Sorry, The Democratic Consultant/Donor Class Aren't Our Friends
Last week, the NY Times noted that though Señor T inherited an economy that was, by most conventional measures, firing on all cylinders with wages, consumer spending and corporate profits rising and low unemployment and a falling inflation rate, “Just weeks into Trump’s term, the outlook is gloomier. Measures of business and consumer confidence have plunged. The stock market has been on a roller-coaster ride. Layoffs are picking up… And forecasters are cutting their estimates for economic growth this year, with some even predicting that the U.S. gross domestic product could shrink in the first quarter. Some commentators have gone further, arguing that the economy could be headed for a recession, a sharp rebound in inflation or even the dreaded combination of the two, ‘stagflation.’ Most economists consider that unlikely, saying growth is more likely to slow than to give way to a decline. Still, the sudden deterioration in the outlook is striking, especially because it is almost entirely a result of Trump’s policies and the resulting uncertainty. Tariffs, and the inevitable retaliation from trading partners, will increase prices and slow down growth. Federal job cuts will push up unemployment, and could lead government employees and contractors to pull back on spending while they wait to learn their fate. Deportations could drive up costs for industries like construction and hospitality that depend on immigrant labor.”
How deeply will a bad economy impact Trump’s Republicans in the midterms? In theory, very badly. In reality… the Democratic Party doesn’t offer a very attractive alternative beyond “We’re not Trump.” The congressional leadership, wrote Seth Masket, doesn’t seem to “recognize the gravity of a presidential administration that defies laws and the Constitution, terminates government spending that has already been appropriated and employees who have worked responsibly, builds concentration camps for migrants, and tosses democratic allies overboard in favor of their authoritarian invaders.”
The Democratic response to his joint session speech last week was uncoordinated and disjointed: “[S]ome Democrats boycotted, one stood to object and was forcibly removed, many wore pink and held up small auction paddles, and some just sat and looked grumpy, while [conservative Senate freshman] Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) gave a formal speech praising Ronald Reagan. It was hard to believe that this was the same party that, just eight months ago, pushed a president off the ticket and coordinated behind Kamala Harris in a matter of hours to increase their chances of winning an election.”
Masket believes that Dems are largely following “what they believe public opinion will be as the 2026 elections approach. They got stung by last fall’s election results and definitely don’t want to repeat that by appearing out of touch on economic issues, so they’re talking about egg prices all the time. And they’re always worried about looking too extreme for the midterm elections, so they’re trying to signal that they can work with the administration on some matters. And more importantly, as Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries clearly understands, members represent very different districts, and he wants to keep them free to respond as they deem necessary to secure their own reelections. This is not a crazy idea. However, this ignores the things that Democrats could be doing now. Further, it treats public opinion as something fixed that simply exists in nature. It ignores things Democrats could be doing to mold public opinion. To be sure, Democrats are in the minority in DC, and their options aren’t enormous…[P]artisan shifts don’t just happen. Most people don’t follow politics very closely, but they do respond to signals from elites about how to think about issues… Currently, the choice by many Democrats to not treat this moment as a crisis is hugely important. It means that potentially sympathetic voters are not receiving that signal.”
As historian Nicole Hemmer rightly described it, “A constitutional crisis requires friction to make it legible.” People don’t automatically understand when a crisis is occurring. Most people don’t really have a sense that Donald Trump is trying to stop the spending of federal funds that are already appropriated, to outsource key decisions to an unelected billionaire, to compel state and local governments to act in certain ways, to get schools and companies to abolish DEI efforts, etc. and does not have the authority to do those things. They don’t know that this creates a constitutional crisis, one that undermines democracy and the rule of law in the long run. These issues are complicated, but a clear signal from partisan leaders they basically trust can do a lot to affect how they think about it.
Their actions can also affect media coverage. One member of the House speaking out during Trump’s speech and getting ejected while the rest of his fellow Democrats just sit and stare looks cranky and odd. If his ejection had led a second member to stand up and loudly object to that, and then that person’s ejection lead to a third member standing up, etc., that becomes an important story. It disrupts the President’s speech. Newscasters will want to interview the people involved, giving Democrats the chance to explain what’s going on and rally their side. As it was, they looked disorganized and feckless. And ten Democrats actually joined their Republican colleagues in censuring Al Green. As Ana Marie Cox summed up, “Such feeble pushback is a complete abdication of the Democrats’ duties as servants of the people and defenders of the Constitution.”
