Invisible vs. Indivisible

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that the Democratic Party’s approval rating is deep underwater, hitting an all-time low of 21 percent, giving them a net approval rating of negative 47 percent. But most surprisingly, this isn’t just among Republican (-78 percent) and independent voters (-51 percent). Democratic voters view their own party overwhelmingly negatively, giving it a net approval rating of -9 percent.

As several commentators have pointed out, just one year ago, the party was similarly disliked by Republicans and independents, but its own voters at least approved of it by +54 points. In February 2017, after Democrats blew their first election against Trump and their shell-shocked voters watched him issue the Muslim ban and pursue mass deportations, they still approved of the party by +28 points.

This most recent rating is a low that not even the GOP reached during its time in the Obama-era wilderness. In March 2009 — probably the deepest depth of this Republican political nadir for the GOP, and when it was widely disliked by almost every voter demographic — they still had a +13 point approval rating with their own voters. The lowest this ever got was the -10 among Republican voters after Obama’s 2012 reelection, which swiftly rebounded (+35 percent) after Trump’s first win, and stayed positive (+13 percent) even after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

This isn’t just on paper. This month saw thousands of liberal voters gather in Iowa City to see Bernie Sanders speak to them about how they could push back against Trump. Speaking to those who came, three things became clear: these voters were hungry for some kind of national leadership and guidance; they were uninspired and unhappy with the Democratic response to Trump; and they were buoyed by being given some kind of direction and the sense of collective action the event provided after a rough month.

This was far from the only sign. Small-dollar donations to the party, which surged in Trump’s first term, have dried up. In liberal Oakland, hundreds of angry protesters demanded that Democrats “grow a spine” and “do your job” as the party’s House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, toured promoting a children’s book — something even a House Democratic aide admitted was “tone-deaf.” A few weeks back, an avalanche of calls from terrified voters demanding they do more to oppose Trump flooded Democratic offices, Jeffries’s included.

But the party’s response has been anger, complaining that they were the targets of pressure and not Republicans, and blaming the liberal (and staunchly pro-Democratic) groups MoveOn and Indivisible for helping organize the calls. A group of corporate-friendly “moderates” is now plotting to reject the influence of activist groups going forward and “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” entirely. Jeffries has since boasted on ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith’s podcast that “the extreme left protest me more than they protest Donald Trump,” because he refuses to “bend the knee” to them.

In reality, the voters fed up with Democrats and protesting Jeffries right now aren’t far-left activists, but ordinary, Democratic-voting liberals. And progressive groups’ energies haven’t been devoted to driving people to Sanders’s Midwest speeches or ending their donations to the party. In fact, they’ve been the ones leading the very resistance that Democratic officials seem to be shying away from.

At the same time establishment Democrats complain about them, these exact groups are coming under attack from the Right — who charge, with reason, that they are organizing the rowdy town halls putting pressure on Republicans over the Trump administration’s mass firings and planned cuts to social programs. These protests have been celebrated on the Democratic side as an inspiring surge of emerging resistance to the Trump agenda, but stand in tension with party leaders who view these groups as a cancer to be excised.

Not every disgruntled voter has drawn this kind of resentment though. The same week Jeffries lashed out at the voters calling his office, he reportedly met and smoothed things over with 150 Silicon Valley donors who were both unhappy with what Democrats are doing under Trump and have started openly moving rightward toward the president. The “singular focus,” those involved said, was to “ensure Silicon Valley remains with Democrats” and “keep them in the tent.”

A Party Out of Step

This is all just the latest sign of a growing chasm between the Democratic base and its leadership.

Maybe most combustible was the issue of Biden’s candidacy for reelection. Despite years of polls clearly showing most blue voters wanted him to step aside in favor of someone else, Biden didn’t budge thanks to a Joseph Stalin–like level of lockstep acquiescence from Democratic officials. (We now know from numerous reports that many of them were lying about Biden’s fitness for office.)

