D.C. DEMOCRATS POLL-TEST EVERY MESSAGE WHILE TRUMP JUST DOES EXTREMELY UNPOPULAR THINGS

We know how Democrats in Washington are responding to the Donald Trump coup. They're gathering in private sessions to workshop responses that won't offend Trump voters. No matter what's going on, they change the subject to the economy, the one issue they believe works for them. And they agree with supposedly liberal pundits who tell them they lost the 2024 election on "wokeness," which is assumed to be wildly unpopular.

Where is all this caution getting them? Is their abandonment of the word "Latinx" -- which hardly any Democrat actually used -- making them more popular? No, not at all. From a new Quinnipiac poll:

Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion....

In today's poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.

While Democrats are cautiously avoiding any statement that might give offense, and gaining no popularity as a result, President Trump is openly embracing Vladimir Putin. How does the public feel about that? From the same Quinnipiac poll:

An overwhelming majority of voters (81 percent) think the United States should not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin, while 9 percent think the United States should trust him.

And in a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll, there's this:

The president’s least popular action is his decision to pardon all those convicted of crimes in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. More than 8 in 10 oppose the pardons for those who were convicted of violent crimes, and 55 percent oppose the pardons for those convicted of nonviolent crimes.

In fact, a great deal of what Trump has done in his first month in office is unpopular, according to the Post poll:

About 6 in 10 oppose shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development....

... almost 6 in 10 Americans say they oppose laying off large numbers of federal government workers or making it easier to fire longtime government employees. Also, more than 2 in 3 oppose blocking federal health agencies from communicating with the public without approval from a Trump appointee....

More than 6 in 10 Americans oppose tariffs on Canadian goods, and nearly 6 in 10 oppose them on Mexican products....

Americans also see negative consequences from these actions. About 7 in 10 say tariffs on products from Mexico, Canada and China will increase prices for those goods. Pluralities also say the tariffs would hurt U.S. workers and U.S. manufacturers.

But Trump's overall job approval (45%) in this poll is better than his approval on these issues. Disapproval is 53%, which makes this one of Trump's worst recent polls. Trump is at 44%-51% in a recent survey Ipsos conducted for Reuters, at 45%-51% in a Gallup poll, and at 45%-49% in that Quinnipiac poll -- but other polls have him in positive territory: 51%-45% according to SurveyUSA, 48%-42% according to Emerson, 50%-47% according to YouGov. In the FiveThirtyEight and RealClear polling averages, Trump is in slightly positive territory.

Being on the wrong side of an issue terrifies Democrats, but Republicans know they can get away with it if they never exude doubt, if they attack Democrats as the real out-of-step party, and if they appear to be on the popular side on other issues. In these polls, voters say they like Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants who've committed crimes. Many want to believe that DOGE is a genuine effort to cut fat from the budget. And it's quite likely that some voters have positive feelings toward Trump because he's clearly doing something, and letting us know that he is. Joe Biden acccomplished a lot in four years, but most voters never heard about most of it from him or his surrogates. He was the least eloquent president in the history of mass communication, and he and his party seemed to believe that Americans would just learn about his accomplishments through osmosis. He never had a good elevator pitch for his presidency, as Barack Obama did when some voters were lukewarm about his first term. "General Motors is alive and bin Laden is dead" -- that was good. Biden had nothing comparable. "Democracy is on the ballot" was abstract, not concrete.

Republicans have always known that they can get away with unpopular positions -- on guns, on abortion, on taxing rich people -- if they denigrate Democrats and have a few popular positions.

This is a long way of saying that Democrats should be throwing a lot of ideas at the wall -- some won't stick, but some will. They need to talk about their policies, but right now they need to be the unswerving opposition, which is what Republicans are every time there's a Democratic president.

And they need to stop being afraid. Voters cut Republicans some slack because Republicans successfully denigrate Democrats and because Republicans always appear ready to fight for what they believe in. Democrats should learn from this.