The State of Democrats

Reeling from Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss, Democrats are at a crossroads. These charts illustrate just how bad things have gotten—and the possible paths forward.

1. The Party’s reputation has hit rock bottom: According to a new Quinnipiac poll, the share of a Americans who have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party is at a record high of 57%, with just 22% of men holding a favorable view of Dems.

2. The Democratic bench looks thin: Per a new Echelon Insights poll, only Kamala Harris beats out a hypothetical “Generic Democrat” in the 2028 primary race.

3. Media decline: Once-powerful liberal mouthpieces, such as CNN and MSNBC, have seen their ratings drop post-election, while competitors like Fox News and independent media upstarts, thrive.

4. Media decline Pt. 2: Progressive organizations and individuals have abandoned X/Twitter in protest of the platform’s supposed right-wing turn under Elon Musk, but they’re arguably hurting themselves by flocking to Bluesky, which offers substantially lower reach.

5. What the people want: A new Data for Progress poll has found the share of Democratic voters who want the party to focus on economic issues (63%) is more than double the percentage who want it to highlight “cultural and social issues like equity and justice.”

6. What seems to work: Since 2018, the biggest Democratic overperformers in elections have tended to be moderates, according to a Split Ticket analysis.

The latest: Democrats tapped Ken Martin as their new DNC chair this weekend, but the real action happened at the meetings leading up to the vote.

• Semafor reporter Dave Weigel said there was a “heavy rhetorical focus on diversity” at the forum, where every candidate for the chairmanship raised their hand after being asked if “racism and misogyny played a role” in Harris’ defeat.

• Asked if they would pledge to appoint more than one transgender person to an at-large seat, all but one candidate raised their hand.

Outgoing DNC chairman Jaime Harrison explaining the rules for electing officers: 

Bubba’s Two Cents

Let’s zoom out and take a bit of a longer view of what’s happened to Democrats.

After Barack Obama ascended to the White House, it looked like Democrats had assembled a powerful coalition composed of working class voters and educated urbanites. But as the conservative thinkers Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat noted many years ago, the non-college educated mass electorate has been ping-ponging back and forth between the two parties for decades

“Since 1968, [working class] voters have provided the ‘silent majority’ that elected Nixon, the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who gave the Gipper his landslides and the ‘angry white men’ who put the Gingrich G.O.P. over the top in 1994. ... Yet after each Republican triumph, this working-class constituency ... has become disillusioned with conservative governance and returned to the Democratic column,” they wrote in their 2008 book “Grand New Party.”

In other words, these voters have shown they’re up for grabs if they feel their interests aren’t being heard. And yet Democrats, who know these voters are a critical part of their coalition, have forgotten how to represent them. It’s no secret—to Democrats themselves, even—that the party has to get back in touch with the working class. And yet, they seem incapable of doing it.

Check out Wall Street Journal political correspondent Molly Ball’s take on the weekend’s DNC meeting:

"Yet as the would-be leaders bickered over party mechanics, the very pathologies that many critics argue have alienated Democrats from the American heartland were on display: a party captive to leftist activists, obsessed with divisive litmus tests, out of touch with regular people’s concerns and in thrall to a patronizing identity politics that alienates many of the very minorities it is meant to attract. Nor did anyone dare to argue that the prior administration’s failures might have contributed to voters’ sour view of Democrats, that Biden dragged the party down or that Harris was a mediocre candidate.”

Dems are being presented with a choice between the effete, cultural progressivism that’s come to define their party (and that thrills the college-educated elites who run the party) and the working class voters they desperately need to win elections.