In fact, they went further, resorting to a series of antidemocratic moves to prevent a serious primary challenger from emerging, despite Biden’s historic unpopularity and the fact that he was headed for defeat. Even when his horrifying debate performance cranked the dial up on voter panic, party leaders publicly closed ranks around the former president.

Jeffries, in theory one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, was a nonentity in arguably the most serious crisis of the party’s modern history. Democratic officials reportedly started planning to simply endure four more years of Trump and regroup in 2028, with one senior Democrat lamenting: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” The preemptive surrender directly contradicted what party leadership had been telling voters for years was their earnest fear that Trump would become a dictator.

Unfolding at the same time was the war in Gaza, another controversy where the party refused to listen to its own voters. The Biden administration’s policy of unconditional support for what more and more experts declared was an Israeli genocide was out of step with the public as a whole, but particularly with Democratic voters, supermajorities of whom consistently favored a cease-fire. Hundreds of party delegates at the national convention signed on to a statement calling for an arms embargo.

Yet the number of elected Democrats in Congress who favored either measure was never even close to the proportion of Democratic voters who favored doing so. A postelection poll found the issue was the biggest one for Democratic voters who abandoned the party last year. But as Sen. Sanders has admitted, members of Congress knew well that what Israel was doing in Gaza was unconscionable but were afraid to come out against it for fear of being swamped by pro-Israel money.

In other words, the party establishment’s decision-making was, in the end, driven by the concerns of donors, not its actual voters or activists. As you read this, its stance is still wildly out of step with them, with Democrats now overwhelmingly sympathizing more with Palestinians than with Israel.

Or just look again at the events in Iowa, where hundreds of liberal protesters spent last week pouring into the state capitol to demonstrate against Republican officials’ removing milestone civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans that had been enshrined in state law eighteen years earlier. It’s grassroots energy ripe for the harnessing by a party counting on taking advantage of GOP overreach — but stands in tension with the Democratic establishment’s certainty that LGBTQ rights are an electoral liability they have to drop like burning coal.

An Open Lane

It’s not a novel point that while Republican leadership is disciplined by its activist base, Democratic activists are disciplined by their party leadership.

The GOP has tended to harness that energy, even when their activists’ most hard-line views — cutting Social Security and outlawing abortion, for instance — are wildly out of step with the electorate. This is probably because the modern Republican Party has increasingly been taken over by its activists, who have also successfully waged electoral battles to scare their electeds straight.

But the Democratic Party has long held a (highly ironic) unease with its own activists, who it sees as, at best, a nuisance to be managed, and at worst, a threat to be neutralized. Biden was, reportedly, among a group of establishment Democrats who viewed the millions of people behind Sanders’s 2020 campaign as “a scary bunch who, if given enough authority, would take too much from the haves and give too much to the have-nots.”

Over the years, this hostility has taken many different forms: the Democrats’ tradition of publicly bashing left-wing activists, the party’s various attempts to put its thumb on the scales in primary contests, Obama’s decision to demobilize his grassroots army following his 2008 win, or Democratic leaders’ open willingness to damage the party by overruling primary voters in 2020.

The question is whether the party can actually afford to keep doing this. Twice now, in 2016 and 2024, Democrats have chosen to take their progressive wing for granted or actively antagonize it, and twice they lost catastrophically as turnout among key demographics dropped. The one time they beat Trump — in fact, the only presidential election they’ve won in the past decade — was in 2020, when they made a concerted effort to bring progressives into the fold and aligned themselves, however disingenuously, with what turned out to be the largest protest movement in US history.

This is the paradox at the heart of the situation the party finds itself in: Democrats want the high voter turnout, committed pavement-pounding, and grassroots energy of an excited base but seem to resent that they should have to do anything to get it.

It’s a state of affairs that could well lead to another demoralizing loss, or even the party’s collapse. Yet it also creates an opening for a different kind of candidate: one who positions themselves as a loyal Democrat, economically populist and willing to full-throatedly back traditional Democratic positions the party is abandoning, and presents themselves as a fighter who will take on Trump and is fed up with a party establishment too weak to stand up to him. The question is who, if anyone, will take advantage of it.