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Do Voters Hate Democrats More Than Republicans?

The GOP is staking its chances on the idea that Americans are more dissatisfied with the opposition party than with the one in power.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, whispers with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House.

Saddled with a historically unpopular president, a fraying House majority, an unpopular and directionless war in Iran, an inflationary economic record, and a fracturing governing agenda, Republican strategists have seized the only viable strategy on offer for the 2026 midterms: Dial up the hate. “It’s going to be a hate election,” a consultant close to the Trump White House told Axios. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

You can see why the leaders of the GOP’s campaign brain trust would embrace an all-demonization, all-the-time master narrative in seeking to retain the party’s imperiled majorities on Capitol Hill; it’s pretty much second nature to them. More than a century ago, Henry Adams coined the de facto slogan of the modern Republican Party when he observed that “politics is the organization of hatreds.” That apothegm became the mantra of Kevin Phillips, the architect of the infamous “Southern strategy” to weaponize white racial grievance for the 1968 Nixon campaign, and it’s secured big-ticket victories for GOP candidates ranging from Bush père and fils in 1988 and 2004 to the epochal win for the MAGA right in 2016.

Yet there’s little indication that another MAGA hate-fest will yield similar returns this cycle. For starters, opinion polling doesn’t bear out the claim that voters can be swayed to hate the Democrats more than they do Republicans. The GOP enjoys a trifecta in Washington, after all, so there’s no plausible way to blame Democrats for the current train of miseries afflicting the electorate. That’s a key reason President Donald Trump is highlighting his Ahab-like obsession with the outcome of the 2020 election and his stupendously counterempirical claims that it was a masterwork of elite Democratic rigging (except, you know, for all the many national, state, and local Republican candidates not named Donald Trump who claimed victories in that cycle).

You couldn’t find a better symbol of the Republicans’ electoral plight than Trump’s petulant refusal to sign a housing relief bill slated to be the sole affordability achievement for GOP........

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