This Issue Could Be Democrats' Secret Weapon, if They Can Figure Out How to Use It

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As Democrats gear up for next year's midterm elections, they have one big gun they're ready to wield: Opposition to Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill is a massive giveaway to the wealthy, paid for by big cuts to services used by the American working and middle classes, that seems set to plunge the country into economic peril. The OBBBA is indefensible, and it's a gift to Democrats—assuming they're able to point their weapon in the right direction.

Over the past several years, that is a task at which they have spectacularly failed. The reality is this: Democratic policies are much more popular than Republican ones, but Democrats lose anyway. Democratic favorability has tumbled to new lows , with just 34 percent of Americans saying they have a positive opinion of the party. While 91 percent of Republicans say they feel favorably about their own party, only 73 percent of Democrats say the same thing about theirs. In other words, even a whole lot of Democrats don't really like Democrats right now. And party registration shows it: Since the 2024 election less than a year ago, Democrats have hemorrhaged more than 150,000 registered party members, while Republicans have gained more than 200,000—and those are numbers from just 30 states, according to a New York Times analysis . Even more damning: Since 2020, Democrats have lost 2.1 million voters, while Republicans gained 2.4 million. And the future doesn't look much brighter. While 63 percent of voters who newly registered for a party chose the Democrats in 2018, in 2024, that was less than 48 percent. And most of those new registrants are young people.

Democrats have all kinds of problems: messaging problems, approval problems, perception problems, vibes problems. Democrats, a whole lot of Americans say , don't understand their struggles and priorities, which are pretty basic: their money, their health, their home, their sense of safety, their optimism about the future.

There is no single solution for these problems, but one aspect of the party's unpopularity feels increasingly obvious to me: Most people actually do seem to feel a sense of autonomy and ownership over their own lives. They believe they are in the driver's seat, and they want to be in control of their futures. They may see themselves as people facing unfair hurdles or disadvantages, but what they want is the road cleared so that they might succeed. Republicans promised that. Democrats, on the other hand, talk to people as though they're victims, from now into perpetuity. And while it's good that Democrats stand up for the weak and the vulnerable, most voters don't seem to view themselves as weak or vulnerable. While it's good that Democrats want to fortify the social safety net, many voters assume (often wrongly) that they will never fall into it.

As Dems press forward with their attacks on the OBBBA, they should keep this in mind: Voters don't need to exclusively hear that the bill steals from the poor and gives to the rich (even though it does). They need to hear that the bill has stolen what they've earned , and that it has mortgaged their futures.

Despite their perception issues, Democrats have a huge advantage: Many of the actual policies they support are much more popular than the Republican positions. A 2024 YouGov poll asked voters about dozens of specific policy proposals; the policies that received more than 50 percent support were overwhelmingly Kamala Harris', and as support dropped well below 50 percent, they became almost exclusively Donald Trump's. And while voters generally correctly guessed whose policies were whose, there were some patterns to the exceptions. Where one candidate had taken public ownership of an issue—Trump on immigration, for instance—voters assumed that any immigration restriction was a Trump policy and not a Harris one. And so Harris didn't get credit for her proposal to fight fentanyl and other drug imports using detection technology—something 90 percent of voters supported, but that 59 percent believed was a Trump idea. The same pattern held for Harris' proposal to shut down the border if illegal crossings exceeded 5,000 people in a week, and her proposal to increase the burden on asylum-seekers to prove they have a case.

One problem, then, is that voters don't always know what Democrats and Republicans actually stand for, suggesting that Democrats could indeed work on basic information penetration. But that problem is a pretty small one; for the most part, voters were able to correctly identify Trump's policies as Trump's, and Harris' as Harris'. And voters generally agreed with Democratic proposals, and more often opposed Republican ones. But Democrats lost the last election anyway. That should tell us that there's something at play here beyond policy.

