other firm regularly tracks is which party would do a better job handling the issue they say is personally most important to them. Today Democrats lead 46% to 37%, with 17% unsure:

Technically that 9-point edge is down from D+13 in May, but (1) that could be noise and (2) even a 9-point margin is a recent record — on par with the 2020 and 2012 elections, and about double the Republicans’ edge in 2024.

This number predicts elections pretty well, so the number is worth keeping an eye on:

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Half the country still says things are going poorly

The share of Americans who say “things are going poorly and major, disruptive changes are needed” sits at 50% in June, roughly even from 52% in May and down from a record high of 55% in April. Just 8% say things are going well. If you add the 38% who say things could be going better to the half who want disruptive change, then the conclusion is that 88% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This level of pessimism is generally a dire warning for the incumbent party.

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Subscribers’ question: who Trump’s policies have actually helped

And now for the fun part. Each month, we let Strength In Numbers subscribers suggest questions for the poll, and I pick a few to run. This helps keep the questions attuned to what people actually care about in a moment in time. This month, subscribers asked who they think the president’s policies have actually benefited.

On the question of which groups are benefiting from Trump’s presidency, few see the working-class president that Trump promised he’d be.

We asked whether they thought wealthy individuals and large corporations have benefited more than average Americans from the Trump administration’s policies. 63% said yes — including a sizable portion of Republicans — and nearly half of all Americans (47%) said the wealthy have benefited “much more” than the middle. Almost no one saw it the other way, with just 8% saying average Americans have come out ahead. About 17% said the two groups have come out the same and 12% are unsure.

Trump ran in 2024 as a champion of the working class who would fight inflation and lock up the elites taking advantage of America. Eighteen months in, by a margin of nearly eight to one, Americans say the people his policies have actually helped are the wealthy and the corporations.

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The White House needs numbers to go up, not just stay flat

Zooming out, June is the first month in a while when our survey results are merely bad for the president, and not trending down. His approval held steady at -23 rather than falling, and the president got a foreign-policy deal that a clear majority of the public supports — if not for the reason he wants.

But a pause is not a recovery. Trump is still underwater on 11 of 12 issues, and the public still gives Democrats more than Republicans to handle its top problems. Democrats still lead the generic ballot by high single digits — enough to take the U.S. House majority in November and make the Senate genuinely competitive. And while voters back the Iran deal, they don’t think it accomplished its goal — 61% aren’t confident it will stop Iran from getting the bomb. Most also say the fighting was generally not worth it.

When a president sits this far underwater this close to a midterm, his party usually pays for it. George W. Bush was at roughly the same approval rating as Trump’s today in June 2006 and went on to lose 30 House seats that fall. One stable month doesn’t change the reality of the tough situation the president and his party are in. If June’s numbers are anywhere close to where things stand in November, Republicans are still headed for big losses, up and down the ballot.

Later this week and next week, Strength In Numbers will release more data from our June survey with Verasight — including on support for impeaching Trump, our annual feeling thermometers on major political figures, including the party’s top 2028 contenders, and the results of a new experiment testing how Democratic candidates can distance themselves from their party’s less-than-stellar national brand. Subscribe today to get those polling dispatches delivered straight to your inbox.

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Methods statement: Verasight collected the data for this survey from June 17–22, 2026. The sample consists of 2,087 United States residents ages 18 and above. The data are weighted to match the May 2026 Current Population Survey on age, race/ethnicity, sex, income, education, region, and metropolitan status, as well as to a running three-year average of partisanship distributions from the Pew Research Center NPORS benchmarking surveys and population benchmarks of the 2024 vote. The margin of sampling error is ±2.2%.

G. Elliott Morris prepared the topline document and this write-up for Strength In Numbers. Strength In Numbers had input on question wording, but all other methodological decisions were made and carried out by Verasight to ensure independence of the data-generating process behind these results. Verasight also reviewed the questionnaire.

