How Progressive Movements Can Speak to Disaffected Voters

Polling may be an imperfect gauge, but it does provide some high-level insight into how the general population leans. Take recent presidential approval polls, which reveal dissatisfaction among Trump voters, suggesting they may have buyer’s remorse.

Such polling data show widespread disapproval of President Trump, signaling the chance to bridge the party divide and sway disaffected Trump voters toward an alternative. This is an especially important endeavor as we head into the midterm election cycle, where control of the House and the Senate hangs in the balance.

The Great Backslide

For those who’ve been sounding the alarm about Trump, the degradation of democracy in the United States has perhaps felt like an inevitability. According to the Democracy Report 2026 by the Varieties of Democracies Institute (V-Dem), a research group based in Sweden, “suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices” are key reasons for the “derailment of democracy” in the United States.

As the report noted:

[T]he United States fell from .84 to .74 on the Electoral democracy index (EDI), and from 0.75 to 0.57 on the Liberal Democracy index (LDI)—the largest annual decline in US history. This is mostly due to a decline in media freedom as well as Congress’s failure to hold the executive accountable, combined with some loss of independence of the judiciary as well as weakened rule of law and protection of civil liberty.

The researchers went on to state that “freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.”

With the upcoming midterm elections, there is an opportunity to wrest control from those who blindly support Trump’s objectives because they are members of the same party, or because they stand to benefit from policies that harm others.

The Century Foundation’s United States Democracy Meter scores US democracy at 57 out of 100 for 2025, compared to the 79 out of 100 it scored one year prior. “In the first year of Trump 2.0,” authors Nate Schenkkan and Thanassis Cambanis wrote, “the United States went from being a passing if imperfect democracy to behaving like an authoritarian state: breaking the law, ignoring court rulings, engaging in grand corruption, targeting critics for persecution, and conducting a campaign against immigrants, in particular, that flagrantly violates civil rights.”

Grim as it may seem, the authors offered hope: “Crucially, elections are still free, providing for the time being an avenue to reverse the democratic decline.”

With the upcoming midterm elections, there is an opportunity to wrest control from those who blindly support Trump’s objectives because they are members of the same party, or because they stand to benefit from policies that harm others. The potential to create a more just society that represents democratic values of diversity and freedom still exists.

It is here that nonprofit leaders and movement organizations should focus their efforts. There are many ways nonprofits can mobilize voters, and, as Vu Le has suggested, people from the nonprofit sector could also run for political office.

As Ann Lehman wrote, “Voter turnout matters. Authoritarian-leaning movements tend to thrive when participation is low and disengagement is high. Democracy can win when participation is broad, inclusive, and informed. Nonprofits can help by normalizing voting as part of community life—not a special event, but a shared responsibility.”

But to move the needle of democracy toward progressive change in a meaningful, lasting way, we need sound narratives to guide this course correction.

Right now, through divisive policy decisions and political missteps, the current administration has provided an opportunity that progressive narrative organizations must capitalize on: Trump’s declining approval ratings.

Voters’ Pessimism, by the Numbers

Polls for overall approval show a dismal outlook for the current president.

The New York Times aggregation of various polls shows a 56 percent disapproval rating versus a 39 percent approval rating. While the numbers are constantly changing, the president’s approval rating has been falling since March 12, 2025, when Trump was pushing tariffs and DOGE was indiscriminately cutting government spending to programs it deemed “wasteful.”

Near the end of March 2026, CNN’s Harry Enten shared data from one poll asking Trump voters if they also considered themselves supporters of the MAGA movement. To that question, 30 percent of people said yes. These people are likely entrenched in their political beliefs and not movable. But if the math holds, then 9 percent of Trump voters did not consider themselves MAGA supporters. Analysts say this shows an opening in this group’s political beliefs, and some could be swayed to vote for someone other than Trump.

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, most Americans were pessimistic about the next four years of Trump’s presidency, with affordability being a consistent issue. Since then, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, approval on the economy—one of the key reasons voters said they favored Trump over Harris—has fallen to 31 percent, an all-time low for the president. For 65 percent of those polled, Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions.

This reality is reflected in the Center on Budget and Policy’s report A Record of Historic Harm in the First Year of Trump’s Second Term:

The human cost of [the Trump Administration’s] cuts and harmful changes is extremely high—both for the individuals and families who will be denied assistance and ultimately for our nation as a whole. Taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other critical support from people will increase poverty and hardship, undermine the ability of some to find and retain employment, and harm children’s health, well-being, and educational outcomes.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) highlights how the Trump administration has weakened the working class through policy changes and cost-cutting initiatives. As CAP Policy Analyst Aurelia Glass wrote, “President Donald Trump promised to be a ‘champion for the American worker,’ but his administration’s actions are setting workers without a college degree up for failure.”

