Top Democrats Warn: Party in Deepest Crisis in 50 Years—And It Could Get Worse
“Millennials were one of the most progressive generations, and it’s looking like Gen Z is about to be one of the most conservative.”
Quinnipiac University released a poll last month that found just 40% of registered Democrats surveyed approved of the job performance of congressional Democrats while 49% disapproved. That’s a stark contrast to one year ago, when 75% of Democrats expressed approval, while only 21% disapproved.
The 35-point decline, the lowest level of support in this poll’s history, is yet another sign that the Democratic Party is in serious trouble.
Axios reached out to top Democrats to discuss the party’s current state and its future direction. Their responses reflected the ongoing sense of doom and gloom that has loomed over the party since the election, with many fearing the situation could continue to deteriorate.
Axios compiled a list of the most urgent challenges facing the party. Apart from perhaps the first two items on the list, there’s little that Democrats can do in the short to medium term to improve their position – other than staging violent protests and orchestrating a judicial coup, that is.
- The party has its lowest favorability ever.
- No popular national leader to help improve it.
- Insufficient numbers to stop most legislation in Congress.
- A durable minority on the Supreme Court.
- Dwindling influence over the media ecosystem, with right-leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascendant.
- Young voters are growing dramatically more conservative.
- A bad 2026 map for Senate races.
- Democratic Senate retirements could make it harder for the party to flip the House, with members tempted by statewide races.
- There are only three House Republicans in districts former Vice President Harris won in 2024, a dim sign for a Democratic surge. There were 23 eight years ago in seats Hillary Clinton won.
- And, thanks to the number of people fleeing blue states, the math for a Dem to win the presidency will just get harder in 2030.
Former adviser to President Bill Clinton and Democratic strategist David Sosnik told the outlet “this is [the] Dems’ deepest hole in at least the 45 years since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” He added that “the 2024 election was at least as much a repudiation of Democrats as it was a victory for Trump.”
The article cites New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein who has been sounding the alarm about what the House and electoral vote maps will look like after the 2030 census. Because people are moving out of blue states including California, Minnesota, and New York and into red states such as Florida and Texas, Democrats “stand to lose as many as a dozen House seats and electoral votes.”
On the Friday night edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, Klein said that under this post-2030 census scenario, if a Democratic presidential candidate were to carry all the states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won in November, plus Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they would still lose the election.
Last week, Klein pointed out something that has been obvious to the rest of us since the day after the election. “Democrats are losing working-class voters. They’re seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish. They’re losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party.”
You may have read about the “deep comprehensive poll” released by Democratic pollster David Shor of Blue Rose Research last week. Axios tells us that the results are “based on 26 million online responses collected over the course of 2024, and filtered to adjust to oddities of modern polling.”
Yet, except for perhaps attaching some numbers to what we already know, the results really don’t tell us much.
Discussing his findings on Klein’s podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, Shor said his most alarming discovery is the growing support for pro-Trump, MAGA, and Republican views among young men, immigrants, and anyone outside the party’s most progressive base.
Shor estimates a 23-point shift away from Democrats among immigrants, with an especially sharp decline among conservative-leaning Hispanics, where Democratic support has dropped by 50%.
“Young voters—regardless of race and gender—have become more Republican,” he noted. “Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”
Ali Mortell, director of research at Blue Rose Research, echoed Shor’s remarks, telling Axios, “Millennials were one of the most progressive generations, and it’s looking like Gen Z is about to be one of the most conservative.”
Yes, but why is that? Why is Gen Z rejecting progressivism for conservatism? What can Democrats do to change this trend? Well, neither Shor nor Mortell told us.
Despite their “comprehensive” project, the only Democrat who appeared to have heard the message of the 2024 election was former Chicago Mayor, former White House chief of staff, and possible 2028 presidential candidate Rahm Emmanuel.
He told Axios, “The public has seen us as more focused around a set of cultural interests and issues — climate, ‘woke,’ DEI, abortion — than the American people. All those I care about. But they consumed both our intellectual and thematic energy. The American people said: You care more about that than everything else.”
Emanuel continued, “We used to have liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats. Now we’re basically a liberal party, because African American and Hispanic voters went out the back door. They’re the ones who walked as we became more liberal.”
“The American dream is unaffordable and inaccessible,” he added. “And that is totally unacceptable. … The forgotten middle class has to be our North Star.”
Finally, a Democrat who “gets it.”
The article concludes by acknowledging that the despair within the Democratic Party “is not Republican spin.” It’s real, it’s not going away anytime soon, and it could even get worse.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
AOC is their only hope, and hope is fleeing the party at an alarming rate.
yep, hope is going
and dope is growing
bad medicine
Up is down, left is right, have we not heard this before?
Yes, but if you want to be the opposite of MAGA, that’s the way you have to go.
Indeed. Radical leftism, or plain old fashioned communism, is what they have left. The grift is disappearing, and their ActBlue funding machine is being shut down.
That leaves the communists in the media and academia.
Joe McCarthy wasn’t just right, he was damn right.