You can download a full topline file, key crosstabs, and full methodology statement at the Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling portal. The paywalled section containing full crosstabs and more interactive graphics has been updated with these numbers.

If you have any questions about this poll or the release, please email polling[AT]gelliottmorris.com.

Have a suggestion for next month’s poll? Leave it in the comments below.

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Later this week I’ll have the results of our monthly June poll with Verasight. This month’s poll covers the generic ballot, Iran-U.S. peace “deal,” updates our annual politician popularity index, and fields several questions direct from subscribers.

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A reader named Tyler writes in with a question I’ve received a few times over the last week:

G what’s your take on the generic ballot dropping from +7 to +5 now

And over on the Strength In Numbers Discord, a couple of readers have asked the same question about Trump’s approval rating ticking up from about 36% to 37% over the last couple of weeks, with his net rating bouncing by 2-3.

Here are the current generic ballot and Trump approval polling averages at SIN sister site 50+1, where my polling averages are hosted. (You can get to the site very easily by bookmarking it, or by typing “fpo.news” into your browser’s URL bar.)

Generic ballot:

Trump job approval:

Look at those recent mean reversions! People are worrying: have we reached peak Democratic wave? Are the party’s hopes of, for example, taking back the Senate dashed?

The short answer to these questions is no and no. That’s because this particular movement is mostly noisy polling pulling around the polling averages (especially the less methodologically robust ones), and I walk through why below.

But I imagine this question is going to come up again in the long term. It is best to be prepared; If you’re going to watch the polls between now and November — or if this is the type of thing you do as a hobby anyway — you need a way to separate poll movement that matters from movement that doesn’t. So let’s do just that.

In this week’s Deep Dive I take the historical generic ballot polls and show you what level of day-to-day (or week-to-week) noise is typical over the course of a cycle. I then combine the generic ballot with presidential approval polls and other data to build a first-of-its-kind “Cost of Ruling” index for measuring the strength — or, in this case, weakness — of the party in control of the White House.

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There’s no perfect way to communicate about polls

Polling averages are a very cool innovation in political journalism, but they are not perfect. The “miracle of aggregation,” as I call it in my book, is not really a miracle (I was being cheeky when I wrote that) so much as an opportune use of statistics and especially marketing: Before the Americans had “polling averages” the British were making “polls of polls” — CNN adopted the practice in the 1990s.

When it comes to the actual math of averages, the good news is that taking the mean of some set of polling data typically offers a better prediction of elections than taking a single poll in isolation. The bad news is the average is only as good as the underlying data and the statistical model used to “average,” or “aggregate,” it — and as good as the journalist presenting it.

This post takes these challenges in reverse order. Start with the journalism of it all — because this is the easiest part of the story. In our 50+1 generic ballot average, the published Democratic margin across polls read about D+7 a couple of weeks ago and reads D+5 today — a paper loss of two points that reader Tyler was asking about. But take the raw numbers for the parties (Democrats at 48.9% and Republicans at 43.4; a change from 49.1 and 42.4 two weeks ago), and the drop is only from D+6.7 to D+5.49 — a drop of about one point, not two.

Unfortunately, this incident of exaggeration is inherent to a tradeoff we made when deciding how to present the data. The general practice in polling analysis is not to show decimals on differences between percentages, because a number like “D+5.4” implies a precision the polls just don’t offer (see: 2024, 2020, 2016, etc). Or, if you’re going to publish decimals, you should include a margin of error either visually it in the text.

The tradeoff is that a small move in the margin between the parties sometimes looks bigger than it is, which is exactly what caught Tyler’s eye here. A 1-point change became 2.

Strip out the rounding, though, and a sliver of real movement is still there. What’s behind that?

Even polling averages can fake you out

Here’s where we get to the data of it all. Part of the 1-point decrease in the Democratic vote margin in the generic ballot is likely real reversion in the party’s vote share, with the average drifting back toward where it was in April and May. And honestly, that’s to be expected, since the party’s lead had been running a little hot during the fallout from Trump’s war against Iran and the ensuing 50% inflation in gas prices.