Now, some stuff will get the public’s attention regardless of what members of Congress signal. People notice a recession. They notice plane crashes. If their Social Security checks are actually going to be late, they’ll sure as Hell notice that. And some of these very blatant actions are part of the reason Trump’s approval rating has declined so rapidly.
But Democrats are going to have a hard time saving the republic if they’re spending their time convincing people it doesn’t need saving.
A recent Economist poll by YouGov shows that neither party is viewed favorably. Just 35% view congressional Democrats favorably and and 37% view congressional Republicans favorably. 50% have a negative view of Democrats and 49% have a negative view of congressional Republicans. As for well known political leaders, this is how they are viewed (net favorables) by self-described “moderates.”
Bernie +15%
Elizabeth Warren +11%
Pete Buttegieg +6%
RFK Jr minus 4%
MAGA Mike minus 6%
John Thune minus 7%
Señor Trumpanzyy minus 11%
Tulsi Gabbard minus 11%
Kristi Noem minus 12%
Eric Adams minus 12%
Kash Patel minus 13%
JD Vance minus 18%
Elon Musk minus 21%
On Friday evening, over 4,000 people turned out to see Bernie in Kenosha— a Wisconsin swing county where Trump beat Kamala 52.4% to 46.1% (and having beaten Biden 4 years earlier 50.7% to 47.5%). In 2016 Trump also won Kenosha, having beaten Hillary 47.2% to 46.9%. Before 2016 it had leaned blue— won by Obama both times, by John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton both times, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and Jimmy Carter both times.
In 2016, despite being the underdog against the establishment candidate, Bernie beat Hillary in the Democratic primary:
14,612 (57.1%)
10,871 (42.5%).
And on the same day, Bernie also won more votes in Kenosha than Trump did:
Bernie- 14,612
Trump-11,139
“Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” wrote Erica Etelson last week, “many Democrats are certain that what cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election was bigotry in the ‘flyover states.’ And that misunderstanding is only going to lock them out of power longer… It points to a deep and very dangerous delusion that’s taken hold of the Democratic Party. One that casts rural voters— supposedly the source of all American backwardness— as scapegoats for electoral catastrophes like this one all while running cover for liberals’ own failed strategy and out-of-touch priorities… But if white rural voters are the problem, what explains the exodus of non-white, working-class urban voters? What explains Bronx residents who voted for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Trump, telling AOC, ‘Both of you push boundaries and force growth. . . . It’s real simple . . . Trump and you care for the working class.’ For two years leading up to the 2024 election, dozens of focus groups and surveys of swing voters made it abundantly clear that the cost of living was their number one issue. Black, white, Latino, working-class, middle-class, men, and women— they all said the same thing: inflation was hitting them hard, they blamed Joe Biden, and they wanted to see a change. They needed to see a change… People are working harder for less, and they’re sick of it. But Democrats didn’t want to hear it. Confronted with voters’ financial woes, they rebutted actual experiences with economic indicator charts and graphs showing that the economy was hunky-dory, actually. In response, people felt gaslit— and understandably so.”
Why was it so hard for Democrats to believe people who said they were hurting? What is so implausible about people in rural and factory towns crushed by deindustrialization and big agriculture monopolization wanting change? Part of the problem lies in the presumption that the real reason is prejudice and that anything else is just a cover story.
Many factors contributed to Democrats’ losses, but party loyalists— especially the ones who oversaw the destruction of small-town and industrial America, are always happy to point the finger at bigotry. It’s a handy excuse for ignoring the party’s many flaws, including its capture by billionaire donors who directed Harris to back off her brief, tepid foray into economic populism.
…Democrats have now lost the trust of working America. If Democrats’ favorite refrain is that the voters are the problem, the party may as well fold up its tent.
In the same issue of Jacobin, Branko Marcetic asked if a party can mount a comeback by rejecting its own activist base? … This certainly is not what the Right has done. Republicans waged one of the more shockingly successful comebacks in US politics during the Barack Obama era. Only two years after Democrats took control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress, the GOP was mired in crisis, and there was widespread talk of a “permanent Democratic majority,” Republicans took back the House. Six years later, they had the Senate and the White House too.
