In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, polls and focus groups suggested that the Democratic Party had suffered more than an election defeat. It looked as though key blocs of voters had irrevocably turned their backs on Democrats as triumphalist Republicans boasted about becoming the party of the working class.
In the six months since Donald Trump took back the Oval Office, his favorability ratings, including on immigration, have fallen, but his decline has not been accompanied by a revival of support for the Democratic Party. The party continues to suffer severe reputational damage, which may not be reparable until 2028, when the Democratic presidential nominee will have a chance to redefine the party’s image as only a party leader can.
Before exploring the dark side for Democrats, let’s first acknowledge three bright spots.
One, prospective Democrats who are jockeying for early position and recognition in the party’s presidential nomination contest are moving toward the center. As Adam Wren and Elena Schneider reported in “
The Great Un-Awokening,” a June 6 piece in Politico, “Searching for a path out of the political wilderness, potential 2028 candidates, especially those hailing from blue states, are attempting to ratchet back a leftward lurch on social issues that some in the party say cost them the November election.”
Wren and Schneider cited Gov. Gavin Newsom’s break with progressive orthodoxy when he declared that allowing transgender athletes to participate in female college sports was “unfair.” They also cited Gov. Wes Moore’s veto of “a bill that took steps toward reparations.”
Two, there has been a burst of activity, including the formation of groups on the center-left seeking a more moderate Democratic agenda, including
Searchlight, led by Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and to Harry Reid, a former Senate majority leader. In addition, there is growing interest in
Welcome PAC, a centrist Democratic group founded in 2021 that has contributed to moderate House Democrats like Jared Golden, Mary Peltola and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
Three, Democratic voters are far more enthusiastic heading into the 2026 elections than Republicans are. A
CNN poll conducted July 10 through 13 found that 74 percent of surveyed Democrats described themselves as “extremely motivated” to vote next year, compared with 54 percent of Republicans, as did 75 percent of liberals, compared with 52 percent of conservatives.
Even so, these positive developments pale in comparison to the negative trends facing Democrats, exemplified in data collected by Navigator Research, a consortium of progressive polling firms that conducted focus groups in December 2024, and in poll results released on June 26 this year.
The December focus groups produced “a pretty scathing rebuke” of the Democratic Party brand, according to Rachael Russell, the director of polling and analytics at Navigator. “This weakness they see — Democrats not getting things done, not being able to actually fight for people — is something that needs to be figured out,” Russell
told Politico.
Some of the comments by focus group participants were devastating. One compared the Democratic Party to an ostrich because “they’ve got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they’re failing.” Another described the party as “not a friend of the working class anymore.”
The
Navigator poll released in June 2025 showed continuing — and in some cases worsening — doubts about the Democratic Party in the electorate. Congressional Democrats as well as Republicans had negative favorability ratings, but the Democrats were somewhat worse off (38 percent favorable and 60 percent negative) than Republicans (42 percent and 57 percent).
Navigator tracked views on a range of issues and found that Republicans in Congress held a 46 to 41 percent advantage over Democrats on the question of which party is “handling the economy” better, along with a Republican advantage (44 to 38 percent) on “dealing with inflation.”
More important, Navigator surveys showed Democrats losing ground on issues the party once owned, including “Which party is better at looking out for working people?” which is now tied at 43 percent.
On Nov. 11, 2024, Austin Sarat, a political scientist at Amherst College, argued in
an essay published in The Hill, “Voters Rejected a ‘Woke’ America — Time for Democrats to Listen and Learn,” “If Democrats and progressives are ever to come to terms with the Trump phenomenon, they will have to come to terms with the fact that a majority of American voters cast their ballots for him, knowing him to be crude, offensive and as politically incorrect as anyone could be.”
I asked Sarat how he saw Democratic prospects now, and his emailed reply was ambiguous:
I don’t think that the Democrats have weaned themselves from their woke agenda, though I think we can see signs of progress in that direction. The Democratic brand has been deeply damaged by its longtime association with identity politics. That association is not easy to shake.
