Morning Wire - Why the Left is Losing Ground | 6.15.25

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

From culture wars to economic shifts, Cygnal pollster Brent Buchanan joins us to analyze the data behind Trump's rising approval and the Democrats’ deepening identity crisis. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Shopify: Go to https://Shopify.com/morningwire to sign up for your $1 per month trial period and upgrade your selling today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Onesawr The Democratic Party finds itself in the midst of an identity crisis with support from young males and

independence dramatically eroding and some of its prominent members breaking rank. Politicos say the parties on the wrong side

of the culture wars and in desperate need of a unifying voice. Meanwhile, President Trump is enjoying more positive momentum. In this episode, we sit down with Polster Brent Buchanan for a deep dive on the American public's current view of the Democratic Party and Trump's second term. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, June 15th.

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Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at Shopify.com slash morningwire. Head over to Shopify.com slash morning wire. Again, that's Shopify.com slash morning wire. Joining us now to discuss the public perception of the Democratic Party as well as President Trump is founder and president of Signal polling group, Brent, Buchanan. First of all, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, great to be back. So look, we've been seeing a lot of reports of consternation from within the Democratic Party,

some people talking off the record, some people talking on the record about the sort of disarray of the party. Is this overblown? Are they seriously in trouble right now in terms of public perception? They're definitely in trouble. And we've been tracking this almost weekly since Trump became president. And they've really cratered in their image and core constituencies that they would normally, be doing pretty well with, they're falling apart. And as you look at Hispanic voters, you look of black voters, they're really underwater everywhere. Young women, they're underwater. A bunch of

groups that they should not be having a problem with. But their entire message has just been anti-Trump. So if Trump takes position A, they walk over to position B, and they claim that they have to be there because Trump's at position A. The problem is Trump is picking positions that are 60, 70, 80% popularity. And the Democrats are backing themselves into these tinier and tinier corners. And they don't have a messenger. They don't really have a message. And so they're just simply reactionary. And that's not resonating with voters. But in terms of the messenger, is anyone actually separating themselves? Is it actually AOC at this point? Well, we've asked a couple times, who do you think the head of the Democratic Party is? And Barack Obama's up there. Kamala Harris is up

there. I've seen polls that have Pete Buttigieg up there. Gavin Newsom's really not up there because outside of California, he doesn't, he's not incredibly well known outside of, you know, the most highly attuned individuals that pay attention to politics all the time. And nobody gets above like 25%. So it's so clear that they're fragmented, not just on their message, but on their messengers. And then you throw on top of that that you have a lot of people who were looking ahead to 2028 in the Democratic Party. So their goal is not going to be to figure out, you know, Westmore, Governor of Maryland, or, you know, Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan, Andy Beshear, Democrat governor of Kentucky. None of them are going to get in a room and come together and say,

what is our message for the Democrat Party? Because they're all interested in, what is Andy Brashear's message for America and for the Democratic Party? because I would like to be the nominee. And so it really complicates their ability to pull stuff together from a messaging perspective because you're going to have 20 people who want to be president next. Right. And the Democratic Party

with its numbers across the board, looking so grim. Is there a sense, too, that these messengers actually don't want to align themselves with the party? They actually want to take the sort of Democrat part out of the messaging? Well, you've got someone like Rahm Emanuel. You know, he was in Obama's White House

and, you know, recently an ambassador, I believe, to Japan. And he's coming back to Chicago, and he's trying to say, we can't keep going off these cultural war cliffs. And we've got to get back to issues that matter to working class voters. The problem is the base of the Democratic Party is no longer working class voters. Those folks have shifted towards and continued to shift towards Republicans, both non-white and white. They're stuck with these highly educated coastal elite,

mostly older women, folks that are well-to-do that live in these bubbles that look nothing like the rest of America. And that adds additional challenges to what is your message because they have no clue what normal people think and what normal people's lives are like. It's a real sense of disconnect there. Now, in 2016, we heard the problem for the Democrats was particularly white males. That's changed. You highlighted some of that. It's not just white males now. It's all young males, even some young females. I think the young female thing might be very surprising to some people.