The challenges working-class families faced just in the first three fiscal quarters of 2025 include 361,000 job opportunities lost for workers without college degrees; 58,000 net manufacturing jobs lost since the administration announced “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025; slowed wage growth; and increased prices for food and household appliances due to tariffs.

If there are cracks in [Trump’s core voters’] belief systems…then it is here that nonprofits and other organizations that advocate for democracy can make meaningful gains.

And the negative data goes on. According to research conducted by Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization, 66 percent of young men who are registered to vote—a group that comprises 54 percent of Trump’s overall voter pool—disapprove of the president’s performance since taking office. Only 26 percent would support a presidential run by JD Vance, who is now one of the least popular vice presidents in modern times.

One of the more surprising data points is that 73 percent of young men “believe that American culture has changed for the worse since their parents were their age—20 points higher than the electorate overall.” However, the responses don’t specify whether this reflects their views of American culture under Trump or in general, and given the timing of the survey in December 2025, their feelings may have since changed.

If there are cracks in this core group’s belief systems or doubts about Trump’s vision for the future, then it is here that nonprofits and other organizations that advocate for democracy can make meaningful gains. As more Trump voters struggle under his policies, they are likely to look for a change that could materially improve their lives.

Nonprofits Need to Thread the Narrative Needle

There are powerful strategies for reaching disaffected voters—john a. powell’s bridging framework being one notable example—but they largely haven’t been adopted at scale. This is due to problems with resourcing, coordination, and priority-setting across the sector. As Aditi Juneja, executive director of Democracy 2076, pointed out, there is tension between short-term urgency and long-term necessity: “Even if we all do the right things for the next two to four years, the lingering sense is that we are not getting to the root causes that will ensure we have a democracy over the next 50 years.” It is why Democracy 2076 was launched in the first place: for the long-term future work democracy requires.

Yet, in the context of the current administration, progressive pro-democracy organizations struggle to reconcile a particular requisite of a functional democracy: engaging with, in Juneja’s words, “power structures as they exist in order to deliver results.” This, in turn, builds the necessary trust of voters. Zohran Mamdani is a key example of this. Mamdani engaged with constituents throughout the election cycle and then, as mayor of New York City, appeared at the White House to demonstrate the possibility of meeting with the president while in political disagreement.

While to some it seemed like an act of capitulation, this put Mamdani in the sights of Republicans who might want an off-ramp from the current president. If nothing else, Mamdani’s appearance served to elevate his already high clout, which matters in our current attention economy.

With media saturation at all-time highs, policy arguments aren’t likely to break through the noise. But an unlikely meeting between two ideologically opposed individuals—representing two polarized political establishments—will. Mamdani then had the opportunity to speak with disaffected Trump voters who might be willing to cast a vote elsewhere based on the New York City mayor’s stance.

Once that attention is gained, even if only momentarily, the messaging must be clear. For nonprofits and movement organizations, leading with narrative over policy can introduce language and stories that more readily captivate disaffected voters, rather than repulsing them with complex or tiresome language that often characterizes policy rhetoric.

As Ade Salami and Melody Mohebi argued in their article “Politics in an Attention Economy,” there are four value orientations that audiences gravitate toward: community, order, autonomy, and authority. While there is a correlation with political preferences (voters who prioritize community tend to be Democrats, while authority and order are common among Republicans), the key is to lean into issues voters are grappling with and tell stories they recognize. For instance, narratives that reach disaffected Republican voters are often grounded in self-interest, or in circumstances they can directly feel, rather than in policy proposals. To be persuasive, rhetoric needs to be adjusted accordingly; in this case, think “more money in your pocket every paycheck” rather than “higher wages for all.”

As Salami and Mohebi note, the narrative around the issues depends on region and context. Elana Mainer offers proof of concept in recounting how Rural People’s Voice (RPV) organized voters in deep red counties in Washington state to invest in schools, childcare, and conservation of land and water by taxing billionaires, even as those counties voted Trump into office.

Mainer notes some of the key tactics that worked for the group: Start early and tap into what people already know, name the right villain (in this case, the billionaire class), get personal and build for the long term, send trusted messengers to amplify a better story, and be clear about your base. The results show the possibility when the narrative is grounded in what actually helps working-class families rather than broad policy points or partisan rhetoric. As Mainer wrote, “Our campaign succeeded because we spoke directly to the working class, not a political party. And that’s how we’ll keep winning in the future.”

Ultimately, nonprofits and movement organizations need to invest in building narrative infrastructure for these new stories to work. The frameworks exist, the tactics are understood. But to work at the scale needed, progressive narrative infrastructure needs deep, long-term resourcing. We might have the right story at the right time, but without the proper infrastructure, the narrative dies before it takes off.