You can see this reversion across pollsters. YouGov, for example, found the party dipping in its own apples-to-apples comparison. In polling from Echelon Insights, a GOP-aligned firm, the party lost a point as well. There are other examples.

But much of that 1-point decline is likely mechanical — a product of what data is available for the average. Over the last 2 weeks, new polls have tended to come from firms that lean to the right and produce numbers that are typically on the lower end for Democrats — Quantus Insights, McLaughlin & Associates (Trump’s pollster), and Morning Consult are a few examples. The average I publish for 50+1 tries to account for some of this availability bias (see my methodology) but there is only so much you can do if your trend is being bogged down by biased data. The high-quality New York Times/Siena poll that had Democrats up 10 points is now over a month old.

This is a dynamic of poll-aggregation that people often miss or ignore. A smart polling average can remove a lot of noise from polling data, but the tool inherently still wiggles around from sampling error and house effects even when the “truth” of public opinion is stable. A poll of 1,000 people has a margin of error of roughly three points — and you’re blending at best half a dozen of those from the last week, and usually less.

This doesn’t mean polls are useless — they are still the best tool we have for predicting elections, and the only one we have for directly measuring how people feel about public life. But it does mean that averages tend to move around somewhat predictably. So how much movement is worth paying attention to? Let’s boot up the historical polling averages and take a look.

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Movement that actually matters

The chart below shows my average of U.S. House generic ballot polls for every election cycle going back to 1998. We published a slightly different version of this at 50+1 last week when we made the case that the Democratic lead was now about as large as in 2018.

The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers. Paying members of Strength In Numbers get every Tuesday’s Deep Dive sent straight to their inbox, access to other premium posts on a 1-2x weekly basis, and early access to data like the new polling index coming below. Their support helps fund my original polling efforts and keeps this newsletter running. If you are not already a paying subscriber to Strength In Numbers, you can become one here.

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In our May poll, Democrats led Republicans by 13 points on trust to handle the problems Americans picked as their personal most important. And since we ask this question every month (at least we do now, starting 2026), we can compare how voters felt on this question over time:

A year ago, the party’s lead was “just” 4 points. But The Democratic edge has widened almost every month since last spring to D+7 by October, D+8 through the winter, then a jump to D+12 in April and D+13 in May. That’s a steady climb throughout Trump’s second term so far. While I wouldn’t make much of how a poll moves in one month (a survey of 1,500 adults has a margin of error around 5 percentage points for the difference in two percentages), the trend here across multiple surveys is undeniable. (Our new June poll comes out next week, so get signed up if you’re not already!)

Besides being great for trend analysis, the cool thing about this number is that we have historical data to compare it against. Where were the parties in previous election cycles, and did the numbers happen to be predictive of results in those cycles?

This post answers that question. But before we get there, a note on the trend itself. A party can make gains on the MIP-trust question for two reasons: Voters can drift toward issues where they already trust that party, or the party can gain trust to handle the issues themselves. In our data, both are happening for the Democrats today. On prices, the most-named problem in every wave of our poll, the Democratic margin has grown from D+1 last May to D+10 now, while prices have also risen in salience. But Democrats have also gained on traditionally GOP-coded issues such as immigration, where voters trusted Trump over Harris by 14 points in YouGov’s final 2024 poll (49% to 35%) but Republicans now lead by just one.

The graph of that data, and the historical data showing this question is predictive/explanatory of election results, beyond the paywall.

As far as I know, Strength In Numbers is the only public pollster that tracks this question (the combination party trust and MIP — ”most important problem” questions) on a regular basis. This is a good example of what we do differently from other pollsters/political journalism outlets.

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And here’s that plot of issue trust and MIP percentage for each individual issue:

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The New York Times released a new poll of potential Democratic primary voters last month, and one question in particular is still making the rounds among people I read and talk to. When they were asked which ideological direction they'd personally like to see the Democratic Party move, 47% of Democrats said toward the “center,” 28% said to the left, and 19% said stay put. The result was spread through the centrist data analyst universe as more evidence the party needs to move right to win future elections.

I’d recommend reading Dan Pfeiffer’s post about this poll at his newsletter The Message Box, in which he comments that the left-right frame is the wrong way to think about what voters want. That’s something we talk about often here: remember the Strategist’s Fallacy, in which pundits and other elites map high-knowledge, high-political-engagement concepts such as detailed ideological issue positioning onto the mass public, which is largely low-political-knowledge and low-engagement.

Yet there are several other criticisms to make of this data that Pfeiffer and others miss. One of the things we try to do here at Strength In Numbers is be smarter about reading and interpreting polls. Here, the big issue is that the poll does not seem to be measuring what people think it measures — namely, desire among Democrats to shift candidate issue positions to the right over the left.

This isn't inherently an argument against moderation, or for it. It's an attempt to urge readers of polls to figure out what they are actually evidence of, instead of seeking in every data point a way to reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. When you actually dig into the NYT poll, the topline takeaway changes dramatically.

This week's Chart of the Week is: why questions about party ideological identity are close to useless. How can Democratic voters want the party to be more moderate, but also rate socialists so highly?

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Democratic voters want the party to move left, right, and center all at the same time

Here’s really this whole piece in one chart. A plurality of the same Democratic voters all say the party should move left, right, and stay put — simultaneously.

Going line by line: 47% of Democratic supporters say they want the party to move to the center, vs 28% left and 19% no direction. But if you ask the same exact respondents not which way the party should move, but what they think of its current position, just 20% say the Democratic Party is actually too far to the left, while 17% (within the margin of error) say it's too far to the right and a 55% majority says it's not too far in either direction.

And then there's the third panel. Asked their opinion of socialism, these potential Democratic supporters split 49% favorable to 22% unfavorable (the remainder said they didn’t know, including a sizable share that hadn’t heard of socialism at all).

So what we’ve got here is a Democratic electorate that is evidently pro-moderate, pro-socialist, and favors the party’s ideological status quo.

Now consider polls on policy. In our May Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, we asked all Americans — not just Democrats — which federal policies would most ease their economic anxieties, and the most popular picks were middle-class tax cuts, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging. Populist economics polls well across the board. Given the rosy results among all Americans, I expect the Democrats in the sample to be even more pro-D.

Either the electorate is hopelessly confused, or the "move left or center" question isn't measuring what pundits think it measures — or both.

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What "move to the center" actually means

Now let me just say that the question people are trying to answer here — how Democrats can optimize their chances of winning in 2026-2028 — is a good question. The stakes of the next few elections are enormous, so the party should optimize its odds of winning them. If “moderating” ideological labels (whatever that means) accomplishes that, it’s worth it to try.

But there are a couple more problems with the way people are using this poll.

First, even apart from the error mentioned above, this poll result isn't an answer to that question. It really isn't even a proxy for one. Voters aren't strategists, and asking them whether the party should move to the center doesn't measure the electoral payoff of moving to the center — it measures whether they've absorbed, and agree with, the conventional wisdom that says moving to the center is how parties win. Those are different things.

When every pundit spends 16 months saying Democrats should tack to the middle to win in 2028, a poll finding that voters agree is of little value. It mostly just tells you the message got through, not anything about the strength of the case. The strategy question is an empirical one about voter persuasion and turnout, and you answer it with experiments and election results — not by taking a vote on the idea.

Then, there’s the problem of what is meant by “left” and “center.” When a poll asks whether a party should move in a certain direction, that means something different for every respondent.

And let’s not overlook the fact that the Times did not poll “left” vs “right” but “left” vs “center.” They might as well have polled “extremist” and “normie.” Because of the normative characterization of polarization in America today, when people hear “left” vs “center,” many likely see the contrast in loaded terms — e.g., "should the party be fair and pragmatic, or ideological and extreme?"

