What We Need From the Democrats Now

Do Something!

The incredible disruption and turmoil we’ve experienced from the first 100 days of the Trump 2.0 Administration has had an impact on popular support for the president. The New York Times/Sienna daily polling average shows that the president’s favorability was plus 9 a week after inauguration. It is minus 12 today. G. Elliott Morris did some fancy statistical analysis today that suggests Trump’s net approval could fall another 22 points by the midterms, blunted somewhat by the 30% of Republicans who will support Trump no matter what.

In theory, one would suspect that such a level of discomfort with a president would make it easy for the out-party to coast to future electoral success. This is the James Carville “play dead” strategy — letting Trump wallow in the public’s dissatisfaction as the results of his policies play out in people’s lives.

But there is a big problem with this strategy. People don’t have confidence in the political parties to do what the country needs. Here is data gathered last month from Pew.

The net approval for the Democratic is minus 22 points while the net approval for Republicans is minus 7. Some of this is due to the previously mentioned 30% floor for Maga Republicans. There is nothing that Democrats can do to swing those votes.

It’s interesting to see the big swings among Republican support. In 2023, they were the minus 29 group. What’s really troubling for the Democrats is a 10 point slide in favorability during tte Biden administration, which continued through the November election.

Not only is there a set of Republicans who will never look favorably on Democrats, there is also a set of Democrats who are angry with their party. Some of this is economics, some is “wokeness”, some is the inability to make big changes, some is the rosy scenarios put forth during the inflation crisis. But the reality is that people don’t see either party as working for them.

Recent weeks have been full of thought pieces and speeches trying to outline what the Democrats really ought to do. There is no coherence to these messages. Do you fight Republican policies, plan to hold investigative hearings (or impeachment) if the House flips in 2026, attack billionaires, complain about tax cuts, drop trans concerns and pronoun policing, show politicians as “real people”, or write “strongly worded letters with eight strong questions” (okay, not that one).

The challenge for Democrats is evident in this recent piece in the Washington Post. It summarizes letters to the editor writing in response to a prompt from the paper asking what they wanted the party to do. The answers show remarkable variety: return to an earlier progressive era, embrace patriotism, don’t be like Trump, find rational middle-of-the-road leaders, energize the left, take back the narrative, embrace single-payer health care and subsidized child care, stabilize social security and reform the tax code, drop “wokeism”, give up on trans sports issues.

This Big Tent problem is evident in the daily news. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez go on their very popular Fight Oligarchy Tour. Elisa Slotkin says to stop talking about the rich except for Musk and calls for an embrace of central values. Chris Van Hollen and congressional democrats travel to El Salvador. Other politicians take to the news channels. Pete Buttigieg spends three hours with a podcaster. Governors make speeches, with Pritzker calling for public protests and Whitmer getting caught hiding in the Oval Office (don’t get me started on whatever passes for Newsome’s podcast).

Meanwhile, people are struggling and all these strategies aren’t making a difference. It’s true that the Democrats are currently locked out of power at the federal level, but that’s not an answer to the challenges people are facing. I’ve recently run across Rachel Janfaza’s SubStack “The Up and Up”, which focuses on Gen Z. Her recent post examined data from the Harvard Youth Poll.

As for the current political climate, the poll found that President Donald Trump’s policies are, on the whole, unpopular with young people (and his approval rating with young people of 31% stands roughly where it did at this time in the spring of 2017, when it was 32%, and fall of 2020, when it was 29%).

But while that may seem like a good sign for Democrats, their brand is awful amongst young Americans. The survey shows that young people’s approval rating of Democrats in Congress — which stands at just 23% — has dropped a whopping 25 points since the fall of 2020, when it was at 48%. The Democratic Party’s work is cut out for them – to say the least.

These young people, as well as their parents and grandparents, need a reason to believe that participating in politics matters. That who they vote for will make a difference in their futures.

Message wars are not going to get this done. For all of the navel-gazing and prognostication about The Right Path for the Democratic Party, people don’t see that impacting their hoped-for future. And simply Not Being Trump is not enough. Trolling about for The Perfect Candidate is not going to work, largely because we aren’t looking far enough into the future (which is why I like David Hogg’s strategy of encouraging primaries).

I’m a little over halfway through Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I’m not fully sold on their argument. Maybe it’s better to say that I understand their diagnosis but don’t see the solutions (check back when I finish the book). The thrust of the argument is that we don’t Do Big Things because we’ve put too many obstacles — even if well intentioned — in the way. Problems of affordable housing or climate disasters could be addressed if we focused on making those things happen. This, by the way, is what a true focus on government efficiency would take up.

The Biden administration tried to put some Big Ideas in place through Infrastructure and CHIPS. But those were frameworks for doing big things that would take years to accomplish. People can see the difference in the political parties when they know that policy changes resulted in short-term benefits — think of Covid relief or Project Warp Speed (before Republicans declared vaccines a disaster).

What the Democrats need to do right now is to take one or two issues most central to public well-being and design legislative initiatives that can begin to address those as soon as Democrats take the House in 2026 and fully implement them when they take the White House in 2028.

These don’t have to be big. They have to be meaningful. And they have to be broad-based. Benefits for subsets of the population (social security, tax reform, student loan relief) will not work.

There are probably many issues that could fit the bill. But the one that is at the center of our political consciousness is food; what Trump calls “the old-fashioned word of groceries”. A comprehensive strategy to limit price-fixing among major corporate producers, subsidies for local farms, enhanced school lunches, improved SNAP benefits, and incentives to eliminate food deserts could be huge. Developing such a strategy would require think tanks, research initiatives, public hearings, and lots of op-eds. It would put the onus on the Republicans to defend the unpopular status quo.

This is just one example. I’m sure there are other, probably better, ones. But the point is to be caught Doing Something to make people’s lives better. If that’s the case, they won’t be distracted by pronouns or the latest culture war fight.

Would such a strategy work? It’s hard to judge. But I’m old enough to remember that the entire Gingrich Revolution — which has destroyed our ability to govern — all started with a fight over franking privileges in the House Post Office.

Doing Something might just restore people’s faith in government right at the point where Trump and DOGE are dismantling it.