July 30, 2025 - 9:30pm
The Democratic Party’s ongoing effort to right the ship after last year’s election, mount an effective opposition to Donald Trump, and forge a workable course for the future has struggled to take off. The main reason is that they can’t even seem to agree on why they lost or what that future course looks like.
The latest manifestation of this dysfunction came on the floor of the US Senate this week. According to a New York Times review of events, Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, who represents a state Trump won in 2024, asked for unanimous consent to pass a package of bills related to policing, including to bolster mental health services for officers and help fund training programmes. In the midst of her speech, a Democratic colleague, Cory Booker of New Jersey, rose to object, arguing that any effort to pass laws right now would make them “complicit” in aiding an authoritarian president.
The ensuing exchange reflected a broader question engulfing the Democrats right now: is it more important for the party to “resist” Trump or to focus on developing an alternative governing vision for the country? The party’s voters have signalled that they want their leaders to step up and more strongly oppose Trump.
A recent survey from the Wall Street Journal showed that while Trump and Republicans are underwater, Democrats’ favourability is at a historic low. Some of this is due to dissatisfaction among their own voters, but other polls show they remain less popular than Republicans among crucial voting blocs like non-college voters (~32%) and independents (22%). Moreover, the Journal’s poll shows that respondents overall trusted congressional Republicans more than congressional Democrats on all but two issues (healthcare and vaccines). In other words, Trump’s decline has not necessarily been the Democrats’ gain. As one of the Democratic pollsters behind the poll put it, “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party.”
In some ways, the Democrats’ low standing at this moment is natural when viewed in a historical context. Parties that lose a big national election and whose incumbent president left office with very low approval tend to take a while to recover. Look no further back than 2008. As a historically unpopular George W. Bush left office, the war in Iraq was trending south, the economy had been wrecked, and Wall Street received a highly unpopular bailout. After Barack Obama won a decisive victory, he entered his first term with historically large majorities in Congress. Still licking their wounds from that rout, the Republicans’ approval rating at the start of 2009 was a paltry 28% — even as Obama’s own approval was beginning to fall as well.
The following November, Republicans made historic gains in the midterms, capturing the greatest number of House seats (64) since the Great Depression era. So, despite their current woes, the Democrats — who also now enjoy a growing turnout advantage over Republicans in off-year elections — should do well in next year’s midterm election.
But there are longer-term questions plaguing the party. One of the biggest is how they can rebuild the coalition that made them dominant in presidential elections under Obama. That coalition included much stronger support from key constituencies: working-class voters, rural voters, and young men — all of whom have swung to Trump over the past decade. It has become clear that simply being anti-Trump isn’t going to cut it. It didn’t work when Kamala Harris tried it, and it’s not working right now for Democrats in Congress. It’s looking like the “Never Trump” share of America is close to hitting its ceiling.
The party would be better served by working to build an alternate agenda to Trump’s, which the Journal’s survey and others show voters are increasingly souring on. This might look like championing economic policies that voters in both parties support, such as raising the federal minimum wage, addressing healthcare affordability issues, and even raising taxes on the wealthy as well as shoring up the solvency of highly popular programmes like Social Security and Medicare. It’ll also likely require a tough look at the party’s stances on hot-button cultural topics.
Democrats’ north star must be the swing voters whose support they’ve lost since the Obama era. They may not win them all back, but the status quo won’t work either, especially if the party hopes to regularly compete for Senate majorities or the presidency anytime soon. Outlining a positive agenda and meeting voters where they are is likely to be a better bet than the same old path of #resistance.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe