Despite a flurry of polling so far this year indicating the Democratic Party’s favorability sinking to record lows, veteran Democrat strategist and pundit James Carville remains optimistic, as he points to recent ballot box victories by his party.
“You can’t discount people winning elections,” Carville told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
Carville spoke the day after a new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was the latest to spell trouble for the Democratic Party, six months after they suffered setbacks up and down the ballot at the hands of now-President Donald Trump and Republicans.
The Democratic Party has been in the political wilderness since last November’s elections, when Republicans won back control of the White House and the Senate and defended their fragile House majority. And Republicans made gains among Black and Hispanic voters as well as younger voters, all traditional members of the Democratic Party’s base.
According to the survey, only about one-third of Democrats are very or somewhat optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party. That’s a steep decline from last July, when around six in 10 Democrats said they were optimistic. The survey, conducted May 1-5, points to an increase in optimism among Republicans, with 55% more optimistic about the future of the GOP, up from 47% last summer.
Since Trump’s return to power earlier this year, an increasingly energized base of Democrats is urging party leaders to take a stronger stand in pushing back against the president’s sweeping and controversial agenda during the opening months of his second administration. And their anger is directed not only at Republicans, but also at Democrats they feel aren’t vocal enough in their opposition to Trump.
And that’s fueled the plunge in the Democratic Party’s favorable ratings, which have hit historic lows in several recent surveys.
The Democrats’ ratings stood underwater in the most recent Fox News national poll at 41% favorable and 56% unfavorable in a survey conducted April 18-21.
That’s an all-time low for the Democrats in Fox News polling. And for the first time in a decade, the party’s standing was lower than that of the GOP, which stood at 44% favorable and 54% unfavorable.
The figures were reversed last summer, when Fox News last asked the party favorability question in one of its surveys.
The Democratic Party’s favorable ratings were well in negative territory in a Pew Research national survey – 38% favorable, 60% unfavorable – conducted in early April and at 36% favorable, 60% unfavorable in a Wall Street Journal poll in the field a couple of weeks earlier.
And national polls conducted in February by Quinnipiac University and in March by CNN and by NBC News also indicated the favorable ratings for the Democratic Party sinking to all-time lows.
Confidence in the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership sunk to an all-time low, according to a Gallup poll conducted early last month.
The confidence rating for Democrats’ leadership in Congress stood at 25% in the survey, which was nine points below the previous low of 34% recorded in 2023.
And the semi-annual Harvard Youth Poll, which was released late last month, indicated that approval ratings for Democrats in Congress among Americans aged 18-29 nosedived.
“I don’t doubt any of that’s true,” Carville told Fox News. “But there’s one thing: We’re winning elections left and right as we’re talking about how the Democratic number or image is low.”
John Ewing, Jr., a Democrat, this week ousted a longtime Republican mayor in Omaha, Nebraska, a blue dot in a reliably red state. Ewing will become Omaha’s first Black mayor.
Last month, the Democrat-aligned candidate comfortably defeated the Republican-aligned candidate in a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election. The high-profile and expensive campaign grabbed plenty of national attention and outside money.
Democrats have also performed very well so far this year in special elections, including flipping red state Senate seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania.
In addition to looking back, Carville also pointed ahead to November’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, where Democrats hope to win back the governor’s office in Richmond.
“Let’s see what’s going to happen in Virginia,” said Carville, who first grabbed national attention for his work as a lead strategist on former President Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign.
And Carville predicted that “we’re going to win that.”
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