Who’s driving this donkey? Losing Dems need a – Latest News
On Nov. 5, the Democratic Party obtained what counts in our hyper-polarized age as a complete drubbing.
Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved over his 2016 and 2020 performances with practically each demographic subcategory, and have become the primary Republican in 20 years to win the favored vote.
In the tip, Vice President Kamala Harris’ $1 billion-plus conflict chest and much-praised “ground game” proved a boon to the faculty funds of Democratic consultants and never a lot else.
“This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party,” one congressman informed Punchbowl News on the morning after the election. “People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”
Post-election polling confirms that the social gathering’s national model is within the Dumpster.
A late January Quinnipiac ballot discovered that solely 31% of voters maintain a favorable opinion of the Democrats, versus 57% with an unfavorable one.
By distinction, Republican favorability stood at 43% — nonetheless underwater, however 12 factors higher — whereas Trump loved the very best approval score of his political profession, 53%, based on a February ballot from CBS/YouGov.
Rejection of progressivism
While voters are undoubtedly indignant on the social gathering that gave us the Biden administration, surveys from Democratic polling corporations recommend a broader public rejection of progressive cultural politics.
According to an election postmortem by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint, revealed in mid-November, swing voters who broke for Trump — as 52% did, in contrast with solely 36% for Harris — noticed Democrats as being more supportive of immigrants than of American residents (73%), eager to “promote transgender ideology” (72%), being “too focused on identity politics” (67%), and having “extreme ideas” about “immigration” (69%) and “race and gender” (63%).
The Progressive Policy Institute’s survey of working-class voters discovered that 68% of respondents stated that Democrats had moved too far left, in contrast with 47% who stated that Republicans had moved too far proper.
This broad-based public exhaustion with cultural progressivism, seen not merely in polling but in addition in Trump’s newfound standing as a cultural icon, appears to recommend that the Democrats’ best path ahead is to ditch “wokeness” and pivot to the middle.
Several distinguished Democrats have made simply this argument. In a memo reported by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Democratic donor adviser and Obama White House veteran Seth London stated that his social gathering’s rebrand ought to “begin with a complete rejection of race- and group-based identity politics,” a sentiment echoed by former Obama White House chief of workers Rahm Emanuel, who informed Martin that “identity politics did not work electorally” and had “failed miserably strategically.”
Party surrogates have been aggressive in taking intention at “the groups,” the sprawling community of progressive nonprofits and advocacy organizations that, beneath Biden particularly, assumed the position of the Democrats’ coverage and mental vanguard.
(As the Department of Government Efficiency has highlighted, many of these teams weren’t solely highly effective within the coalition; they had been additionally being sponsored by taxpayers.)
Blowback vs. moderation
But abandoning id politics — and the teams — is simpler stated than carried out.
Shortly after the election, Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts declared that the social gathering needed to be “brutally honest” about how out of step its place on transgender points was with the American public.
As the daddy of two younger daughters, Moulton informed The New York Times, he agreed with the eight in ten Americans who are not looking for schoolgirls “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”
The blowback was extreme.
Activists, spurred on by native Democratic officers and national journalists and nonprofits, accused Moulton of “scapegoating” trans people, descended on his workplace for a “Neighbors Against Hate” rally, and pledged to major him in his subsequent election.
Moulton’s marketing campaign supervisor and the director of his political motion committee stop in protest of his remarks, and the chairwoman of the Salem Democratic City Committee denounced him in an e-mail as a “Nazi cooperator.”
The Democratic National Committee’s elections for a chairman this February, meantime, had been classic woke surrealism, straight out of 2020.
The occasion featured a land acknowledgment, anti-Trump slave spirituals, and an announcement by outgoing chairman Jamie Harrison explaining how “nonbinary individuals” would get counted beneath guidelines mandating gender stability amongst DNC officers.
‘I’m too radical for America’
The DNC elected as one of its vice chairmen the Gen Z skilled activist David Hogg, whose X account over the previous seven years reads like an AI-generated parody of elite progressive extra.
Hogg had even posted in 2022 that “I’m one of the most politically toxic people in the country and I’m too radical for American politics,” suggesting that he had a more correct view of political actuality than the 2025 model of his social gathering.
Identity politics has sway within the Democratic Party for a cause.
Ideologically, as Christopher Caldwell has argued, id politics — or “civil rights, broadly understood,” in his terminology — is the glue of the fashionable Democratic coalition, binding collectively its extremely educated and prosperous city skilled wing with its mass electoral base of minorities.
“The groups” usually are not exterior to the social gathering however a important factor of its machinery.
They help write Democratic insurance policies, prepare and provide staffers for Democratic administrations and congressional places of work, and register and set up voters during election season.
They present patronage — Hogg, earlier than changing into DNC vice chairman, served for years because the secretary of March for Our Lives Action Fund — and money, deciding which campaigns, points, and even leisure will get funded.
When the Biden administration declared, because it typically did, a “whole of society” dedication to ending this or that injustice, what this meant in apply was deputizing the teams as coequal authorities companions in implementing the administration’s targets.
When Biden defied the teams by refusing to interrupt publicly from Israel, they helped set up mass protests in opposition to him and fomented resistance to the coverage within his own administration.
Perhaps essentially the most important impediment for Democrats’ attempt to buck their activist wing is that the teams replicate the preferences of social gathering donors.
