Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward

New York Times

25-05-2025

One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America's two major parties to animals.
After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as 'apex predators,' like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive.
So Ms. Shenker-Osorio perked up earlier this year when a Democratic woman in Georgia suggested that a very different kind of animal symbolized her party.
'A deer,' she said, 'in headlights.'
The woman had more to say.
'You stand there and you see the car coming, but you're going to stand there and get hit with it anyway.'
Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage. Its standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990 — after a defeat that felt like both a political and cultural rejection.
Communities that Democrats had come to count on for a generation or more — young people, Black voters, Latinos — all veered toward the right in 2024, some of them sharply. And unlike Mr. Trump's win in 2016, his victory last year could not be waved away as an outlier after he won the popular vote for the first time.
The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election. Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years. Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.
'Over a long period of time, our party overdrew our trust account with the American people,' said Rob Flaherty, who was deputy campaign manager for former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
The Democratic Party's tarnished image could not come at a more inopportune moment. In this era of political polarization, the national party's brand is more important and influential than ever, often driving the outcomes of even the most local of races.
And so The New York Times is beginning an occasional series of articles about the Democrats and their predicament: how it got so dire, what comes next and who could lead the way.
The first challenge is that it is not just Republicans and independents who have soured on the Democratic Party. It is also Democrats themselves.
The Democratic base is aghast at the speed with which Mr. Trump is undermining institutions and reversing progressive accomplishments — and at the lack of resistance from congressional leaders. Primary challenges are on the rise headed into 2026, often along generational and ideological lines.
'There is fear, there is anxiety, and there are very real questions about the path forward — all of which I share,' said Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who is charged with recruiting candidates to help Democrats win back the House in 2026.
'We are losing support in vast swaths of the country, in rural America, in the Midwest, the places where I'm from,' Mr. Crow continued. 'People that I grew up with who now support Donald Trump, who used to be Democrats. There's no reason why we shouldn't have the support of these folks, other than we have pushed, in so many ways, these people away from our party.'
Even the gender gap — which had long benefited Democrats — helped Republicans in 2024 as men swung harder to the right.
Now, top party officials, activists and donors are broadly weighing how to rebuild, and reassessing how to speak to voters, how to listen to them and how to reach those who have tuned out entirely.
Fierce ideological debates over policies — whether to push for a stricter stand on immigration, defend transgender rights less forcefully or embrace anti-corporate economic populism — are already playing out on Capitol Hill and on the nascent 2028 campaign trail.
All political parties, of course, face time in the wilderness. And by some measures, this is far from the bleakest outlook Democrats have confronted in modern times.
President Ronald Reagan enjoyed a 49-state romp in 1984. By comparison, Mr. Trump's 1.5-percentage-point margin of victory in the national popular vote was narrow, and he was only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988.
But while the overall margin, and most of the presidential battleground states themselves, was relatively close last year, the country as a whole has shifted markedly to the right. In the final tally, Mr. Trump won a nearly identical percentage of the vote in the battleground of Arizona (52.2 percent) as Ms. Harris won in the supposedly safe state of New Jersey (52 percent).
The Democratic Party of 2025 also faces structural challenges that will impede its recovery, including a Senate map tilted distinctly to the right and an Electoral College in which blue and battleground states are losing population to red states.
Mr. Trump twice cracked the 'blue wall' states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But even carrying those northern battlegrounds is unlikely to be enough for Democrats to win the White House after the 2030 census.
'The party has to find ways to compete in states where it's not,' said Jaime Harrison, who stepped down in February as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
For now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for 'Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan' — and promises investment to 'study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.' It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.
'Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,' it urges.
Mr. Trump's diminishing popularity since the election has some Democrats already salivating for the midterm elections. Republicans control the House only narrowly, 220-212, with three vacancies in heavily Democratic seats.
'Trump's numbers seem to be getting worse and worse, and I'm pretty optimistic Democrats will have some real opportunities in 2026,' said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster.
But Mr. McCray, who lives in an Alabama congressional district that is often ranked the nation's most conservative, cautioned against taking the wrong lessons from any successes in 2026 because, he said, the party's brand is repellent in so much of the country.
'The 2022 midterms masked the Biden problem,' he said of the former president's age. 'A good 2026 midterm — we should not let that mask a deeper problem.' He added that Democrats had 'lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.'
Ms. Shenker-Osorio, the Democratic researcher and messaging consultant who holds regular focus groups, said Democratic voters today craved more action and less self-reflection.
'Voters are hungry for people to actually stand up for them — or get caught trying,' she said, urging Democratic leaders to embrace the fight. 'The party is doing a lot of navel-gazing and not enough full-belly acting.'