Democrats Now Outnumber Republicans In The United States

 

These charts are from a Pew Research Center survey -- done between January 30th and June 18th of 2026 of a nationwide sample of 5,511 adults, with a 1.8 point margin of error.

Populism Is Back - And It's Growing Stronger In Both Political Parties

 Robert Reich comments on the growing populist fervor in both political parties:

The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick. 

Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America. 

Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism. 

Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C., and a bevy of newly-elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.

Pitted against these economic populist in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine after the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism. 

In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II. 

It runs vertically from bottom to top.

Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.

Sanders’s, AOC’s, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.

 

Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP. 

They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent-controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.

 

I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties. 

One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist. 

There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.

 

But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.

 

The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.

 

Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and is has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.

 

Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “we’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.

 

Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.

Voters Still Think Trump/GOP Are Focused On The Wrong Issues

The chart above is from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

 

Why Is The Economy So Bad For Most People? Because It is Being Run By Billionaires!

The following is an excellent history of economic politics in the United States by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful. 

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

 

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a rightwing radio station in every city and town, rightwing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since. 

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford 70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of ten the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — pissed off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+employees compared with Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis they created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too. 

Peter Theil, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”

New Strength In Numbers Poll Has Only Bad News For Trump/Republicans

 

The charts above are from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done on May 18th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,520 adults, with a 2.7 point margin of error.

Trump Is Losing Support Of Republicans On Economy And Foreign Policy

 

The charts above are from the AP / NORC Poll -- done between May 14th and 18th of 1,117 adults. The Margin of error for just Republicans is 5.9 points.

Trump Has Many Republicans Believing Things That Are NOT TRUE!

The following post is by Ryan Teague Beckwith at MS NOW: 

Solar power is the cheapest form of electricity to set up in most parts of the world. Tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, who pass along the costs to consumers. And noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.

These three statements are facts. You can verify them by looking at scientific research, listening to experts or just reading reliable news outlets.

Recent polls, however, show that substantial numbers of Republican voters simply don’t believe these statements. That’s bad for the country, because it’s harder for us to solve problems and decide how to move ahead when we can’t agree on the facts. It’s also bad for Republican politicians — and they have only themselves to blame.

Led by President Donald Trump, many members of the GOP in recent years have made their case by attacking the underlying facts, making baseless claims and undermining the credibility of independent experts who could contradict them. The result is a party that is increasingly out of touch with voters outside its ideological bubble and unable to come up with good arguments or practical solutions.

Just look at the numbers:

• In a January poll by Morning Consult, 51% of Republicans said tariffs are a “fee foreigners pay for selling products to the United States,” while 38% more accurately said they are “a tax on foreign products that Americans buy.”
• In a March poll by the Pew Research Center, 43% of Republicans said that solar power is more expensive to consumers than most other energy sources, while only 24% said that it’s cheaper.
• In an April poll by Ipsos, 82% of Republicans said that large numbers of noncitizens cast fraudulent ballots in U.S. elections, compared to just 38% of independents and 18% of Democrats.

The sheer number of Republicans who believe things that aren’t true distorts the political landscape. As problems arise, they effectively box Republican politicians out of making certain arguments or trying specific solutions. When Trump’s broad-based tariffs lead to increased prices, how can Republicans in Congress push back if their own supporters don’t see the link?

In Australia, cheap solar power is now so abundant that every household will soon get three hours of free energy every day. Promoting solar here would surely help Americans at a time of rising energy prices, but even if they wanted to, Republicans would have a hard time making the case for it so long as their own voters incorrectly believe solar power is more expensive.

Meantime, Trump’s persistent arguments about voter fraud have left Republican politicians chasing phantoms. But when state lawmakers look to curb mail-in voting or introduce onerous voter ID requirements, their own elections directors and strategists have to pull them aside and warn that these restrictions might backfire on their own party.

As just one example, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Congress pass a law that would require married women who have changed their last name to produce both birth and marriage certificates to register to vote, among other provisions. But a 2023 Pew survey found that 25% of liberal Democratic women kept their own name after getting married, compared with only 7% of conservative Republican women. So which party would that restriction hurt?

None of this is necessary. Trump could have stuck with his argument that any cost of the tariffs will be worth it in the long run. He could make a somewhat principled argument that government support for solar power distorts the marketplace and it should stand on its own. Or he could have stuck with the clever Republican line that it should be “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

But that would be hard. It would require knowing some facts, having a consistent political philosophy and engaging with ideological opponents who would have counter-arguments of their own.

Instead, Trump chose the easy way, making wild claims and trying to shut down debate, and Republicans largely fell in line behind him. The result is a party whose debating skills have grown rusty, preaching the same tired sermons to an ever smaller choir of supporters as the day of reckoning grows closer.