What do you think is driving that trend even among young females? Well, they're not losing them as much as males. So you've got to think of shifts and parties happening in waves. And so it's not everybody that matches a certain demographic group moving a certain direction.

There tends to be pieces of those demographic groups that are first movers. So among young voters, it is young males moving fastest. And what's really interesting, is it's non-white young males that have been moving to the right culturally. And really, maybe we don't even have to say that they're moving right as much as that the left has moved so far

left beyond them, that they're sitting there looking down and going, okay, well, the people I used to identify with are way over here now. And so I guess the person I'm closest to now are these people who call themselves conservatives. But you see this globally. I mean, you can go look at the presidential election that just happened in Poland, where the liberal mayor of Warsaw, lost, even though he was expected to win. And it was the younger voters that catapulted the center-right or further-right candidate into the presidency. You saw that happen in Germany with the AFD. You saw it happen with reform in the UK.

So this is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to the U.S., but I would say it's actually more drastic outside the U.S. currently, which means it's going to come to our shores. I have for long said that all we have to do is look at what's happening in Europe, and we're, three to five to seven years behind there. And so I think what we're going to see is over the next three to five to seven years, younger voters in the U.S., especially as they can't find economic opportunity and immigrants are replacing their housing opportunities and their ability to find jobs, that it is going to catapult young voters even further, right, faster, right, like we've seen in Europe most recently. Right. We've been tracking that trend, very fascinating in Europe.

Now, with the young males in America moving away from the Democratic Party, do you think it's the culture war type issues in the Democrat messaging that's really sort of denigrating males in general, or is it more economic concerns that are driving young males away? What we're seeing is that it's both and. So the economic issues really opened up these working class voters, younger male voters, a lot of the segments that elected Donald Trump in 2024, it opened their eyes to these Democrats, when they're in charge, they cause chaos. and the chaos is now affecting my pocketbook.

I don't necessarily think that's the reason at the end of the day that they made the switch. I think it is those cultural issues and those cultural issues that you mentioned are essentially proxies for radicalism. And if you don't see yourself as radical on those issues, then you don't see yourself as a Democrat right now. And yes, maybe it does come down to, I'm going to make my vote on men and women's sports. I don't think a lot of people are walking into the voters booth and they're like, you know, the one issue, the final deciding factor, I think they're proxy topics for radicalism. And it's something that the Democrats were really good at doing to Republicans for a long time on abortion, where it wasn't about abortion alone. It was about what a Republican's position on abortion represented about how radical they were on not giving an inch on anything and how they didn't care about women. And you could just kind of see how you unravel it into other topics. And I see the culture wars of today that Republicans have finally realized that those are the best vehicles we have to show how radical the Democrats are. Now, Trump, like when most presidents come into office, experienced a dip in approval rating at first.

He started to make a rebound, though. What is going on with Trump's approval specifically on the economy? How is he doing so far compared to other presidents at this point in their term? He started off like a rocket ship. I mean, so many key questions that we look at, like direction of the country and including his image, also, are you favorable or unfavorable of Donald Trump? Once he got inaugurated, those numbers skyrocketed it to the positive for him. Even the initial days of Doge and Elon Musk being there and, you know, 100 executive orders on every topic you can imagine, radical drastic change. And I'm not saying radical in the sense that I don't agree with it, but it was very different than what people had experienced the month before, you know, or the year before.

with Joe Biden as president. So in looking at that, people were okay with the change. It was the tariffs that kind of threw a wrench in his image and how people viewed him. And therefore, it affected how they saw and gave him approval on his handling of certain issues. His strongest issue is still by far illegal immigration and border security. I mean, it's over 20% net approval on that. But what we have seen with the last couple of weeks, that his image is improved, how people believe he's handling of the economy's improved. And I think much of it is that, you know, the media cried wolf for so long that these tariffs are going to, you know, double the cost of everything you purchase. And, you know, you have these companies saying,

well, we can't hold on for very long. We're going to have to start increasing prices on you. And then magically, you know, the price of eggs is down 62 percent since he took office. And people are realizing, you know, well, gas is cheaper. And they're starting to see the whole picture come together of how Trump's new approach to the economy is going to benefit them. And they're realizing that the tariffs are not destroying the economy, if anything. They just brought in another $23 billion in tax revenue that didn't have to be paid by Americans. And it's driving folks to the table to negotiate better trade deals for us.

