Just a few months ago, Republicans were triumphant, while Democrats were demoralized. But something real has happened: Democrats’ fury is building. Perhaps they have had it with Elon Musk. Perhaps Senate Democrats’ capitulation on government funding ignited voters who felt abandoned by their party leaders. Perhaps it was all the institutions cutting deals under pressure from President Trump. Whatever it was, Democrats are proving a political axiom: Anger is a more powerful motivator in voting than happiness and satisfaction.
And Republicans had better watch out, as they learned Tuesday night in a Wisconsin statewide election for a State Supreme Court seat, in which the Democratic-backed candidate prevailed by 10 percentage points just five months after Mr. Trump beat Kamala Harris there by just one point.
As a pollster, I’ve been focused recently on gauging what voters think of Mr. Trump’s performance back in office. One way to do this is by asking if they approve or disapprove of the job he is doing across a range of issues — a metric that in the past few weeks showed gently declining but overall middling approval ratings.
But I think studying how voters feel is also important — maybe even more important than studying what they think. In my polling, when I ask voters how they feel about what the Trump administration is doing, Democrats are not simply dissatisfied. When I offered voters a range of seven emotions in a poll in mid-March, from “furious” to “thrilled,” the top response from Democrats was “furious,” at 38 percent. Only a quarter of Republicans described themselves as “thrilled,” by contrast (though, make no mistake, Republicans support Mr. Trump a great deal).
What should worry Republicans most is that when a party wins elections and its supporters are satisfied with what their side is doing, it becomes easy to rest on one’s laurels and miss the bubbling rage of the other side or not find ways to counter it. Democrats did this, to some extent, during the rise of the Tea Party movement, dismissing it as AstroTurf — activism masquerading as grass-roots energy — and paying dearly for it in the first Obama midterms, in 2010. Republicans may wish to dismiss some of what they see appearing at angry town hall meetings, but this isn’t just the usual anger of an opposition party: Mr. Trump is supercharging the anger in two important ways that add up to even greater potential peril for Republicans in the short run.
The first factor is the nature of Mr. Trump’s policy pushes, such as new tariffs and the mass firings of government employees, which can cause immediate problems for families, consumers and business leaders, with the only balm being his vague assurances of an ensuing upside. This is exactly the kind of dynamic that deepens the frustration and anger of a large group of very personally affected voters, who will seek to send a message.
The other factor is Mr. Trump’s reshaping of the Republican coalition to rely more heavily on what we in the business call low-propensity voters. Analysts at Split Ticket found, for instance, that the Trump era has brought a number of voters to the Republican cause who are not the most reliable at turning out when he is not on the ballot. Add all this together, and you have all the makings of a tougher road ahead for Republicans, potentially leading to rough midterm elections in 2026.
Though Republicans held two congressional seats in Florida this week in special elections, they did so by far narrower margins than the G.O.P. typically enjoys in those districts. Spooked about special elections, Mr. Trump pulled his nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador because he didn’t want to take a chance that Democrats would flip her seat in the House, despite her double-digit margins of victory in her district for the past decade.
So given Republican triumphalism in the 2024 elections, why the sudden shift? It all comes down to emotions and the relative intensity of negative versus positive emotions in politics today. Republicans have struggled in the Trump era during elections without him on the ballot, succumbing to a Democratic opposition that is highly animated to turn out against Republicans when he is in power.
The 2018 elections during Mr. Trump’s first term saw a blue wave, in which Democrats picked up 41 seats in the House and returned the speaker’s gavel to Nancy Pelosi. But even before that, Republicans managed to lose a Senate race in Alabama, of all places, ceding Jeff Sessions’s vacated seat to the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. Mr. Jones was elevated by high turnout in the bluest pockets across the state, defeating a divisive opponent as voters angry with Mr. Trump sought to send a message to Washington.
If Democrats winning statewide in Alabama seems strange, so is a Republican statewide victory in Massachusetts. In January 2010, after the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, a wave of anger toward the Obama administration led to the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, defeating the Democrat, Martha Coakley, by a nearly five-point margin. His election threw a wrench into the Democratic-controlled Congress’s process for advancing the Affordable Care Act and foreshadowed a huge red wave.
A look at polling from 2010 showed all the signs of the coming wave. Shortly after Mr. Brown’s victory, the Pew Research Center found Republican voters 12 points more likely than Democrats to say they were “certain” to vote. It also found that the independents who had the most intense dissatisfaction with government were the most likely to say they were “certain” to vote, and those independents favored the Republican Party by a wide margin. As Election Day approached, Pew found that Republicans — especially Tea Party-aligned Republicans — were much more likely than Democrats to report feeling angry about political news or to say that “this year’s elections are more important than most.”
In 2018 a similar pattern emerged: Democratic-leaning voters were especially angry about the prospect of Republicans being in power. When Pew asked voters how they would feel about different possible results of the midterms, those who supported Democratic candidates were more likely to say they’d be “angry” if their side lost or “excited” if their side won. (After the election, it found that only 11 percent of Republicans were angry that they’d lost the House; most were simply disappointed.)
It is notable that in 2022, when the red wave fizzled, some surveys showed there was not the same kind of anger gap Republicans benefited from in 2010. Data from Morning Consult at the time showed Republicans and Democrats about equally likely to say they felt angry about things heading into those midterms.
Not all political scientists necessarily agree that anger is a turnout booster. While some research showed that voters who are induced to be angry can be turned out at higher rates, other researchers found that “the most common reactions to political anger are withdrawal and inaction,” according to The Washington Post. It added, “Many fewer Americans’ anger pushes them to get politically engaged.” And to be sure, there has been anecdotal evidence suggesting that the resistance during Mr. Trump’s first term has been more muted this time — fewer large marches, fewer celebrities talking politics at awards shows, less backlash from corporate America.
But the data is clear: Democratic voters are enraged by what is happening in Washington. Republicans may say, “Well, good! That’s a feature, not a bug, of the changes Mr. Trump is pursuing.” But the new coalition he has fashioned for the Republican Party is ever more dependent on less reliable voters, meaning a fired-up opposition has a greater and greater advantage, especially in special elections and others with lower turnout.
Being out of power and being incensed at those who are in charge seem to be highly motivational. Right now, it is Democratic voters and those who are upset by what they see in Washington who are the most activated. Republicans may be pleased with where the country is heading, but they may find themselves facing wave after wave of anger slamming hard into their eddies of satisfaction at the ballot box.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer and Republican pollster, is the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
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