The Democratic Party’s approval rating is at its lowest point in at least 35 years, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released last week.

In that survey, 63 percent of voters expressed an unfavorable view of the Democrats, while just 33 percent voiced a positive one. By contrast, voters disapproved of Congressional Republicans by only 11 points. These dismal figures are broadly consistent with other recent polling: In RealClearPolitics’s average of recent surveys, voters disapprove of the Democratic Party by a 59.3 to 36.3 margin.

What’s more, Democrats don’t just have a lower favorability rating than Republicans, but also command less trust on the public’s top issues. In the Journal’s poll, voters disapproved of Trump’s management of the economy, tariffs, inflation, foreign policy, and immigrant deportations. And yet, they said that they trusted Republicans to handle all of those matters better than Democrats would. Of the 10 issues raised in the survey, voters favored Democrats on only two — health care and vaccine policy.

These grim data points have spurred some handwringing in blue America. But just how dire is the Democrats’ predicament? Is the party temporarily tainted with the stink of last year’s defeat — and poised to rally back into power, just as it did after losing in 2004 and 2016? Or is the better precedent for the party’s current position 1981, when the party began a 12-year struggle to escape the shadow of a failed presidency?

Only prophets can answer such questions with certainty. In my own view, though, two things are true:

• The Democrats’ putrid approval numbers paint a misleadingly bleak picture of its current standing.

• The party is in much worse shape than it was eight years ago, and will likely struggle to secure full control of the federal government any time soon.

Below, I’ll detail five reasons for believing that first point, and two for accepting the second one.

This story was first featured in The Rebuild.

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Why Democrats might not be in disarray

1. Disaffected, but loyal, Democrats are driving down their party’s approval rating

In the Journal’s poll, the GOP’s net-favorability rating is 19 points higher than the Democratic Party’s. And yet, in that same survey, voters say that they would prefer a Democratic Congress to a Republican one by a 3-point margin.

This seems odd. Voters disapprove of Democrats by a much larger margin than they disapprove of Republicans. Yet a plurality nonetheless say they would vote for the former party over the latter one.

As polling analysts G. Elliott Morris and Mary Radcliffe observe, there is only one explanation for this: Unhappy — but loyal — Democratic voters are driving down their party’s favorability rating.

This interpretation is consistent with polling from YouGov and The Economist, which finds that only 74 percent of Democratic voters approve of congressional Democrats, while 22.6 percent disapprove. By contrast, 88.9 percent of Republican voters approve of their party’s........

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