How Deep Is the Hole Democrats Are In?

Pretty deep.

Trump’s approval rating has declined to the point where his approval is “underwater”—that is, his net approval (approval minus disapproval) has turned negative in the both the RCP and Silver Bulletin running averages. And his net approval rating is even more negative (-8) on the all-important issue of the economy, Trump’s key issue in the 2024 election. Polls regularly show gloomy voter assessments of the economy’s current trajectory. In a recent Echelon Insights survey, voters by 17 points say the economy is getting worse rather than improving and by 18 points that their personal financial situation is getting worse rather than improving.

This raises the hope in Democratic hearts that voters are wising up to how terrible Trump is for the economy and the country and that a combination of #Resisteverything and a thermostatic reaction against the incumbent Trump administration will rekindle their political fortunes. This is a comforting take for Democratic partisans because it implies that a combination of stout-hearted opposition and waiting around for the sky to fall on Trump will suffice; no need to do anything drastic like actually changing toxic party positions and doing serious surgery on the party brand.

I think there are grounds for considerable skepticism here. The hole the Democrats are in is so deep that it is doubtful that the comforting take is the right one. Their problems are just too severe. I round up here a series of recent survey and analytical results plus new findings from the 2024 election that illustrate how deep the Democrats’ hole truly is.

1. Views of the Democratic Party. You’d think that as Trump runs into difficulties and sows chaos, voters would like Democrats more. They do not. Instead, Democrats’ favorability among voters is scraping the bottom. In a March CNN poll, favorability toward the Democratic Party clocked in at 29 percent, down ten points since right before the 2024 election and the lowest rating for the Democrats in the CNN poll since its inception in 1992. Trump’s job approval among working-class (non-college) respondents in the poll was 20 points higher than their favorability toward the Democratic Party. The working class does not appear to be warming to the Democrats.

In a March NBC poll, the Democratic Party’s favorability was even lower, 27 percent. The rating was the lowest in that poll since 1990. Among independents, the party’s favorability was an abysmal 11 percent vs. 56 percent unfavorable. These voters may not love Donald Trump but they really don’t like the Democrats.

In a February Blueprint Research poll, about two-thirds of voters thought the Democrats don’t have a workable strategy for responding to Trump and around the same number found this take on the Democrats persuasive: ”No one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for anymore, other than opposing Donald Trump. Democrats have no message, no plan of their own, and no one knows what they would do if they got back into power. If Democrats ever want to win elections again, people need a clear message from them about what they stand for and what they’ll do.” Ouch.

On the plus side, voters in a February Navigator Research poll across the battleground Congressional districts thought Democrats in Congress “fight for what they believe.” However, they also thought Democrats don’t respect work, don’t share my values, don’t look out for working people, don’t value work, don’t care about people like me, don’t have the right priorities and, by a massive 47 points, don’t get things done. Double ouch.

There’s lots of polling data along these lines and they send a clear message: Democrats’ image is atrocious and therefore cannot present an attractive alternative to Trump and the GOP.

2. Identification with the Democratic Party. Nothing looms as large in driving political behavior than party identification: which party voters identify with or lean toward. Lately something astonishing has happened: Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. This trend shows no sign of abating in the aftermath of the election.

And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. Indeed, over time, just four states—California, Colorado, Delaware and New York—have seen Democrats out registering Republicans compared to 22 states where Republicans have been gaining.

3. Leaving Democratic states. There’s no more meaningful vote than where you choose to live. And right now the trend is strongly against blue states and in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. This is implicitly a harsh judgement on Democratic governance.

My Liberal Patriot colleague Nate Moore has the facts:

Since Covid, the biggest blue states have dramatically lagged behind the biggest Republican states in population growth. Between 2020 and 2024, California, New York, and Illinois each lost more than 100,000 thousand residents. Florida and Texas, meanwhile, both gained around 2 million residents. The disparity is shocking.

It is tempting to chalk up the unprecedented decline to Covid. Now that the pandemic has faded, numbers will even out, some might argue. Nothing more than a blip. But the most recent figures confirm that the reasons behind the blue-state population decline run much deeper than Covid. Even though case counts are a thing of the past, populous red states continue to lap their blue counterparts. Between July 2023 and July 2024, Florida and Texas gained more than 1 million residents combined. Illinois, New York, and California barely broke 400,000 cumulatively.

That’s bad but consider the electoral implications:

Estimates from the American Redistricting Project predict that California is on track to lose three House seats—and three electoral votes—after 2030’s reapportionment. New York could drop 2 seats. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Illinois all might lose a seat. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are each projected to gain a whopping 4 seats. Idaho and Utah, too, will tack on an additional seat.

