Why the Democratic Party Is in the Dumps: Democrats are in sorry shape. Not only did they lose last year’s election but they lost ground essentially everywhere, in the vast majority of counties across the country and among nearly all demographic groups, particularly men of every income level, race and ethnicity. The party’s favorability ratings are down to late Nixon levels, according to recent polls. “Too many in our party have lost their way and it’s time to wake the heck up,” Pennsylvania Congressman Chris Deluzio said this week, declaring his own party “weak” and “wimpy.”
It's normal for the out-party to engage in a period of soul searching. But Democrats don’t seem nearly ready to move beyond that. A party that for years has defined itself as anti-Trump can’t decide if that’s still enough — since it clearly wasn’t last fall. “In many ways, what’s keeping the party from having a unified message now is that they’re still fighting over why they lost last year’s election,” says Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, who wrote a book about the Democratic Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election called Learning From Loss.
Some Democrats are convinced they lost because they lost touch with voters, moving too far to the left on issues such as immigration and crime. Sarah McBride, the Delaware Democrat who is the first openly transgender member of Congress, said in an interview last week that the party has to be more open to hearing the concerns about people who are uncomfortable with trans people, particularly when trans athletes are participating in female sports.
“We have to recognize that the time for tinkering is over,” says Kate deGruyter, senior communications director for Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “It is a mistake to believe that we can kind of fiddle around the edges and not take a fuller look at what it takes to assemble a winning coalition, in part because of the way the electorate has moved toward Trump.”
But even as moderate voices call for, well, moderation, progressives insist on the need to provide a real contrast to Trump and actively seek to thwart his policies, rather than trying to co-opt any of the more popular ones. They can point to the large crowds drawn in recent days by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. By contrast, progressives are calling for Charles Schumer to step down as the party’s Senate leader because he cast a vote for a GOP budget bill that averted a government shutdown. “You have a lot of dissatisfaction from their own members who don’t understand what the party is doing,” Masket says.
Given the GOP’s slim majority in the House, history suggests Democrats will return to power there in next year’s elections. Midterms are often about dissatisfaction with the incumbent party and Trump’s numbers, too, are softening, given concerns about his management of the economy. It was at about this point in 2009 that, following Barack Obama’s election, entire books were being written about the end of conservatism. The following year, Republicans won a historic number of seats in the House.
But Democrats have a problem both in the short run — in terms of figuring out how to counter a president whom they despise but who is more popular than they are — and the long run. There’s no clue at this point as to who will emerge as the party’s next real leader and what direction the party might go heading toward 2028.
(Susan Crawford/Facebook)
Maybe the Year’s Most Important Election: Despite all the teeth-gnashing, Democrats are happy with the way their candidates have performed in the few elections held since November. On Tuesday, they picked up a seat in the Pennsylvania Senate, winning a district that Trump had carried by 15 points and that hadn’t elected a Democrat in decades.
They’re hoping they can bring that momentum to Wisconsin, which is holding a state Supreme Court election on Tuesday. Partisan control of that body rides on the outcome. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is nominally nonpartisan, but liberals currently hold a 4-3 majority, thanks to a victory two years ago in what was then the nation’s most expensive judicial contest ever.
That record has been shattered this year, with more than $80 million devoted to the race. Groups funded by Trump adviser Elon Musk have spent at least $17 million, offering $100 to any Wisconsin voter willing to sign a petition assailing activist judges. Trump has endorsed Brad Schimel, a former state attorney general and the conservative candidate in the race. “The world's richest man, not content to be running the federal government, is also trying to buy our state Supreme Court,” said Ben Wikler, who chairs the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate, has received funds from billionaires George Soros, Reid Hoffman and JB Pritzker, the governor of neighboring Illinois. “This is a battle that everybody understands will determine perhaps the future for Wisconsin politics in the next … certainly for the next several years,” Pritzker said last week.
One of the key issues is redistricting and whether Crawford, as part of a liberal majority, would undo a map that gives Republicans six of the eight U.S. House seats in a narrowly divided state. She says she has not decided how she might rule. Earlier this month, the court declined to hear a Democratic challenge to the state’s congressional map.
Next week’s election will leave one side or the other with a single-seat majority on the court. It won’t be long before that majority gets challenged. In fact, the state is set to hold Supreme Court contests every year for the next five years. "We could see this kind of back-and-forth at fairly short terms — a year, two years, three years in between them,” said Howard Schweber, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, “in a way that deprives the court of one of the key things that is supposed to separate law from politics, which is stability."