Oh, please run AOC in 2028!
I wouldn’t characterizel that wretched, dumb-as-rocks twit as representing much “hope.” Occasional-Cortex is yet another dim-witted, histrionic, narcissistic, lazy, entitled and nagging Dhimmi-crat harridan/scold/termagant/shrew, like crone-harlot, Harris. Thought the leftist media will strive mightily to deify her and anoint her as the new Dhimmi-crat savior, a la Obama, she has zero appeal to the voters whom the Dhimmi-crats need to appeal to, in order to win national elections.
You drove the sane liberals to be independents and you can’t seem to understand why your ship is sinking.
Firebombing Teslas to convince the base you are resisting Trump is insane. The Party has lost its mind and deserves what it is getting.
Not entirely. It does build a cadre of activists who are willing to commit more serious crimes. Once you have done arsenious tomfoolery that can get you a 20 year sentence, it is a small step to graduate to murder. Both houses of Congress could be flipped by selective assassination.
Hilariously, they seem to believe their own BS. Not a winning strategy.
Side note: my local NYC invader family is hiding their Cyber Truck in my town. LOL!!
The Democratic Party, in modern times, has been a party devoted to the advancement of socialism, which is simply a system of government where workers pay taxes to subsidize the political class in exchange for the illusion of security. They will lie, and lie some more, but they can never abandon that fundamental framework, or they destroy themselves.
The problem the Democrat Party has is that a significant number of their base BELIEVES their propaganda about Trump being a fascist Nazi and that their lives are literally at risk and trans people are going to be loaded into cars bound for camps.
And if you actually BELIEVE that, then of course you aren’t happy with the Democrats ‘working’ with the administration and just meekly mouthing speeches.
That’s the Democrat Party’s problem in a nutshell. Their base BELIEVES the propaganda they’ve been spewing, and they can’t stop it.
They might all end up in straightjackets instead of camps and it will be their own feeble minded faults
The Left recruits by claiming moral and intellectual superiority. It’s method of retort is at first to claim you don’t get it, you’re uneducated or uninformed or possibly stupid (Basket of Deplorables). If you continue and challenge them with tough questions you’re evil or a Nazi, etc. With Trump they went full retard with evil and everything he says or does must be wrong and defeated. This put them in a box of always having an answer even before the question is asked. Trump just continues to put them on the wrong side of issues by default.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time.”
President Trump and the Republican Party came away from the 2024 election looking really good. But we can’t be complacent. Some folks have labeled the victory a Mandate and a landslide. Not to take anything away from the victories, President Trump only won the popular vote by around 1.5% or around 2.3 million people. Yes, he wiped up in the electoral college, which is the only thing that matters. But if those 2.3 million folks move around to other states the tables could be turned.
I don’t get to excited when I read about the Democrats being in disarray (of course I do, who doesn’t) because the margin was thin and we need to grow it.
The Democrats are a mess, and that’s good. We need to get more of them to embrace conservative values. We need to grow MAGA.
I am worried about the special elections for April 1 that have already started. The early numbers do not look too good. A lot of Trump voters don’t bother with special elections, but they are critical. Control of the House is at stake.
My daughter told me yesterday that voting for Democrats is like driving drunk. Nothing unusual for her as from an early age she was always very conservative.
The Dems’ “crisis” is temporary. They own media, newsrooms, academia, virtually all women under 40 years of age, governmental bureaucracies, entertainment, CIA, etc, etc …. They’ll be completely rehabilitated and ready to lead by 2028. MSM will let you know. Stay tuned,
I suspect big events will happen, and then the Democrats will pounce. Look at how they exploited COVID back in 2020. As soon as it happened they were on it right away. It didn’t take them long to formulate and implement a game plan, and in fact, they already had pandemic plans on the shelf. They have a lot of plans on the shelf right now, waiting to be implemented.
Dig deeper you clowns. Dig deeper! Double down and triple down. The whole your digging can always be deeper until you reach China which is where you want to be anyways.
Could the Democrat party get any worse?
Yes.
How is that possible?
As Democrats get worse, their party gets worse.
The real takeaway IMO is the partisan split between age cohorts and between College educated Women and Men +non college educated Women. The majority of Men age 75+ went for Harris over Trump but Gen Z Men went for Trump at a higher % than the 75+ Men went for Harris. The majority of Non college educated Men and Women went for Trump as did the majority of College educated Men.
All together it means that the core d/prog voter shifted from blue collar to largely College.educated Women and Boomers/Silent Gen voters. Those older voters ain’t gonna be around forever. The College Educated Women who by and large didn’t get a STEM degree are likely to continue to.support collectivist BS they were indoctrinated with and politicians who promise student debt repudiation.
IOW MAGA/MAHA center/right populist movement can write them off b/c these voters are far less likely to support our philosophy or candidates. Instead we.should focus outreach at Men, the working class, the trades emphasising economic, immigration and foreign policy and tax proposals that appeal to middle America, more traditionally minded Main Street folks. Though d/prog support for Tranny primacy, open borders, boondoggle gov’t spending, insane debt and coddling criminals is doing much of the heavy lifting, all we gotta do is be welcoming to those disaffected d/prog who seek to join. We shouldn’t put them immediately in party leadership or demand they embrace everything we believe all at once just that they be open minded enough to inquire and listen and we can convince them over time. They would have already made the key step in leaving.the d/prog.
