President Donald Trump’s approval rating is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden’s was at this point in his term. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president’s approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50%, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 elections.

So the Democratic Party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November. That’s good, but not good enough.

The stakes are so high that a win isn’t sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.

The easiest issue, perhaps surprisingly, is immigration. Since 2024, Democrats have been snakebit on the subject, afraid that their instinctive pro-immigrant positions were unpopular enough to lead voters to select a snarling villain vowing mass deportations. They can exhale. What the polls over the past year suggest is that most Americans are not white-supremacist goons like Stephen Miller, ready to trash the Constitution in the name of purifying die Volk.

Instead, voters actually believed that Trump would only deport “the worst of the worst.” As they watched the inhuman treatment of gardeners, veterans, children and American-citizen protesters, they soured fast. Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, fully 60% of respondents told NBC they disapproved of Trump’s immigration policies, 49% strongly so.

If Democrats present themselves as opposing the brutal tactics of ICE and CPB and favoring firm border controls, they should find themselves in the sweet spot. Messages like Billie Eilish’s “No one is illegal on stolen land” are unhelpful.

The other big issue on voters’ minds is inflation, or “affordability.” The reality is that politicians cannot actually bring prices down, as Trump promised to do in 2024, except by crashing the economy. Still, some voters presumably believed him, and they are disillusioned now. Some Democrats may be tempted to run on taxing the rich. This is a comfortable old shoe for Democrats, but as a political strategy it hasn’t been terribly successful.

On the other hand, voters have already concluded that tariffs are making life more expensive. The issue is a layup — if Democrats can get out of their own way.

The progressive wing of the party has long favored tariffs as a way to protect American workers from competition from low-wage nations. This muddies the waters.

Finally, a vulnerability that Democrats must overcome is seeming soft on crime. Here again the Trump administration has handed them a golden opportunity. MAGA is so fixated on ethnic cleansing that it is pulling Justice Department officials off crime-fighting to pursue immigration cases.

Democrats should stress that the funds appropriated for ICE would be far better deployed to local police departments. Bill Clinton’s promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the ’90s and cut against the Democrats’ soft-on-crime image.

The voters are the last redoubt in the fight to reclaim American democracy and decency, and the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest political party since the advent of universal suffrage, is the only entity that can carry the burden. If they can win a big victory in the House and Senate in nine months, there is hope for us.