But I see signs of progress. To see them, you have to look less at the party apparatus or its leadership and more toward its base. One place that I would look at is what is happening in the colleges and universities that feed the Democratic Party’s highly educated constituency. There, you see clear signs of rethinking of the politics of woke.
At the same time, Sarat continued,
polls show that the party’s favorability ratings are at an all-time low. Drilling down on that data shows just how much trouble the party is in. Almost 60 percent of the American public thinks that the party “prioritizes other groups of people that don’t include me.” It seems clear that the electorate is moving to the right on a variety of social issues. That makes the Democratic Party anathema to many voters, including especially men and some people of color.
On March 19, Stuart Gottlieb, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia, was even more pessimistic about Democratic prospects. In a Newsweek
essay, “Why the 2024 Election Shattered the Democratic Party,” he argued that the 2024 rout of the Democrats reflected “fundamental shifts in America’s political landscape” and that “in the age of Trump, Americans of all stripes will vote not based on their racial or ethnic identity, but on which party they believe is better attuned to their overall needs and concerns.”
I asked Gottlieb whether he continues to stand by his analysis, and he emailed me back:
I believe my March piece is as true today as ever: Democratic Party approval has actually declined since then. Worse for Democrats — their numbers remain terrible even as Trump’s poll numbers have dipped overall, including on issues like immigration and the economy. So what gives? Why do many/most Americans still not view the Democrats as a viable alternative?
Gottlieb’s answer to his own question:
This is a realignment that has significant staying power. The standard advice to Democrats — come back to the center! focus on “affordability”! protect migrants from deportation! — might have worked in the 1990s, but it is falling on deaf ears now because the Democrats have lost credibility with far too many swaths of voters and the brand is deeply tainted.
One widely cited survey, the
Quinnipiac University National Poll, released on July 16, found that approval of congressional Democrats had fallen to 19 percent, the lowest level since Quinnipiac first posed the question in 2007. In contrast, according to Quinnipiac, 33 percent of voters approved of Republicans in Congress.
Another poll question result that Democratic insiders find worrisome is the so-called generic vote, in which voters are asked whether they would support a Democrat or Republican for Congress. The
RealClearPolitics average of the seven most recent surveys gave Democrats a 2.5-point advantage, 45.1 percent to 42.6 percent.
While seemingly favorable to Democrats, a 2.5-percentage-point advantage is no guarantee of success — and it is far below the party’s edge going into the 2018 elections during Trump’s first term. Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University,
wrote about the generic ballot during the 12 months from May 2017 to April 2018 and found that on average, “Democrats led by 7.1 points,” with the lowest level at “6.2 points in February 2018.”
A separate
Navigator survey of voters in battleground House districts released on March 12 revealed a serious weakness in the party’s ability to win voter support. The survey cited the following Democratic vulnerabilities:
A majority of voters said the phrase “values work” did not describe congressional Democrats and that the phrase “looks out for working people” did not describe House Democrats.
Do Democrats “have the right priorities?” Fifty-eight percent said no; 39 percent said yes.
It didn’t stop there. Majorities of voters in battleground districts said that congressional Democrats were “too focused on being politically correct,” “too liberal” and too “elitist.”
There are some analysts who argue that the Democratic difficulties of 2024 have deeper roots than is commonly recognized.
Anat Shenker-Osorio, the founder of ASO Communications, a progressive research firm, contended in an email that the party’s problems go back to the rebranding process that took place during the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president:
Having enjoyed a massive brand advantage under Franklin Delano Roosevelt by standing with the working class in word and in deed and against the owning class that Republicans represented, the Democratic Party decided to redo its formula, rebranding as “New Democrats.”
Passing laws to decimate welfare and undermine labor while also adopting the antigovernment language of its rivals, Democrats betrayed their base and lent credence to their opposition’s story line. No longer were there clear sides — with Democrats standing proudly for the little guy — but instead “a rising tide” that purportedly lifted all boats. When in fact, yachts floated while everyday Americans were left to drown in the wake of declining wages, disappearing pensions and impoverishing health care.
