Outside the Beltway

Party Favorability Gap

Democrats are considerably less happy with their party than are Republicans.

James Joyner · Sunday, October 19, 2025 · 2 comments

So, there’s a weird thing in the polling.

For the second time in four months, the largest protests in American history have turned out to express outrage at President Trump’s flouting of the norms and laws of our country. Roughly 52 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and 55 percent of Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction.

And yet, as unpopular as the Republican Party is

the Democratic Party is even more unpopular:

By quite a lot.

You have to get down to the crosstabs to see why.

Looking at the latest CBS/YouGov poll,

we see that, while 59% of the sample as a whole disapproved of the GOP, as did a whopping 95% of Democrats, 89% of Republicans are happy with their party’s performance.

By contrast,

66% of the overall sample had an unfavorable view of Democrats, as did 93% of Republicans—and 21% of Democrats.

To be sure, 79% of Democrats are happy with their party’s performance. But there’s still a ten-point deficit compared with the Republicans.

Presumably, much of this is simply the impotence of being out of power and seeing Trump policies rammed through without much in the way of resistance from Democratic leaders. I’m not going to capture screen grabs of the micro questions—you can find the results here, if you wish—but

• 15% of Democrats see their party as “extreme”
• 13% don’t see it as “reasonable”
• 44% see it as “weak”
• 73% say “strong” does not describe their party
• 74% say “effective” does not describe their party

Contrast that with Republicans:

• 29% say their party is “extreme”
• 17% don’t see it as “reasonable”
• 15% see it as “weak”
• 83% see it as “strong”
• 80% see it as “effective”

It’s not clear whether those Republicans describing the party as “extreme” and “unreasonable” are Romney-era holdovers or whether they say extremism as a positive. Otherwise, though, Republicans seem to be happy with their party because it’s getting things done.