It was just this huge swath of change. And then tariffs, people didn't really understand. I think what's most fascinating, I saw a chart yesterday that showed. approval of tariffs from the beginning of the year to now. And it's dropped pretty significantly of people approving of just what a tariff does in general. But, yeah, I cannot wait a month, six weeks, eight weeks from now to see where things are, because I really do believe that much of what Trump is doing on the economy, tariffs being a key part of that, is actually going to start driving more money into people's pockets, less going out when they're going to purchase things.

and we're really going to see him, I believe we're going to see Donald Trump actually flip into positive territory on his image where he has more people approve of him than disapprove, which is something he's never had. Yeah, he's brought it to within around two points, is that correct? We have them, you know, right around that number right now. There are a couple polls that will show he's, you know, plus 10 favorability.

That's just, we don't live in a world where people have plus 10 favorability. Now, this is Pride Month, or it used to be called Pride Month. It might have a different name soon. How much do you think the issue of the T, in the LGBT has really hurt the Democratic Party and the overall left-wing agenda. What do you predict in terms of future actions from the key voices from that side related to this? Well, it seems like considering the percentage of the population that they are and the percentage of the LGBTQ, whatever other letters and numbers and symbols were adding to it today, they represent a small portion of that.

but when you look at media attention and how loud their voices are and how often their issue is brought up over other people in that coalition's issues are brought up, it's significantly outsized. And going back to what we were talking about of reasonableness and radicalism, when you talk about the LGBT, you know, those are things that we've all heard about for 30, 40 years. and they started out, let us have a relationship, let us get married, now bake our cake. And they kind of realize that they pushed the envelope too far in going from them having freedom into pushing into other people's freedoms. And the transgender crowd and those who support them have not figured that piece out. And they keep digging, like Democrats in general, they just keep digging further into the issue where it's not just about a 40-year-old person can decide if they want to change their gender. They want to,

in California, take away a six-year-old child from their parents if they do not do the gender transition surgery on a six-year-old child. And that is where you go from reasonableness to radicalism. And that is why the T and LGBTQ has so drastically brought down the whole movement. And there was a survey that I saw the other day that among conservatives and moderates, there's been a decline in the support for gay marriage, which nobody's even talking about that issue right now. Yet it's declining because of this anchor of the radical transgendered ideology. And didn't you recently feature some specific polling on this trans issue that was really bad for Georgia Democrat Senator John Ossoff? Yes, so we worked with the American Principles Project

and did a survey in Georgia. It was a couple months ago. I don't expect it's changed anything for the positive for him in that sense. We asked what's called a generic ballot, and that is you want the Republican or the Democrat for U.S. Senate. Republican leads out by one in that instance. Then we said, okay, well, what about Democrat John Ossoff and a Republican? Didn't even name a Republican. A Republican, it's tied. That's not a great place for a sitting, you know, incumbent member of the Senate to be in a purple swing state where, you know, you're tied with a nobody who just happens to have a label. And then we said, if you knew John Ossoff, and I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not going to get it exactly right, but if you knew

John Ossoff, you know, voted against getting rid of men and women's sports, protecting women's forts. That's it. That's all we introduced is the information, who would you vote for, John Ossoff or a Republican candidate. And John Ossoff drops down to 38%, which I've never seen an incumbent drop that far and go under 40%. And the Republican leads by 14 points in that instance, on a single issue. So, you know, the Republican ecosystem needs to be just running that one ad over and again for the rest of this year to get John Ossoff to a place where he couldn't ever come back from. And I think that shows the power of these culture issues and that Republicans need to be willing to fight these culture wars of what we believe because we have a strong majority on our side

of these issues. And they're becoming less of a silent majority, which is encouraging. Well, it's unsurprising that the Trump administration has really leaned into this issue so heavily and done a complete 180 from how the Biden administration approached Pride Month, for example. Brent, thanks so much for talking with us. Hey, thank you, John. That was Brent Buchanan, founder of Signal Polling Group, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.