Top Democrats Warn: Party in Deepest Crisis in 50 Years—And It Could Get Worse
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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