Is Our Democrats Learning?

Not really.

George W. Bush famously posed this question back in 2000: “Is our children learning?” In 2025, we can follow up Bush’s earnest inquiry with one of our own: “Is our Democrats learning?” It’s been half a year since their catastrophic loss to their arch-nemesis Trump, so it’s a good time to assess whether Democrats are indeed moving up the learning curve.

I’d say progress has been quite spotty. The party’s favorability rating is still dreadful, they have only a modest lead in the generic congressional vote for 2026 and their prospects for taking back the Senate are slim. To most voters, the 2025 Democrats seem awfully similar to the 2024 Democrats they didn’t like much at all.

That’s a shame. A party that was truly in the process of reinventing itself and shedding its core liabilities would likely get a close look from voters. Trump isn’t very popular and many of his actions have alarmed broad sections of the electorate. Confidence in the economy, despite some recent improvement, is still quite low. And the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), an omnibus reconciliation package on the verge of party-line passage in Congress, has many juicy targets for Democrats, reflecting the attempt to jam the priorities, popular and unpopular, of all sections of the GOP into one bill. The BBB is already remarkably unpopular and may not improve with greater public awareness. In particular, the cuts in Medicaid spending—projected at around a trillion dollars over 10 years—are to a very popular program Trump swore he’d never cut. This is unlikely to go down well with many of the GOP’s new working-class voters.

Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out—and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.

The “’tis but a scratch” problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious—“’tis but a scratch.” Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious their wounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party’s approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.

The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.

The “whatever it is, I’m against it” problem. In the classic Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho uncompromisingly asserts: “whatever it is, I’m against it.” That pretty much sums up Democrats’ approach to Trump administration proposals and actions. With very minor exceptions, Democrats have refused to support any of it, even where these actions are popular and/or are targeted at clear areas of Democratic vulnerability that needed shoring up. Little to no effort has been made to stake out a middle ground that recognizes some of Trump’s actions address areas where Democrats have screwed up, while setting out a better (kinder, gentler?) approach that would more effective and less illiberal. Easier though to adopt Groucho’s approach and avoid the uncomfortable need to acknowledge mistakes and convince voters you won’t make them again.

The rising generations chimera. Many Democrats have seized upon the fact that leading Democratic politicians tend to be quite old, if not ancient (hello, Joe Biden!) and decided what is needed is younger Democrats. The changing of the guard—that’ll do the trick! On net, it seems like a no-brainer to move younger cohorts up in the party who can better communicate with young voters where Democrats have been losing ground. But what if these young communicators aren’t communicating anything to voters that would actually help Democrats dig out of the hole they’re in? Then the changing of the guard will only help at the margins.

Take Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic Millennial who pulled off an upset victory in the New York City Democratic primary and will likely be New York’s next mayor. His energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently—and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way. But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and “the Squad” were in the aftermath of the 2018 election—and we saw how well that worked out. Democrats’ thirst for generational excitement, whatever its content, will make it even harder than it already was for Democrats to re-orient the party around an effective majoritarian politics. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

The generational change they’re envisioning is AOC and Greg Casar, not Ritchie Torres, Jake Auchincloss, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. They want to do think pieces about Zohran Mamdani, not Abigail Spanberger. And here I think it’s important to be clear: Generational change is both needed and also largely inevitable, but it doesn’t make ideology or policy irrelevant, and it’s just not factually true that younger people are automatically more progressive…[T]hey will also need to remember that it’s dangerous to assume that youth appeal and communications savvy will lead to progressive nirvana, because there’s a younger and more conservative generation [Gen Z] coming up behind us.

Relying on generational change and excitement, absent of content, is a mug’s game. But it does have the advantage of avoiding all the pesky rethinking stuff.

The “round up the usual suspects” problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying “round up the usual suspects.” The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don’t like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.—the “usual suspects”—rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:

Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.

“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”

I think Mr. Jentleson is on to something.

The abundance for whom? problem. The “abundance” idea is having a moment in the discourse. The idea is to clear away procedural, zoning, and regulatory obstacles that make it ridiculously hard to build stuff and govern efficiently, particularly in “blue” areas. A recent Washington Post article asked: “Can the abundance movement save the Democrats?” The article notes the predictable resistance from the Democratic Party left who accuse abundance of being thinly veiled neoliberalism and too easy on the power of big capital.

But the big problem with abundance isn’t that—I’m all for the deregulatory stuff—it’s the abundance for whom? problem. As the movement has developed and been motivated so far, it’s been oriented toward the governance problems of progressive areas and the need to fight climate change through building out clean energy. In other words, it’s abundance for progressives, not necessarily for ordinary working-class people. That’s a big problem, as many have noticed.

Progressives may be pining after a socially liberal ecotopia of dense housing powered by renewable energy but most working-class voters would prefer a big house in the suburbs with plenty of money and lots of nice stuff and perhaps a “big-ass truck” or two in the driveway. And they could care less about renewable energy. This electorally toxic contradiction is yet another fundamental problem Democrats are assiduously avoiding.

The red state Senators problem. Re-taking the presidency is the problem Democrats think most about. That’ll be hard enough. But the Senate is now looking much tougher, due to the Democrats’ fading strength in so-called red states—all of whom get two Senators, regardless of population size—where their brand is so damaged that electing a Democratic Senator against underlying partisanship is getting close to impossible.

In 2026, Democrats not only have to defend seats they hold in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, they’ll have to knock off Republicans in Maine and North Carolina and then take two out of three in the certifiably red states of Iowa (Trump +13), Ohio (Trump +11), and Texas (Trump +14). The only way to effectively and reliably compete in states like these is for the national party’s brand to be different enough from its current iteration so that good candidates like Sherrod Brown are not dragged down by their association with the national party. Without that, Democratic control of the Senate will be very difficult to attain.

The necessity to compete in red states for Senate seats is another problem Democrats are loathe to confront because of the scale of needed change it implies. Much easier to think about other things. For example, Democrats have an excellent chance to take back the House in 2026 even if their program is simply: “Trump is bad. We are not Trump.” But that won’t work for the Senate.

These obstacles help clarify why, despite the depth of the Democrats’ recent defeat and their fragmenting coalition, their response to adversity has seemed so perversely underpowered. What could shake them out of their torpor? Galen Druke had a useful suggestion in a recent New York Times op-ed: take a page out of the Donald’s book!

The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps: moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition—one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause—the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.

It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump…

Running against your own party from both the left and the right, and more broadly against both parties, allows you to frustrate voters’ perceptions of you…To be truly successful, the next Democratic nominee will transform how Americans view the Democratic Party as a whole, leading the way to winning voters not currently viewed as “gettable” in states that have been written off.

That may seem a bit radical. But in light of the Democrats’ current problems, I think it’s just practical.

---

Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot newsletter will not be published on Friday July 4th. Happy Independence Day!