A lot of conservatives are leaping on the surprising finding in the Washington Post/ABC News poll that the Democratic Party is now viewed as out of touch by a larger share of Americans than either the Republican Party or President Trump. But if you look closely at the numbers, it isn’t as much of a vindication as Republicans might believe.
Here’s what the overall results say:
The same poll found that in March 2014 — eight months before their party went splat in the midterms — only 48 percent of Americans believed the Democratic Party was “out of touch.” So that’s a pretty big increase in “out of touch” since a period when Democrats were already doomed.
But beneath these topline numbers there is a saving grace for Democrats. It is the mirror image of something we saw consistently during the Tea Party era.
Many conservatives being polled during that time were (and probably still are) giving the Republican Party scathing low marks, even if those respondents intended to vote Republican in the end. There was no corresponding ill will among liberals toward the Democrats, which meant that on aggregate, the Democratic Party was far more favorably viewed than the Republican Party. Without the context of who was giving low marks to whom, the party favorability polls seemed to hint at a coming Republican collapse ahead of the 2014 election, which of course is not what happened at all.
Today, an equal and opposite reaction can be seen among liberals’ feelings about the Democratic Party:
[T]he biggest change has occurred chiefly among the party’s own typical loyalists, with “out of touch” ratings up 33 points among liberals, 30 points among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 26 points among moderates and nonwhites alike.
The Democratic party has suffered with moderates and non-white voters too, so this might not just be the result of an angry Democratic base. But don’t forget that when you see Democrats with high disapproval, it isn’t necessarily a sign that they won’t do well in 2018 as part of a backlash against the president in his first midterm.
As with Republicans during the middle and late Obama era, this may just be a sign that the party faithful are restless and expect more than they’re getting. It doesn’t mean they won’t vote as one would expect, and it might even mean that they vote in larger numbers.