I wonder why the extra 18 million voters Joe got in 2020 didn’t come out for the party?
Lara Trump was closely watching for the types of fraud that occurred in 2020, and “poof!” that “mysterious” surge in ballots disappeared.
Cause they no longer exist, or never existed.
Emmanuel is either ignorant or stubborn. Due to the D lack of knowledge and their preference to take jobs where it’s almost impossible, they no longer think or look for ways to change the bad or even invent much.
The only solution for Ds is to support programs that the Rs are working to implement. Problem with that, they gain nothing.
When I first got into politics, my friend warned me, “Overconfidence is a mortal sin.” Rs better keep that line front and center through all upcoming elections.
The biggest problem is people are no longer afraid of the woke.
20 years ago, the “Blue Dog” democrats consisted of 56 members. Today, that number is 10. There were some pretty solid conservative democrats when I was growing up … like JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
But today that party is a woke mess of bitches and bimbos. A toast … to even more bitches and bimbos!!
Don’t forget communists!!
“And, thanks to the number of people fleeing blue states, the math for a Dem to win the presidency will just get harder in 2030.”
A neat trick for either party as there is no presidential election that year.
True …but there is a census which is probably gonna shift a dozen or so Electoral College votes and the associated HoR CD from Blue/Purple to Red States. So the 2032 election will be on more favorable ground IF we can keep the Census and reapportionment on the level by ensuring that under/over counts are eliminated and ‘mistakes’ don’t all cut against Red States.
Especially if Trump pulls some unexpected sleight of hand limiting the census to citizens.
I wonder how many people will be deleted from the rolls once the Social Security system is purged of dead people with active SSNs?
There must be 10s of millions of people where Ma and Pa died at home and got buried behind the barn, but their kids are still collecting SS every month, and the local Doc is in on it and billing Medicare every month and splitting the loot with the kids.
They’re talking about the Illuminati presidency — the only one that really matters.
No, but it is a Census and Midterm year, and reapportionment happens in 2032.
I have an idea to save the Democratic Party. Platform Bestiality. No brainer, as libs seem to say. Easy pick up pf millions of votes.
Free Braaaaaaaaaaains for All!
“Millennials were one of the most progressive generations, and it’s looking like Gen Z is about to be one of the most conservative.”
I think this is one of the most surprising political developments during my lifetime. If someone would have told 5-years ago this is how it would shake out, there is no way I would have believed them. These are the people who have been under the most oppressive yolk of indoctrination – parents, schools, entertainment, media – and yet because of developments on the ground, they reflexively turned to the right. It’s fascinating, IMO.
It really makes me wonder how the kids who are adolescents and teens right now who are the targets of the greatest grooming movement in human history will respond when they start voting.
“and yet because of developments on the ground”
Or, the reason is not political but hormonal.
Every generation naturally rebels against their parents’ values. It’s how they establish their own identities.
It’s one of the two reasons that physical Galt’s Gulches can never work.
That, and like everything else, the Dems are overselling their radical leftism.
This doesn’t explain Washington State and Oregon.
Two once purple states.
They keep doubling down on stupid.
They hate their rural residents.
They have the worst crime and nutty (evil) tranny policies.
They have the worst anti-police, pro criminal legislatures.
They embrace druggies, illegals, cartels, human traffic’ing.
The 2020 election was our barometer of fleeing. Then 2022 affirmed there was no turn around. We fled in 2023, and they super double-tripled down on the stupid and crazy.
They keep getting blue-er. ????? WHY? They’ve turned these once wonderful states into hell holes that seemingly have a fetish for normalizing dystopia that is literally hell on earth.
You expect inmates to voluntarily give an asylum BACK? That never happens.
the left puts the children in charge
the gop has been afraid to fight it
here we are
Time for toughlove.
“Top Donks Warn: Party in Deepest Crisis in 50 Years – and It Could Get Worse!”
Wait, and so, this is a problem?
It will be very painful…for them.
There’s ANOTHER “truth” that is being exposed that has caused the DEMOcrats’ decline in numbers – TRUTH IS BEING EXPOSED!
Before all the podcasters and alternate media, the DEMOcrats and their lapdogs controlled the news! People sat in front of their tv’s and absorbed the left’s propaganda like it was the Gospel!
Another “TRUTH” that has been exposed is the absolute corruption and waste of US TAXPAYERS’ MONEY! Now people have seen WHERE and HOW MUCH has been spent on ridiculous, and sometimes DANGEROUS, “studies”! It’s kind of a kick in the nads to read about a study of Japanese Quail and how they are more promiscuous when high on cocaine and realize that EVERY PENNY you’ve PAID IN FEDERAL TAXES was just snorted up by a sex crazed quail!! I want my money back or a few of those quail carcasses!!
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