Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to blame Democrats for the slide of the United States toward fascism. As one enraged commentator put it recently, "the Democrats" have "let us down day by day by day".
But, in fact, "the Democrats-- " at the grassroots and at the federal government level-- have repeatedly displayed overwhelming opposition to the right-wing Republican onslaught. By contrast, Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump's priorities. Indeed, the gap between the two parties on most key issues has been enormous.
The stance of grassroots Democrats on control of the economy is illustrative. A Gallup poll in August 2025 found that, asked about big business, only 17 percent of registered Democrats had a positive view of it, compared to 60 percent of Republicans. Furthermore, only 42 percent of Democrats regarded capitalism favorably, compared to 75 percent of Republicans. Indeed, 66 percent of Democrats had a positive view of socialism.
On the hot issue of publicly-supported healthcare, a poll in late 2025 showed that 90 percent of Democrats-- but only 20 percent of Republicans-- backed Medicare for All. Moreover, as a September 2025 KFF poll revealed, even when it came to the much more modest program of extending health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there was a clear partisan division.
Other surveys found even sharper differences between Democrats and Republicans. In August 2025, a Quinnipiac poll revealed that Trump's dispatch of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, had the backing of 86 percent of Republicans, but only 5 percent of Democrats.
U.S. policy toward Israel also triggered significant partisan divisions. According to the August 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 75 percent of Democrats opposed sending more military aid to that nation for its Gaza campaign, while 56 percent of Republicans supported sending it. Indeed, 77 percent of Democrats thought Israel was committing genocide. By contrast, 64 percent of Republicans thought Israel was not.
In January 2026, another Quinnipiac poll, conducted within days of Renee Good's murder by an ICE agent, found that 77 percent of Republicans surveyed thought the shooting was justified, but that 92 percent of Democrats surveyed considered it unjustified. Similarly, 77 percent of Republicans approved of how Kristi Noem was handling her job as Secretary of Homeland Security, while 85 percent of Democrats disapproved. A Data for Progress poll had comparable findings.
The elected representatives of the two parties in Congress also displayed sharp partisan differences on major issues.
In early April 2025, Senator Bernie Sanders, decrying the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage as "a starvation wage", introduced the Raise the Wage Act. It would increase the minimum wage to $17 over five years and gradually eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities. When Sanders forced a vote on amending the Republicans' Senate Budget resolution to this effect, every Democrat voted for the measure, while every Republican but one opposed it, thereby killing it.
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