 Polls The president’s worst approval ratings in his second term have come from this pollster, which had underrated his strength in 2024. But it’s found the same trend that every national survey has: Steady support for Trump’s overall border policies, and historically weak support for his management of the economy. Conducted mostly after “Liberation Day,” it has one in nine Republicans disapproving of his trade policies, along with two-fifths of independents. Most pollsters have stopped asking about inflation — for Joe Biden, there was often a small gap between anger at that and the separate “economy” question — but trade is his weakest issue now, linked closely to views of the economy. On Election Day, voters told exit pollsters that they trusted Trump more than Kamala Harris to handle it by 8 points. Democrats haven’t regained their credibility, but Trump has lost some of his.  Wisconsin Democrats bet that Musk’s intervention in the state supreme court race would backfire, citing their own polling, which found him to be incredibly unpopular with their most likely voters. It paid off last week, and the first public post-game polling suggests that Musk hurt Republicans by airlifting money — in ad buys and gigantic novelty checks — into the state. Just one in four Wisconsin voters approved of Musk’s cash giveaway, and less than a third approved of the ad spending from his PAC, the most any single organization has ever spent on a court race. A small share of voters who supported Donald Trump in November ended up voting for Susan Crawford, the Democratic judicial nominee. That suggests that a Republican worry was right: Their campaign to excite MAGA voters was hurt by Musk making the final weeks of the election about DOGE and himself.  This poll’s a bit of an artifact now — the last one in the field pre-“Liberation.” In that vacuum, when the only tariffs in the news were the stop-start threats to Canada and Mexico, the policy made voters worry. Fifty-four percent worry that tariffs are “passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices and inflation” and 54% oppose them, period. That’s not a terrible starting point for Trump’s team, and there is room to recover if the worst expert predictions on tariff impact don’t come true — especially if they’re mitigated by Trump not enacting most of them. This is about as unpopular an experiment, at the start, as the border wall was eight years ago. And the border wall now has majority support. Ads Fix the City. AdImpact Politics/X- Fix the City, “The Mayor for This Moment.” Funded with millions of dollars from Andrew Cuomo’s allies, this super PAC’s first mayoral campaign spot portrays a city in crisis and a man who can fix it quickly. A promise of “more cops on subways” blends with (three-year-old) footage of people fleeing a subway car after a shooting; a plan for more housing is backed up by his record of building, as governor. The man-on-street voices are a cross-cut of Cuomo’s supporters: Two black women in Brooklyn (where the Eric Adams vote is now up for grabs) and a white man in Queens, agreeing that the “great governor” can be a great mayor.
- Barbara Lee for Oakland Mayor, “Homelessness.” Lee, who left the House after losing a 2024 U.S. Senate bid, quickly became the front-runner in Oakland’s special election. It was one of two Alameda County races forced by voters after November recalls — one, of the county’s embattled reform prosecutor, the other, of a disgraced mayor who was indicted after the election. “I’ll bring integrity back to the city,” Lee says here, nodding at the scandals and surging crime, and saying she’ll fix its problems. The race has been closer than it looked at the start, thanks to a more moderate candidate linking Lee and progressive politics to Oakland’s post-2020 decline.
Scooped!I thought we had the Wisconsin supreme court race cornered, and was very happy with the coverage we ran through April 1. But I didn’t get one of the best details of the race: Kamala Harris’s secret Zoom call for Democratic volunteers, clips of which she posted after Susan Crawford had won. In their update on what Harris has been up to, four New York Times reporters write that “Ms. Harris’s offer to visit Wisconsin was rejected as a potential distraction during early voting,” because Democrats “feared that reports of her involvement would divert attention from Elon Musk.” That was very likely true. Musk gave Democrats a gift (see above) by inserting his face and money into the state for weeks. The upshot for Harris, though, is that whatever Democrats say in public about her, they are not eager to bring the second-highest vote-getter in their history back on the field. Next - 60 days until primaries in New Jersey
- 67 days until primaries in Virginia
- 74 days until primaries in New York City
- 207 days until off-year elections
- 570 days until the 2026 midterm elections
David RecommendsLeft Adrift, a short political history book by Timothy Shenk, has a terrific premise that must have been murder to pitch: The history of liberal collapse through the lives of Doug Schoen and Stan Greenberg. The story Democrats like to tell themselves focuses on swaggering politicians and quotable operators, not pollsters who read Antonio Gramsci. But Schoen and Greenberg came out of the 1960s with very different ideas of how to save liberalism — triangulation and culture war triage, versus “class war” that would always put FDR’s party on the side of workers. It’s a quick read that’s incredibly illuminating about how the same trends, in every developed country, gave us our current competition between liberal parties that do best in college towns and populist right-wing parties that have not yet found their limits. |
