David M. Shribman: Drinking the double haterade

LAMBS GROVE, Iowa ― Move over, soccer moms, forget about NASCAR dads and dismiss even the "bunch of childless cat ladies" that JD Vance identified ― all shorthands for critical voting groups in past elections. The term with a powerful punch in this year's midterm congressional election is "double haters." It's possible you're one of them.

Fervently cultivated by both parties and a vital swing in the battle for control on Capitol Hill, these double haters aren't exactly misanthropes, they simply believe the two parties are miscast for the politics of today, and surely for the politics of tomorrow.

Thus, double haters.

Early exemplars of target voters include the archetypical 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, married to a machinist (the fabled symbol of the 1970 midterm elections); "waitress moms" (low-income working women, late 1990s); and "security moms" (post-2001 terror attacks). But it is the double haters who are the prized prey of 2026. There are more of them than ever, and far more of them than voters whose views match those of "Joe the Plumber," the fanciful symbol in the 2008 campaign.

Deploring politicians of all stripes is a great American tradition. Mark Twain argued that there was "no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress," and Henry Kissinger said that "corrupt politicians make the other 10% look bad."

But contempt for both parties ― and for the politicians that personify them ― is hitting new modern highs.

A fifth of all voters now view both parties unfavorably, according to the most recent Wall Street Journal poll. More than half of independents have a negative view of both, according to the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll.

"The double haters don't love either party and are in the position of deciding whom they hate the least," Charles Franklin, the Marquette political scientist who directs the poll, said in an interview. His remarks are an update of John Kenneth Galbraith's observation that "Politics is not the art of the possible" but instead "consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable" or the view, often attributed to George Orwell, that politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

Dig a little deeper into the reams of survey data, and you'll see why the Democrats currently are regarded as favorites in their drive to seize control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate after the midterms, now little more than three weeks away.

Those figures reveal a seeming contradiction, but also a powerful updraft for the Democrats.

Start with the surface results, which might lead you to see peril for the Democrats. Members of the Democratic Party are, by a large margin, more likely than Republicans to be double haters; some 26% of them dislike both parties while only 16% of Republicans do so, according to the Marquette figures. Additionally, Democrats are more likely to dislike their own party (30%) than are Republicans (19%). Yet those Democrats are more loyal to their party than their sentiments might suggest.

So what gives?

They now are supporting Democrats more reliably than double-hater Republicans are supporting their candidates. The possible reason: The Democrats who hold an unfavorable view of their party feel that way because they are frustrated with it, likely because they are unhappy that its leaders aren't doing enough to fight President Donald Trump. "But," explained Franklin, "they still will vote for Democrats."

In that way, these Democrats are not like the 1980 Democrats who turned to Ronald Reagan because those voters were leaving the Democratic Party. "The current ones are Democrats who want party renewal," Franklin said. "By no means are they considering voting for Republicans."

Indeed, poll figures show that 89% of Democratic double haters will vote for the Democratic congressional candidate while only 71% of the Republican double haters will vote for the GOP candidate.

Plus: Democratic grouches are more likely to vote this year than Republican grumps by a margin of 60 percentage points to 49 points.

This trend of a growing number of double haters doesn't apply everywhere, however. Yet even in Iowa, according to voter registration figures released in July, the end result may be the same.

In the gubernatorial race, Democrat auditor Rob Sand holds a 12-percentage-point lead over Republican businessman Zach Lahn, according to a Marist Poll, which shows that, by a 57-33 margin, independents prefer Sand. In the Senate race, Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek holds an 8-point lead over Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson.

In Iowa, affiliation with both parties actually grew this summer, while the number of independents dropped substantially.

The Democrats gained more than 27,000 new registrants, while the Republicans gained more than 17,000 new party members. These gains came at the cost of independents, whose numbers shrunk by more than 32,000. Though Republicans outnumber Democrats by 183,912 voters, independents remain a slightly bigger group than Democrats, outnumbering them by 27,634.

And it's the independents who will decide those contests.

A great unknown remains: Who actually votes. Traditionally, it's not young people, who account for about a quarter of the nation's double haters. Overall, they are more negative about both parties ― and their alienation has grown over the past two years, according to the Marquette poll. And the percentage of Black, Hispanic and multiracial groups who can be considered double haters has grown.

Such alienation has been a powerful force for change in the past. More than a century ago, it fueled the populist and progressive movements, which in turn created political parties that ran as alternatives to the major parties. The populists under James B. Weaver won nearly 9% of the vote in 1892. In various, unrelated incarnations, movements named the Progressive Party won 27.4% of the vote (and 88 electoral votes) with former President Theodore Roosevelt the nominee in 1912; 16.6% (and 13 electoral votes) with Sen. Robert La Follette Sr. as its nominee; and 2.4% (but no electoral votes) with former Vice President Henry Wallace as its 1948 nominee.

All these are examples of double hatreds of the past ― and emblems that Americans have looked askance at the major parties throughout the country's history.

That's in part because the evil that political parties do lives after them, which is why Shakespeare would recognize the broad sweep of American politics. The good ― Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy for the Democrats, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republicans ― is oft interred with their bones. Double haters now reign supreme.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.