President Donald Trump’s poor economic performance is costing him with Sun Belt voters, giving Democrats an opening to win them over ahead of the fall midterm elections—but it will be an uphill battle because these voters largely favor the Republicans right now. That’s the message from a new poll released Wednesday from Way to Win, a left-leaning strategy group.
Way to Win commissioned a March poll of 1,282 likely voters in Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas that also drilled down into 14 congressional battleground districts in four of those states. The good news for Democrats is that there’s a yawning gap in voters’ enthusiasm in those districts: 72 percent of Democratic voters said they were extremely motivated to vote in November, compared to 34 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of independents.
The bad news is that among those six states, Democrats are ahead only in only one of them—Georgia—on the generic ballot, and down five points overall across all of them. In the battleground districts specifically, voters favor Republicans over Democrats by seven points. This is a stark difference from national generic ballots, where Democrats lead Republicans by five points, on average.
This doesn’t mean voters are happy with Trump and the GOP. In Way to Win’s poll, the president is underwater on the economy by 17 points. That’s significantly lower than his overall approval rating of 49 percent in this poll, which itself is higher in these purple and red states than it is nationally. Respondents were more likely to blame rising costs on GOP politicians and big corporations than Trump’s preferred scapegoats—immigrants, Democrats, and the Federal Reserve.
“Trump’s failures on the economy are the opening to actually build and grow more coalitions in these places,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win.
The poll tested a variety of right-wing and left-wing messages and found that more voters believed “the problems come from having an economy where large corporations and wealthy insiders have written the rules to benefit themselves, making life less affordable for everyone else,” rather than “from out-of-control government spending, too many immigrants entering the country, and leaders focusing on cultural issues instead of traditional values.”
Left-populist messages proved to be the most popular when it comes to the economy, housing, immigration, crime, and artificial intelligence, and even conventional Democratic messaging beat out Republican messaging on those issues. Voters were more supportive of taxing corporations and the ultrarich, cutting middle-class taxes, and creating more jobs than of cutting taxes and regulations on businesses, shrinking the welfare state, and stopping immigrants “from taking American jobs.”
“That’s where the weak spot is,” Fernandez Ancona said. “The populist framing outperforms, because it’s giving people a clear reason. It’s giving them a clear villain.”
The one issue where Republican messaging prevailed was on government corruption. The idea that the country needs to “stop government fraud and overspending,” including giving money to people who don’t need it, outperformed messages about campaign finance reform and a proposed stock-trading ban for members of Congress.
“It was an interesting finding that is kind of a warning for all of us. We need to figure that out,” Fernandez Ancona said, “because there is so much to attack … with the Trump administration and what they’re doing, and they are going to keep leaning into that fraud-and-abuse message.”