And it’s not clear Americans have a good understanding of ideology anyway — or, at the very least, that that understanding translates in any way to policy and other outcomes. Gallup found in September 2024 that voters were about as likely to call Kamala Harris "too liberal" (51%) as to call Donald Trump "too conservative" (48%) — a statistical tie. That is implausible for two reasons. First, the candidates were nowhere near equidistant from the center on most policy domains, with Donald Trump farther to the right than Harris was left on entitlement spending, immigration enforcement, and trade policy, to name a few.

Finally, nearly a third of the Democratic supporters couldn’t tell the Times what they thought about socialism — a concept considered pretty basic among most elites. This indicates a low level of engagement with these subjects among the general public. A related finding: I showed in April that only 8% of self-described "moderates" actually want moderation when you let them describe their politics in their own words.

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A choose-your-own-adventure poll for pundits

Many actors and organizations in the general orbit of the Democratic Party are jockeying right now to get legislators to adopt their (and their donors’) positions on pet issues and party strategy ahead of the 2028 election. One such organization is the Times itself, which by my count has published a dozen articles arguing the party should run to the center to win in 2026/8, often with thin evidence, and few exploring alternative paths or contrary evidence.

Given the issue with the poll question discussed in this piece, unfortunately, it will lend itself to generating less objective insight about party strategy and more confirmation bias for whatever the person reading the poll already believes. It is akin to a political Rorschach test. If you want the party to move right, you quote the 47%. If you want it to move left, you quote the 49% on socialism and the 17% who say the party is too far right. Everyone gets a crosstab — nobody gets an answer.

This is not meant as a criticism of the Times’ pollsters, who have mostly written about the general consensus among Dems that the party is positioned well ideologically (see panel 2 in the chart above). Rather, as with a lot of the articles here at Strength In Numbers, it’s a reminder that not all polling — and not all poll-based punditry — is what it seems at first glance.

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In a column from late May, Charlie Cook argues the Democratic Party will have a hard time winning a big “blue wave” election this November because it is counting on persuasion among Republicans that may never materialize:

Even while polls show mounting reservations about President Trump, if not downright opposition, that has minimal bearing on Republican voters in the red states and districts that Democrats need in order to flip the Senate or approach a wave election in the House. In this new era for our politics, voters having doubts about a president of their own party is one thing, but voting for the opposition party is something else entirely.

Empirically, Cook shows that the “party loyalty rate” (the percent of Democratic-aligned voters who vote for Democratic candidates, and Republican voters who vote for Republican candidates) is sky-high, meaning (in theory) there are few Republican converts around to supply the party a robust majority in either the House or Senate:

Just 4 percent of Democrats voted for Donald Trump in 2024, precisely the same share of Republicans who voted for Kamala Harris; in each case, 95 percent of each side toed the party line. Four years earlier, both Trump and Joe Biden pulled the exact same 95 percent of their fellow party members. In 2016, the cohesion levels were only slightly lower, with 94 percent of Democrats voting for Hillary Clinton and 92 percent of Republicans for Trump. … There are even fewer defections in midterm elections. In 2018, 97 percent of voters identifying as Democrats backed their side’s candidates; in 2022, it was 98 percent. For the GOP, it was 95 percent in 2018 and 97 percent in 2022.

And to be clear, “party loyalty” when measured like this looks high in polling today, too; it’s not just a product of looking at past election results. A New York Times/Siena poll conducted May 11–15 put Trump’s approval at a second-term low — 37% approving, 59% disapproving. And yet, when you look inside the Republican column, only 5% of self-identified Republicans said they’d vote for a Democratic candidate for Congress. Ninety-two percent said Republican.

So are Democratic hopes for winning a majority dashed? Are polls showing such a large lead for the party a phantom result of optimistic polling that will disappear when people actually cast ballots?

Cook gets a lot right: Party loyalty is high, and split-ticket results have nearly vanished from American politics. There are very few Republican senators from states that vote for Democratic presidential candidates and vice versa. And Democrats genuinely cannot assume that every Trump-disapproving Republican is theirs for the taking; if you look at the survey data, it looks like most, in fact, won’t convert.