One piece of the puzzle is that not all issues are equally important in voters' minds. Voters may overwhelmingly agree with, say, imposing harsher consequences on companies that damage the environment, but relatively few are going to decide their vote on that issue alone. Voters see Democrats as prioritizing issues like LGBTQ+ rights or abortion over concerns like inflation, immigration, and health care. And while voters believe basic rights issues are important—abortion, for example, enjoys strong support —they are not central to the everyday lives of most Americans, insofar as they either directly affect a minority group (LGBTQ+ rights), or they could potentially affect a majority (women) but are time-constrained and typically one-off events that most people do not anticipate needing (abortion). On the other hand, the issues voters say Republicans prioritize—the economy, immigration—are those that affect voters every single day, with the economy shaping all of our lives and immigration often a visible reminder of change and distribution of resources. Voters may not like what Republicans do on those issues. But in some perverse logic—voters, I regret to inform you, are not a universally rational bunch—they see a party that recognizes their pain, does something, and changes the status quo as preferable to one that does nothing, even if the changes wind up being bad ones.

Democrats also do a better job of standing up for the vulnerable, which is more appealing when voters are feeling solid about their own lives and prospects. But when they're feeling insecure, a Democratic Party that emphasizes special attention on very small groups feels like a distraction at best, especially when most of this attention is purely rhetorical and doesn't actually translate into tangible benefits for the groups in question. And even many members of the “vulnerable” groups don't seem to like this rhetoric either , I suspect because most people don't walk around self-identifying as vulnerable and in need of special protection. Regardless of race, gender, or class, a great many Americans want opportunities and a rightful claim to what should be theirs. That's one reason means testing is such popular politics, even if in practice—like with the Medicaid cuts in the OBBBA—it's terribly devastating policy: Most people believe they are among the deserving majority, and that someone else is the lazy grifter who will lose their health care.

The task for Democrats now is to understand the different audiences they're speaking to—talking to voters in rural Iowa will require very different messaging than talking to voters in the Bronx—and when they're talking to local voters, they should focus on what will feel the most universal and resonant in those particular areas. They should use the names for Medicaid-funded state health care programs rather than just “Medicaid,” given that many people don't seem to realize they're on Medicaid at all , thinking instead that state programs called Apple Health or TennCare are different. When Democrats are doing national messaging, they should be as expansive as possible, so that just about any American could hear themselves in Democratic rhetoric about the OBBBA. This bill takes health care away from hard-working Americans. It takes food away from hungry children. It increases your student loans. And it will plunge the nation into debt and put our children's futures in jeopardy, just so the very richest households—households like Donald Trump's—can get exorbitant tax cuts.

None of this is to say that Democrats should abandon their commitment to vulnerable groups and minorities. It is to say that the messaging matters, and Democrats need to learn to talk about what Americans deserve without constantly defaulting to special carve-outs. And Democrats need to frame their policies as clearing the way for opportunity, safety, and personal freedom—not just keeping the worst-off afloat, but getting impediments out of the way for more people to thrive.

Republicans seem to assume a few crucial things: that poor people may not identify as poor, and certainly don't believe they have to be poor forever; that people find purpose in work and believe hard work to be a moral good; that many people believe in their own moral goodness but are suspicious of others' actions and motives; that people want more money and opportunity; that people overestimate their potential for success and underestimate their potential to fall on hard times; and that individuals will take credit for their own achievements but blame others for their challenges or failures (a new job is the result of one's own hard work, not a president whose policies expanded the labor market; a lost job, though, might be blamed on the guy in the White House for his economic policies or immigration policies or trade policies). Republicans are really good at identifying the “others” who might be blamed: immigrants, liberals, Democrats, those who imposed a global trade economy. They have realized that while people may be glad the safety net is there when they need it, few plan to fall in the first place. Instead, they hope to hit the big time.

Democrats, on the other hand, tend to emphasize aid for the need over opportunity. They tend to blame “billionaires” or “the rich” even though Americans are largely indifferent toward the ultrawealthy and often aspire to join their ranks. While Democrats fight the rich, Republicans tell people that they can help them get rich, too.

This is tricky territory because Democrats should, in fact, strengthen the social safety net. They should battle yawning income inequality and they should fight policies that favor the rich over the rest. There are instances in which making billionaires the chief villains might be both accurate and strategically smart. But when Americans look around at their friends, communities, and neighbors and identify who seems to be getting one over on them, they're largely not seeing a billionaire next door. What Americans generally want is a pretty tired cliché of a promise: that if they work hard, their lives will get better. Democrats can take this moment to emphasize all of the ways in which this administration is stealing from American workers, and all the ways in which Trump is giving them with the raw end of a deal.