The Democrats' Opportunity -- If They Can Seize It

Mona Charen
Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:14:14 -0800
Opinion

President Donald Trump's approval rating is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden's was at this point in his term. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president's approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50%, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 elections.

So the Democratic Party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November. That's good, but not good enough.

The stakes are so high that a win isn't sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.
Updated: Fri Feb 13, 2026

President Donald Trump's approval rating is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden's was at this point in his term. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president's approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50%, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 elections.

So the Democratic Party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November. That's good, but not good enough.

The stakes are so high that a win isn't sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.

The easiest issue, perhaps surprisingly, is immigration. Since 2024, Democrats have been snakebit on the subject, afraid that their instinctive pro-immigrant positions were unpopular enough to lead voters to select a snarling villain vowing mass deportations. They can exhale. What the polls over the past year suggest is that most Americans are not white-supremacist goons like Stephen Miller, ready to trash the Constitution in the name of purifying die Volk.

Instead, voters actually believed that Trump would only deport "the worst of the worst." As they watched the inhuman treatment of gardeners, veterans, children and American-citizen protesters, they soured fast. Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, fully 60% of respondents told NBC they disapproved of Trump's immigration policies, 49% strongly so.

If Democrats present themselves as opposing the brutal tactics of ICE and CPB and favoring firm border controls, they should find themselves in the sweet spot. Messages like Billie Eilish's "No one is illegal on stolen land" are unhelpful. By all means, get angry about the savagery; stress that law and order means that first and foremost the state cannot be the lawbreaker. But also add that borders are not notional and chaos cannot be permitted to prevail along the Rio Grande.

The other big issue on voters' minds is inflation, or "affordability." The reality is that politicians cannot actually bring prices down, as Trump promised to do in 2024, except by crashing the economy. Still, some voters presumably believed him, and they are disillusioned now. Some Democrats may be tempted to run on taxing the rich. This is a comfortable old shoe for Democrats, but as a political strategy it hasn't been terribly successful. Middle-class voters often fear that they will be labeled as rich.

On the other hand, voters have already concluded that tariffs are making life more expensive. The issue is a layup — if Democrats can get out of their own way. Nearly 60% of Americans blame Trump for rising prices, and 65% disapprove of his tariffs. Fifty-nine percent of independent voters say the tariffs have hurt the economy and their personal finances. Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs. Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.

The progressive wing of the party has long favored tariffs as a way to protect American workers from competition from low-wage nations. This muddies the waters.

Cutting tariffs is one of the only levers governments can pull that will actually reduce prices, and since price sensitivity is very much on voters' minds, does it make sense to temper that message at all? All House Democrats voted in favor of a resolution that would end the national emergency excuse for tariffs, and three Republicans joined them. This is the moment. Tariffs are bad — full stop.

Finally, a vulnerability that Democrats must overcome is seeming soft on crime. Here again the Trump administration has handed them a golden opportunity. MAGA is so fixated on ethnic cleansing that it is pulling Justice Department officials off crime-fighting to pursue immigration cases. A memo from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed officers who had been working on transnational organized crime, money laundering and major drug trafficking networks to focus instead on assisting ICE. Ditto for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. In fact, roughly 25% of FBI agents (and 40% in larger field offices) have been diverted from fighting financial crimes, public corruption, cybercrime and complex corporate investigations and pulled into immigration enforcement. Most maddening are the thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents who've been pulled from investigations of child sex abuse to assist with deportations — as if the administration needed more ways of signaling that it's OK with child sex trafficking.

Democrats should stress that the funds appropriated for ICE would be far better deployed to local police departments. Bill Clinton's promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the '90s and cut against the Democrats' soft-on-crime image. The slogans write themselves: More Cops, Less ICE.

The voters are the last redoubt in the fight to reclaim American democracy and decency, and the Democratic Party, the world's oldest political party since the advent of universal suffrage, is the only entity that can carry the burden. If they can win a resounding victory in the House and Senate in nine months, there is hope for us.