A Rebuke, Not a Romance: What Three Voter Polls Say Americans Meant When They Handed Democrats Congress

At 10:09 on Tuesday night, Central time, CBS News projected that Gina Hinojosa had beaten Gov. Greg Abbott, which meant that Texas, a state no Democrat had won statewide since 1994, was about to get its first Democratic governor since Ann Richards left office in 1995. Her win came on the same night James Talarico took the state’s Senate seat. Somebody voted for all of that, and the question for every campaign office in the country on Wednesday morning was who.

The polls give a first answer, and it begins with one number. Among the people who voted on Tuesday, 38 percent said they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing, according to both the NBC News Exit Poll and the Fox News Voter Poll. Both are surveys of people who voted, not counts of votes. Fox put disapproval at 62 percent, so his approval minus his disapproval comes to minus 24. That is twice as bad as the 44 to 56 split Fox recorded at the same point in his first term, and NBC says it is lower than any sitting president’s rating on Election Day in nearly two decades. The AP Voter Poll found about six in ten voters disapproving.

Our first piece on the night said Democrats won ground they had not won in generations, and that we could not yet show why. Our argument here is that Tuesday was a rebuke of Trump more than an embrace of Democrats. The voters who moved were the ones who had leaned toward him in 2024, they moved over prices, corruption and the Iran war, and they did so while telling pollsters they think no better of the Democratic Party than of the Republican one. That matters, because it tells the new majority what it was hired to do and what it was not.

Who moved

The biggest moves came from groups that had been drifting toward Trump. Fox found that Democrats led among young men by 33 points in the House vote, a 48-point swing from the 15-point lead Trump had among them in 2024. The AP says about seven in ten voters under 30 backed the Democratic candidate, after being roughly split between Trump and Kamala Harris two years ago. Hispanic voters moved too. Fox has Democrats ahead by 27 points, up from Harris’s 12, and ahead by 15 among Hispanic men, up from her 2. The AP reports about six in ten Hispanic voters backing the Democrat and about a third the Republican, where roughly four in ten had voted for Trump. Independents went to Democrats by 22 points, against 6 for Harris in 2024. Even among rural voters, the Republicans’ strongest group, their lead shrank to 18 points from the 28 Trump won by.

Two cautions belong here. A House vote in a midterm is not the same as a presidential vote, and the people who turn out in a midterm are not the same people, so the swings are real but not exact. And the polls do not agree on every figure. On air, CNN gave a larger Democratic lead among Hispanic voters, 39 points, and a smaller one among young men, 24 points. We use the Fox and AP numbers because they are published and they match each other, but they share a pollster, so the true size of these shifts is still open.

What they were angry about

Asked what mattered, voters named the economy first, 39 percent in NBC’s poll and about four in ten in the AP’s, with the state of democracy second at about three in ten. Nearly eight in ten told NBC that inflation is causing hardship for their families, and 87 percent said they are concerned about the price of gas and diesel. Sixty-five percent said Trump’s policies have worsened the economy and 62 percent said he is responsible for high prices. By 43 to 37, voters said they trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy, which NBC notes is a reversal from 2024, when Trump beat Harris on the issue by 7 points. Corruption weighed heavily as well: NBC found 90 percent calling it a crucial or major factor in their vote, though they were split on who could fix it, with 37 percent saying Democrats and 31 percent Republicans.

The picture is not one-sided, and the polls say so. Fox found that Republicans led on only one issue, immigration, by 3 points. NBC found that 57 percent of voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement has gone too far, while 22 percent said it has been about right and 22 percent said it has not gone far enough. The Iran war counted too, but as one reason among several. More than a third of voters in Fox’s poll called it crucial to their vote, about six in ten said the United States was wrong to take military action, and nearly twice as many preferred ending the fighting to lower gas prices as preferred restarting it to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Reading those answers together, our view is that the war reached voters mostly at the pump, which is where the Kansas farmers and truckers described in our first piece felt it.

What the polls say about Republicans’ explanations

We reported that Vice President JD Vance blames the war, that Trump says he was not on the ballot and blames the candidates, and that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the party is in a hole. The polls give each some support and none of them the whole story. Vance is partly right: the war mattered to more than a third of voters. But corruption and prices mattered to far more, so it was not the only cause. Trump’s claim that he was not on the ballot sits badly with the polls: 43 percent of voters told NBC that one reason for their vote was to express opposition to him, more than said so in 2018, and the AP found about four in ten House voters wanted to express opposition, fewer than two in ten wanted to express support, and about four in ten said he was not a factor. DeSantis’s point about the party is harder to test, but the polls do show that the Republican base held: Fox found that 99 percent of Republicans who call themselves MAGA voted Republican, and so did 85 percent of the others. The party lost the people in the middle and the groups that had just joined it.

The same polls hold a warning for Democrats. In NBC’s poll 53 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, and 59 percent have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party. Nearly one voter in five likes neither, at least five points more than in the last two midterms. About seven in ten told the AP they want Congress to provide more checks and balances on the presidency. That reads to us as a job description, not a blank check: a majority elected to check a president, on a promise to bring down costs, by voters who have not decided they like the party now in charge. NBC reports that Democrats plan both to investigate Trump and to tackle affordability. In the polls, voters put the economy first.

What happens next turns on a fact that victory speeches tend to skip. Americans voted out the party in charge in 2024, and on Tuesday they rebuked the one that replaced it. Mississippi and Alaska are still being counted, and the polls will be adjusted when the final votes are in, but the central finding is unlikely to change: Tuesday’s voters did not say they had found a party to trust. They said they had run out of patience with the one in charge. Both parties will now spend two years learning how long a voter’s patience lasts when the party in charge is theirs.