But I do think there’s a couple problems with this 95% partisan loyalty statistic. Both issues have the effect of making actual vote-switching between parties sound rarer than it is. As I show in this article, what we really care about is not what percentage of current, self-identified partisans vote for their party’s candidate, but what percent of one candidate’s voters switch sides or fall off in the next election. This sounds like a pedantic distinction, but it has big consequences — I’ll show you what I mean with hard data.

This week’s Deep Dive is a look at why Cook’s way of analyzing party loyalty overstates partisan polarization/partisan sorting. Last week, I ran the math on how many Trump voters Democrats need to win over to win the Senate race in Texas, and the answer came in lower than I think most people expected. Similarly, this week’s post has big implications for imagining what’s possible in future elections.

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Why the party loyalty rate (”95% of Republicans vote for Republicans”) overstates electoral stability

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So that your inboxes are not empty, I have pre-written a small batch of articles which I will send out once a week through next month. I’ll also take some time, where I can get it, to write up the June and July polls with Verasight so our monthly trends remain unbroken. Each has a few great questions suggested by subscribers!

My many thanks to everyone who reads SIN, and especially those who support the site with a paying subscriptions. The media economy is in a weird place now where writers are asking subscribers to support them while they take breaks (negotiating even a standard week vacation when 70,000 people rely on you is, to put it mildly, kinda weird?), which I acknowledge is a departure from how employment worked in the past. I understand if you feel the need to pause or cancel your subscriptions, but I hope you’ll stick around for my return in ~8 weeks for the rest of the election cycle — and beyond. I have many cool projects planned for this year!

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to some time away to focus on our kid. I’ve opened up the comments of this post so people can share their parenting tips.

Elliott

The political blogger Matthew Yglesias had a piece out yesterday morning arguing that Texas state Rep. and Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate James Talarico needs to “moderate” his image/brand/positions/etc to defeat Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race, which he says Talarico has a moral obligation to win. Here is the money graf, which commits the Strategist’s Fallacy in prescribing a solution but is otherwise directionally right on the problem: Texas is a red state, so Talarico will have to win independents and some Republicans to carry its U.S. Senate seat.

The article caused a small dust-up on X, with Greg Sargent of The New Republic pointing to his reporting that the Talarico campaign is running on what I generally call “anti-system” politics rather than just relying on one-dimensional moderation to win converts — the smarter play, in my opinion, given the data. I’m not interested in relitigating my ongoing fight with Matt to clarify what “moderate” means and bring some actual data and political science to bear on the conversation, and instead want to focus on the question in the title of this post.

See, underpinning a lot of the Discourse about Talarico’s chances is the claim that Democrats have to win “a lot” of Trump voters to take Texas. Given how red the state is at a presidential level, it’s tempting to conclude that a Democratic candidate can’t win in a state like Texas without appealing to a good chunk of Republicans too. The natural inference is that “good chunk” means 10% to 15% of them — but is that right?

This strikes me like a fitting empirical question for publication that’s all about covering politics with data, not punditry and conventional wisdom. And thanks to a lot of the other data I have crunched here at Strength In Numbers — from Census data to precinct-level election returns to voter-file matched polling data — I have all the tools to actually answer it. So come with me as I actually run the numbers on this very important question: How many Trump voters does James Talarico actually need to win in order to win the Texas U.S. Senate race?

This article is free to read, but it was not free to write. Subscribers to Strength In Numbers get exclusive data-driven analysis of politics and elections, access to premium polling data, and support independent, interactive data journalism. Consider joining as a paying member today:

Upgrade to support Strength In Numbers

If a paid subscription is not in the cards for you, the best thing you can do is share this article with a friend. Word of mouth is the #1 way new people learn about this publication! Thank you.

The partisan baseline in Texas is actually around R+5

To answer the big question today, we first need to figure out three small sets of numbers:

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