Publicly, Democrats are practically salivating at the made-for-midterms message that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk seemed to give them with the chaos of the federal cuts backed by the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Challenge of Democratic Response
Privately, however, they’re sounding a note of caution that attacking DOGE may not be a slam dunk.
When moderate Democrats huddled last month at an upscale resort in Loudoun County, Virginia — at a retreat hosted by the centrist group Third Way — those gathered concluded that their party is seen as “favoring excessive regulations, inefficient spending, and programs that don’t directly benefit them,” factors putting them on the back foot in responding to DOGE. Not only that, but their party also struggles with being “seen as defending elite institutions” such as the “government bureaucracy,” they agreed, according to a memo they wrote after.
Public Opinion and Political Dynamics
Then, over the weekend, came new polling by CBS News/YouGov that found a majority of respondents, 51 percent, generally approve of Trump’s efforts to cut staff at government agencies like USAID.
Now, before their official response to Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday, many Democrats are coming to the conclusion that they’ll have to be more nuanced about how they respond to his raft of cuts to the federal government.
“I walk around and see signs, ‘We love our federal workers,’ and that may be true, but we can’t lose sight of the broader picture that [this] isn’t just about government spending,” said Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at the progressive group The Hub Project, which commissioned research on DOGE. “We don’t need to say we’re saving the federal bureaucracy, but focus [our messaging] on the people, the devastating impacts on society and some of the most vulnerable populations. That’s sometimes hard for Democrats to do.”
The Messaging Strategy
Democratic polling conducted by the Hub Project and Navigator Research found a significant difference in how DOGE is viewed depending on whether it is linked to Musk in voters’ minds. A plurality of voters in their survey viewed the Department of Government Efficiency, without Musk’s name attached, favorably by a 4-point margin. But when calling it Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, its favorability dropped to 37 percent.
But Russell warned Democrats that there’s a risk in tying DOGE to only Musk because, based on Trump’s rocky relationships with administration officials in the past, “who knows how long he’ll actually be there.”
Connecting with Voters
“Focusing solely on Musk as the villain is not going to be sustainable for us,” Russell said. “We have to connect the dots here for voters on why they’re taking stuff away from Americans, and that’s because they’re giving billionaires a tax cut.”
Russell also cautioned Democrats against solely focusing their messaging on “the status quo getting torn apart” because there’s “always some appetite” for cutting “bloat” out of the federal government.
Adapting the Narrative
The Democratic National Committee appears to be taking this advice. During a private call with Democratic strategists and operatives to give messaging guidance ahead of Trump’s Tuesday speech, they urged attendees to focus on the effects of Trump’s cuts on voters — particularly how they affect costs and the economy. They pushed Democrats to focus on Trump’s campaign “promise[s]” and how he’s “broken” them, according to a messaging guidance circulated after the call and obtained by POLITICO.
For example, the memo reads, Trump promised to “lower mortgage rates,” but “DOGE cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development are likely to worsen housing markets and upend mortgages.”
Political Dynamics and Public Perception
What Democrats are finding is that while Musk himself might be underwater in polling, the idea of making government more efficient and distancing the party from bureaucrats is not without support — even if Democrats oppose how Musk has executed it.
“Some of DOGE’s efforts were on their face, a little bit appealing, including things like cutting waste, fraud and abuse, cutting spending, unnecessary spending, increasing government efficiency, but the minute you let folks know that Elon Musk was running DOGE, the numbers plummeted,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive advocacy group that has polled on the issue.
Republican Response and Political Landscape
Last month, on Pod Save America, the liberal podcast hosted by former advisers to President Barack Obama, co-host Jon Lovett lamented, “Some of this is pretty annoying because it’s the stuff we should have done.”
On the right, meanwhile, DOGE is becoming a rallying cry that Republicans believe could animate GOP voters in the midterms. A new survey of Michigan voters by one of the state’s largest Republican PACs, Brighter Michigan, obtained first by POLITICO, showed that DOGE is resonating on the right.
Implications for the Midterms
In the field from Feb. 21-24, the survey of 911 likely Michigan Republican Senate primary voters found that government corruption and DOGE was the most important issue to 55 percent of voters, outpacing the next closest issue, the economy, which registered 22 percent. It was a partisan poll, but it made an impression on Republicans.
“DOGE is today what the wall was in ‘16,” said a GOP consultant who works on races in battleground states and who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Strategic Considerations
Democrats have been trying to recalibrate their responses. Following the Third Way retreat, the group’s co-founder Matt Bennett said that if the group had been meeting more recently than a month ago, DOGE would likely have featured more prominently. And, he said, “I think the conclusion would have been: People want change, just not this change — not the chainsaw, but more of the scalpel.”
Broadly, Democrats see linking DOGE to Musk as a potent issue for them. Bennett said he suspected DOGE is “gonna go out of favor when people start to feel this in their lives,” while Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said “the idea of cuts is not what people object to, they object to them being blunt and reckless.”
