Feb. 11, 2025, 2:27 p.m.
President Trump has some pretty good polling numbers right now. His approval rating is higher than at the dawn of his first term. This weekend’s CBS News/YouGov poll showed that sizable majorities of voters view him as “tough,” “energetic,” “focused,” and “effective.” The only truly bad number for him in the poll is that 66 percent think he is not doing enough to lower prices.
These numbers are a bucket of cold water in the faces of Democratic pols, who say Trump’s early moves are chaotic and possibly illegal. Explaining Trump’s relative popularity is a struggle from this perspective. But on CNN’s State of the Union, Republican commentator Scott Jennings offered a very simple explanation for these numbers—the president is on the majority side of most issues, making him the “80-20 president,” in other words, doing what 80 percent of the country wants.
He’s exaggerating the margin. There aren’t a lot of issues on which 80 percent of the American public is on one side. Most of Trump’s marquee actions do fall into the 60-ish percent support range, however, including deportations and downsizing the federal government, although in both cases, opinion shifts depending on the details of the policy and the wording of the question. Majorities of Republicans and independents want to decrease foreign aid, but not Democrats. Views on tariffs are mixed.
This particular 80-20 argument emerged in response to Trump’s executive order on transgender women participating in sports—and as CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out, this is indeed an 80-20 issue. He cites a New York Times/Ipsos poll that shows 79 percent oppose transgender women in women’s sports, while only 18 percent support it.
Democrats didn’t set out to be on the unpopular side of 80-20 issues, or even 60-40 issues. In fact, the Times/Ipsos poll shows that only 31 percent of Democrats support transgender women participating in women’s sports. You don’t get to an 80-20 issue without most Democrats also on the 80 side. But Republicans’ $215 million anti-LGBTQ (mostly anti-transgender) ad blitz in the fall, which largely went unchallenged, means that most voters perceive Democrats to be on the 20 percent side of the issue. Perception is everything in politics.
The other key factor is that public opinion has shifted to the right. In 2021, 62 percent of Americans opposed transgender women playing on women’s sports teams in a Gallup poll. That rose to 69 percent in 2023 before climbing to 79 percent now.
The debate over transgender bathroom use goes back nearly 10 years, showing the pattern even better. In May of 2016, 38 percent of Americans supported restricting transgender people to using bathrooms that align with their sex at birth, including just under half of Republicans (48 percent). North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” passed that year, which resulted in boycotts of the state, including canceled NCAA basketball tournaments. The legislation was rolled back and not seriously attempted in other states.
As recently as five or six years ago, it was easy to think that transgender issues might go the same way as same-sex marriage, support for which rapidly increased over a relatively short time frame between 2005 and 2020. The opposite happened, though, as focus shifted to sports and drove overall anti-transgender sentiment up. By 2023, Republican support for bathroom bills skyrocketed to 78 percent, and independents shifted to a majority in favor as well, pushing overall support to a narrow majority.
Obviously, that is not an 80-20 issue; bathroom restrictions are less popular overall than restrictions on participating in sports. But the issue illustrates the shift in opinion that has taken place over the last eight to 10 years. A shrinking majority supports transgender troops in the military. Even support for same-sex marriage has stalled over the past few years—although it remains near a high mark—and has declined among Republicans, after more than two decades of increasing support.
The data patterns are clear that we’re in a period of backlash after expanding progressivism in the Obama era, and even into the first Trump term, not just on LGBTQ issues, but on race as well. That happens—society tends to move in cycles of progress and backlash to that progress. But the result has been that Democrats ended up on (or are perceived to be on) the losing side of issues they expected to continue moving their way.
It also doesn’t help that Democrats in viral cable news and social media arguments usually represent the very liberal side of most issues, adding to perceptions that they’re on the 20 percent end. Republicans, on the other hand, are aligned behind Trump’s message and agenda. And, not for nothing, that message won.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