Notice a pattern? The states projected to gain representation—and an Electoral College boost—are overwhelmingly Trump states. The states projected to lose representation are Harris states.

Yup, where people choose to live matters. And increasingly they don’t want to live where Democrats are in charge.

4. No Democrats where you need ‘em. Wherever you find dense concentrations of highly educated voters you’ll find plenty of Democrats. As for the rest of the country—not so much. This is a big, big problem, not just in presidential elections but critically in Senate elections where every state, no matter its education level, gets the same two Senators.

Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have the relevant facts:

Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

It turns out being widely disliked in huge parts of the country matters. A lot.

These four factors indicate a party that is truly in a deep hole. The party’s severe image, identification, governance, and geographic weaknesses cannot be remedied by mounting the (rhetorical) barricades against Trump and waiting for his administration to self-destruct. This may make the partisan faithful happy but it is woefully inadequate as a program to bring the party back to full health.

Unfortunately, that so many Democrats are wedded to #Resisteverything—starting with the defenestration of Chuck Schumer—rather than making the Democrats into a party more voters actually like shows the depth of denial in the party. They think they’re on the verge of a breakthrough if they just toughen up. They are not.

Perhaps some fresh data from the 2024 election can shock them back to their senses. I’ll write more about these data in coming weeks but here are some of the most startling findings from a tranche of data analysis just released by David Shor’s Blue Rose Research firm.

5. Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters, who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats. Shor’s analysis indicates that if everyone had voted last year Trump would have won the popular vote by five points rather than a point and a half. Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!

Hispanics are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in ideology. It’s been well-documented that Hispanic conservatives have been shifting dramatically to the right in their voting patterns. But Shor’s new data establishes that Hispanic moderates are now joining the party. There was a 24-point decline in the Democratic advantage among this group from 2020 to 2024 and since 2016 there’s been a total 46-point margin shift away from the Democrats. Hispanic moderates (almost half of Hispanic voters) are now voting very similarly to white moderates.

More broadly, ideological polarization among all nonwhites is shifting moderate to conservative voters away form the Democrats. This is making nonwhite voters less reliable constituencies for Democrats.

Shor’s data also indicate that immigrant voters swung from a +27 Biden constituency in 2020 to a Trump +1 group in 2024. Wow.

Shor’s analysis also suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. Double wow. He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami.

The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.

There’s plenty more in the Blue Rose analysis plus interesting discussion and data nuggets in two interviews Shor did with Vox and with the New York Times. But the totality of the data really does underscore how deep a hole Democrats are currently in. The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work.

Instead Democrats should consider the approach recommended by John Judis (full disclosure: Judis was my co-author on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?) in his bracing new article on the Compact website.

To reverse their fortunes, the Democrats must alter their image in voters’ minds. Above all, they must be seen again as the party of the “normal American” and “the real America.” The last time they succeeded in doing a makeover like this was in the 1992 election when a group of politicians and political operatives, working through a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, turned around voters’ perception of the Democrats as weak on crime and defense and opposed to any reform of the welfare system. The DLC’s former president Bill Clinton won in 1992 on the DLC’s platform. I don’t suggest that the Democrats need to mimic the content of the DLC platform, particularly on economic and trade issues, but they do need to transform their image, or what political consultants call their “brand.”

Some commentators have insisted the Democrats’ defeat had nothing to do with “wokeness.” That is a fatal misreading. The Democratic makeover must start with the panoply of cultural and socio-economic stands that Republicans were able to use in 2024 to discredit Democratic candidates. These include the Democrats’ positions on immigration, sex and gender, affirmative action, criminal justice, and climate change. A candidate like Sherrod Brown in Ohio had said all the right things about economics and labor for decades, but he was defeated by a candidate who linked him to the Democrats’ stances on social issues.

I’m not suggesting Democrats should hypocritically adopt positions that are wrong-headed. In rejecting the participation of biological males in competitive women’s sports, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom did recently, Democrats would have biology and public opinion on their side. The same goes for policies that have encouraged street crime and illegal immigration. A more difficult issue is climate change. Democrats are right to reject Republican claims that it is a hoax or needs no serious attention—indeed, the Trump administration is actively discouraging the transition to renewable energy. But in order to win public support for any climate measures, Democrats will have to tone down their apocalyptic rhetoric and abandon unrealistic goals for achieving net-zero emissions. That would include, for instance, supporting natural gas as a transitional fuel and nuclear energy as a feasible alternative to fossil fuels.

Great advice. But I’m not holding my breath on when Democrats might choose to follow it. They’re too busy pretending the deep hole they’re in is just a shallow indentation and vanquishing Trump is right around the corner.