Democrats thought they had their silver bullet for 2026. If the message of affordability wasn’t enough to seal the deal, they were sure they could turn public outrage over ICE enforcement into a weapon against Donald Trump and the GOP. They’ve spent months calling ICE “out of control,” blasting “militarized” immigration enforcement, and insisting Americans are horrified by Trump’s crackdown.
Then the latest NBC News poll dropped, and it blew up that storyline. In fact, it’s nothing but bad news for the Democrats.
According to the poll, Donald Trump’s net favorability rating sits at -12. That is not great. But it is still better than both Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, the two leading contenders for the 2028 Democratic nomination. Harris is stuck at -17. Newsom is even worse at -18. So even an endlessly demonized Trump, after years of media attacks and nonstop “threat to democracy” hysteria, is less unpopular than the Democrats’ future. And speaking of 2028 contenders, Marco Rubio’s net favorability tops them all at -7, and JD Vance is next at -11.
I’m just getting started. It gets even uglier for the Democrats.
The Republican Party as a whole is also more popular than the Democratic Party. The GOP’s net favorability comes in at -14. The Democrats clock in at -22. For all the left’s talk about Republicans being “extreme” and “out of step,” voters are looking at both parties and deciding Democrats are the bigger problem. That’s the landscape heading into the midterms.
But the real gut punch for the left is next.
Democrats have waged an all-out war on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Trump came back to office. “Abolish ICE” became a rallying cry on the far left. ICE agents were portrayed as villains in campaign ads, Hollywood storylines, and cable news monologues. The narrative was simple: if voters just saw what ICE was doing, they’d turn on the agency and, by extension, on Trump and Republicans.
Instead, the NBC poll shows ICE with a net favorability of -18. That’s still higher than the Democratic Party’s -22. Let that sink in for a moment: after all the hostile coverage, demonization, and organized campaigns to make ICE toxic, the agency is still more popular than the Democratic Party. That has to sting.
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And this is after the highly publicized incidents involving Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Good was shot and killed after she attempted to run over an ICE agent with her vehicle. Pretti was killed after he assaulted Border Patrol agents while carrying a loaded gun. The left jumped on both stories, rushing to cast Good and Pretti as innocent martyrs and the agents as executioners. Liberal outlets framed these cases as clear-cut murders and used them to argue that ICE and Border Patrol are fundamentally illegitimate.
The poll suggests that even after wall-to-wall liberal coverage insisting that the agents were the villains, voters still view ICE more favorably than the Democratic Party.
And if you’re wondering just how bad it gets, the NBC poll offers one more brutal detail. The only thing more unpopular than the Democratic Party is Iran, which has a net favorability of -53.
Democrats wanted to run in 2026 on outrage over ICE. Instead, they’re going into the midterms as the party Americans like less than the agency they were told to hate. That is the worst news they could possibly get, and they earned every bit of it.
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