The Democratic donor class ranges from household foundations like Ford and Rockefeller to newer philanthropic and grantmaking organizations primarily based on finance and tech fortunes, resembling George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the varied branches of Pierre Omidyar’s empire, and the San Francisco–primarily based Tides Nexus.
These donors back not solely a lot of the organized progressive motion but in addition the huge exterior assist equipment that wages political warfare on the social gathering’s behalf.
To take one small however telling instance: The marketing campaign to take away Trump from the presidential poll beneath the 14th Amendment was spearheaded by a 501(c)(3) known as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), half of the nonprofit and advocacy machine run by longtime Democratic operative David Brock.
Between 2017 and 2021, CREW obtained $2.85 million from Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society — half of the identical philanthropic empire that, in 2020, introduced $220 million in funding for “efforts to achieve racial equality.”
Maybe a charismatic new social gathering chief might defy this infrastructure and pivot to the middle, the best way Trump defied a highly effective GOP constituency, the institutional pro-life motion, during his 2024 marketing campaign.
Absent that, nevertheless, the Democrats’ path of least resistance within the close to time period might be to float within the reverse direction — towards a additional embrace of the millennial and Gen Z left.
Populist pivot
The framework would probably be what social gathering leaders have began calling “economic” or “authentic” populism, outlined by a Bernie Sanders–esque criticism of “oligarchy” that de-emphasizes cultural politics rhetorically with out truly abandoning the social gathering’s cultural commitments.
The clearest instance of this populist pivot comes from Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who, for the reason that election, has emerged as a main voice in an in any other case demoralized and disorganized Democratic opposition.
In memos, interviews, and X posts, Murphy has argued for the social gathering to coalesce round a message concentrating on particular billionaire villains, together with Elon Musk.
When parts of the unconventional left (together with former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz) brazenly celebrated the December homicide of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Murphy was fast to discern a political alternative.
No, one shouldn’t assassinate executives in Midtown Manhattan, Murphy conceded in an X video posted shortly after the killing — however he felt compelled to acknowledge the nation’s anger in regards to the “thousands of people who die often anonymous deaths every single day at the hands of a health care industry that mostly doesn’t give a s–t.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren equally spoke of the “visceral response from people across the country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies.”
While Warren and Murphy have performed footsie with the far left, others within the Democratic aristocracy have made more open overtures.
“Pod Save America,” a podcast hosted by three former Obama speechwriters that acts as a clearinghouse for the social gathering management’s conversations with itself, enthusiastically backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unsuccessful bid to turn out to be the rating Democratic member on the highly effective House Oversight Committee after which lamented her loss to 74-year-old Gerry Connolly as a victory for the “gerontocracy.”
Amid chatter in regards to the need for a “Democratic Joe Rogan,” “Pod Save America” invited the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker for a dialogue of the place the Democrats went fallacious in 2024.
A well-liked influencer who straddles the worlds of elite progressive media (his uncle is Cenk Uygur of “The Young Turks”) and the communist-adjacent milieu of a newly radicalized millennial/Gen Z left, Piker has the potential to play a main position within the Democrats’ future.
A extensively shared Slate profile of the “hot” and “dangerous” Piker noticed that his “access” — he has hosted Ocasio-Cortez and Biden FTC chief Lina Khan on his stream — is “evidence of a fledgling effort to make him more central to Democratic messaging.”
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The electoral prospects of this rebrand appear doubtful.
In a post on the Liberal Patriot, the disaffected Democratic strategist Ruy Texeira notes that it’s “magical thinking” to imagine that voters will abruptly neglect about Democrats’ cultural radicalism and inept governance if the social gathering focuses on class conflict.
Much of Trump’s populist appeal, he observes, comes from working-class resentment of progressive cultural politics — “soak the rich” messaging will do nothing to handle it.
But a pivot to the left would have not less than one benefit: delaying any reckoning with the social gathering management that introduced the Democrats to this level.
It was, after all, the Obama administration that oversaw the rise of the new id politics and its nationwide implementation by way of the coercive energy of the federal forms.
It was the outgoing Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton marketing campaign that cooked up Russiagate and tried to make use of the ensuing hysteria to consolidate the national security institution in opposition to Trump.
And it was the Biden administration that pushed an financial agenda that pundits described as “economic populism” and “social democracy” and impressed common comparisons of Biden with FDR.
That agenda yielded the inflation that voters final November cited as a key cause for giving Democrats the shove.
It was the Obama and (opposite to delusion) Biden administrations that oversaw the lean in American overseas coverage away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and towards Iran, paving the best way for the Gaza conflict that, satirically, ended up inflaming the left in opposition to Biden and serving as an electoral millstone round his neck.
In the Italian novel “The Leopard,” set during the Nineteenth-century motion for national unification, a younger Sicilian nobleman urges his uncle, a highly effective conservative landowner allied with the Bourbons, to flip his allegiance to Garibaldi’s nationalists to keep away from being caught on the shedding facet.
As the younger man explains, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Democratic management appears to be pondering equally.
What advocates of the pivot to the left are suggesting, in impact, is a rehash of what they’ve pushed as social gathering leaders over the previous decade and a half — albeit with recent younger faces and “radical” new antiestablishment branding to “meet our moment.”
Given the institutional energy of the social gathering, they could succeed.
But as Donald Trump proved in 2016, a social gathering exhausted of concepts, with a management class sporting a file of failures, makes a prime goal for a hostile takeover.
Park MacDougald is a fellow on the Manhattan Institute and editor of The Scroll, Tablet’s every day publication. From City Journal.
