Pew poll: Democrats’ pessimism about their party’s future is at its highest level in the Trump era

By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

(CNN) — In the aftermath of the 2024 elections, Democrats are less optimistic about their party’s future than they’ve been at any point in the past eight years, according to new Pew Research Center polling released Friday.

The poll, which was conducted November 12-17, also finds that views of President-elect Donald Trump continue a pattern seen pre-election: Americans largely express confidence in his plans for the economy, while continuing to rate him negatively on many personal characteristics.

Roughly half (51%) of Democrats and independents who lean toward the party say they’re optimistic, while 49% say that they’re pessimistic about its future. Democratic pessimism is up compared with both 2016, when 38% said they were feeling that way in the wake of Trump’s first presidential victory, and in 2020, when 17% of Democratic-aligned adults described themselves as pessimistic after Joe Biden’s win in 2020. They also didn’t feel this pessimistic in the wake of the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

By contrast, 86% of Republican-aligned adults now call themselves optimistic about the GOP’s future, up from 65% who said the same two years ago. Roughly 8 in 10 said they were optimistic following Trump’s 2016 election and the 2018 midterms, with 74% calling themselves optimistic after Biden’s 2020 victory.

Democratic pessimism this year is particularly pronounced among younger members of the party, with 55% of Democratic-aligned adults younger than 50 taking a negative view of the party’s future, compared with 39% among their older counterparts.

Overall, half of US adults say that the Republican Party represents their interests at least somewhat well, modestly higher than the 43% who currently say the same of the Democratic Party. While the Democratic Party’s standing on this metric is largely unchanged from July 2023, the GOP number is up 11 percentage points over that time. That shift, Pew finds, is due almost wholly to Republican-aligned adults’ increasingly positive assessments of their party.

Just over half, 53%, say they approve of Trump’s “policies and plans for the future,” with the same share giving him positive ratings for his conduct since winning the election. A 59% majority say they’re at least somewhat confident in him to make good decisions about economic policy, with majorities also expressing confidence in him to effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues (54%), make wise decisions about immigration policy (53%) and make good decisions about foreign policy (53%). Fewer express confidence in Trump to make good decisions on abortion policy (45%) or to bring the country closer together (41%). And less than half of the public thinks Trump is well described as someone who cares about the needs of ordinary people (45%), or somehow who’s honest (42%), even-tempered (37%) or a good role model (34%).

Overall, half of Americans express positive feelings about Trump’s election victory, with 22% saying they’re excited and 28% saying that they’re relieved, while the rest say they’re disappointed (33%) or angry (15%). In a separate question, about one-third express surprise about his win.

Asked to rate their feelings about Trump on a scale from 0 to 100, 43% of Americans give him a “warm” rating of 51 or higher, an uptick from 36% following the 2016 election and 34% after his election loss in 2020. A 78% majority of Republican-aligned adults rate him warmly today, compared with 9% among Democratic-aligned adults.

Views of the president-elect’s ideology also have shifted from eight years ago: a 64% majority of the public now sees Trump’s views as conservative on most or all issues, up from 46% who said the same in December 2016.

The Pew Research Center poll surveyed 9,609 US adults from November 12-17, using a nationally representative online panel. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

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