Shenker-Osorio acknowledged that this strategy
allowed some wins along the way, but overall it shifted the terrain of American life and, with it, elections. Democrats shrank their best outreach — labor unions — while Republicans grew theirs — evangelical churches. Moreover, Democrats created an opening for the status-threat story authoritarians the world over rely upon: blaming some Other for the struggles that working-class people face.
Shenker-Osorio argued further that
it’s very obvious what voters want from Democrats: to show, not tell, they are standing up to this MAGA regime of the bullies, for the billionaires. According to recent
Research Collaborative findings with Data for Progress, 55 percent of Trump-opposing voters support Democratic leaders using all administrative procedures at their disposal to slow down or stop MAGA Republican bills making their way through Congress and believe this action would likely make a difference in building opposition to the Trump administration.
In an earlier survey, between 77 to 89 percent of voters who oppose Trump, including 80 to 93 percent of Democrats and 66 to 88 percent of independents, would approve of Democratic leaders using various resistance tactics to oppose the Trump administration’s policies.
When I asked
Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the
Analyst Institute Board, about the problems facing the Democratic Party, he challenged the legitimacy of the query, saying, “Ultimately, even posing this question prematurely reflects a kind of temporal myopia — a Groundhog Day scenario common among pundits overly fixated on current conditions.”
“Available nonpartisan polling,” Podhorzer went on to say,
consistently shows that voters, if given the chance to redo the 2024 election, would likely favor Harris. Indeed, polling and approval data indicate Trump’s initial support relied heavily on voters not fully understanding or believing he would enact his stated policies. Now that he has implemented precisely those policies — such as tariffs and mass deportations — his approval ratings have plummeted.
Demographic groups that shifted away from Democrats in 2024, Podhorzer wrote, “particularly Latino and younger voters, have moved the most sharply against Trump.” However, he conceded,
this shift doesn’t necessarily reflect renewed enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. Instead, it underscores a recurring political reality of the 21st century: widespread voter dissatisfaction with whichever party holds power. Most voters perceive neither party as adequately representing their interests.
The belief that either major party can substantially attract new voter blocs is largely confined to pundits, campaign strategists and fervent partisans. Historical trends demonstrate that electoral shifts predominantly result from voters rejecting the incumbent party, rather than from any sustained party appeal.
I have considerable respect for Podhorzer’s political judgment, but I think his analysis fails to address the real possibility that discontent with the Democratic Party — its perceived failure to value work, its political correctness, the extremity of its social and cultural liberalism — might have become deeply entrenched in the electorate. If so, a Democratic revival will prove to be not only more difficult but also more fragile than in the past, even if it is somehow achieved.
There is also the problem that Podhorzer’s approach lends itself to the adoption by the left of passivity, simply waiting out defeat in anticipation of historical trends of, in his words, “voters rejecting the incumbent party.” But all the recent trends we have been discussing suggest that passivity is risky at best and a disaster at worst.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, took a view different from Podhorzer’s. In an email, he wrote:
No one could credibly claim the Democratic Party is in good shape. When the party’s presidential candidate loses ground (compared to Biden 2020) in virtually every category of voters and in a large majority of counties throughout the nation, it is foolhardy to contend that special circumstances explain the retrenchment.
Inflation and immigration explain most of the election results — but not all. The party as a whole has become intolerant of ideological diversity in its ranks. Democrats are too far left on many social issues and insist that their candidates check all the boxes, whatever the electorate as a whole may want.
Democrats are in even worse shape than all of these factors suggest. After the 2030 census, they will lose more electoral votes and House seats. With the Democratic Party’s collapse in rural states, it is difficult to find a way for the party to secure a Senate majority with any staying power. Unless Democrats get religion on all this and decide to let a thousand flowers bloom, with nominees that fit their states and districts, as well as candidates who are not expected to fall in line on every social issue, the future really doesn’t look particularly bright for the party.
Still, the practical reality is that Trump may well have overplayed his hand, especially as discontent and anger at administration policies continue to rise and as the effects of the cuts in Medicaid and food stamps begin to bite, inflicting hardship on voters all over America, including millions of MAGA loyalists.