How did they do it? One part of it was a campaign of aggressive and relentless opposition to almost anything and everything Obama did, deciding that “if you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority.” The other part: they hugged their activist base tightly, capitalizing on the oppositional energy in the right-wing grassroots that took form in the Tea Party protests, and working in concert with right-wing activist groups. The next two years saw Democrats hounded in angry town halls, rolling protests against health care reform and government spending, and targeted pressure campaigns against lawmakers— efforts that may not have completely halted Obama’s agenda, but that set the stage for his 2010 “shellacking.”
The Democratic Party today has a different theory of the case. Influential party strategist James Carville wants them to “roll over and play dead” as part of a “strategic political retreat” that lets Republicans “crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” His advice echoes Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s remark in early February that Democrats should play the waiting game, since “Trump will screw up.”
This is certainly possible. It’s a bet the party has made before— and lost spectacularly, in both 2016 and this past election, when anti-Trump sentiment wasn’t enough to overcome demoralized key blue-voting demographics and checked-out working-class voters.
This confidence in simply winning by default stands at odds with where the party rank and file is. Simply put, Democratic voters seem to be yearning for more from their leadership.
… This month saw thousands of liberal voters gather in Iowa City to see Bernie Sanders speak to them about how they could push back against Trump. Speaking to those who came, three things became clear: these voters were hungry for some kind of national leadership and guidance; they were uninspired and unhappy with the Democratic response to Trump; and they were buoyed by being given some kind of direction and the sense of collective action the event provided after a rough month.
This was far from the only sign. Small-dollar donations to the party, which surged in Trump’s first term, have dried up. In liberal Oakland, hundreds of angry protesters demanded that Democrats “grow a spine” and “do your job” as the party’s House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, toured promoting a children’s book— something even a House Democratic aide admitted was “tone-deaf.” A few weeks back, an avalanche of calls from terrified voters demanding they do more to oppose Trump flooded Democratic offices, Jeffries’ included.
But the party’s response has been anger, complaining that they were the targets of pressure and not Republicans, and blaming the liberal (and staunchly pro-Democratic) groups MoveOn and Indivisible for helping organize the calls. A group of corporate-friendly “moderates” is now plotting to reject the influence of activist groups going forward and “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” entirely. Jeffries has since boasted on ESPN commentator Stephen Smith’s podcast that “the extreme left protest me more than they protest Donald Trump,” because he refuses to “bend the knee” to them.
In reality, the voters fed up with Democrats and protesting Jeffries right now aren’t far-left activists, but ordinary, Democratic-voting liberals. And progressive groups’ energies haven’t been devoted to driving people to Sanders’s Midwest speeches or ending their donations to the party. In fact, they’ve been the ones leading the very resistance that Democratic officials seem to be shying away from.
…It’s not a novel point that while Republican leadership is disciplined by its activist base, Democratic activists are disciplined by their party leadership.
The GOP has tended to harness that energy, even when their activists’ most hard-line views— cutting Social Security and outlawing abortion, for instance— are wildly out of step with the electorate. This is probably because the modern Republican Party has increasingly been taken over by its activists, who have also successfully waged electoral battles to scare their electeds straight.
But the Democratic Party has long held a (highly ironic) unease with its own activists, who it sees as, at best, a nuisance to be managed, and at worst, a threat to be neutralized. Biden was, reportedly, among a group of establishment Democrats who viewed the millions of people behind Sanders’ 2020 campaign as “a scary bunch who, if given enough authority, would take too much from the haves and give too much to the have-nots.”
Over the years, this hostility has taken many different forms: the Democrats’ tradition of publicly bashing left-wing activists, the party’s various attempts to put its thumb on the scales in primary contests, Obama’s decision to demobilize his grassroots army following his 2008 win, or Democratic leaders’ open willingness to damage the party by overruling primary voters in 2020.
The question is whether the party can actually afford to keep doing this. Twice now, in 2016 and 2024, Democrats have chosen to take their progressive wing for granted or actively antagonize it, and twice they lost catastrophically as turnout among key demographics dropped. The one time they beat Trump— in fact, the only presidential election they’ve won in the past decade— was in 2020, when they made a concerted effort to bring progressives into the fold and aligned themselves, however disingenuously, with what turned out to be the largest protest movement in US history.
This is the paradox at the heart of the situation the party finds itself in: Democrats want the high voter turnout, committed pavement-pounding, and grassroots energy of an excited base but seem to resent that they should have to do anything to get it.
It’s a state of affairs that could well lead to another demoralizing loss, or even the party’s collapse. Yet it also creates an opening for a different kind of candidate: one who positions themselves as a loyal Democrat, economically populist and willing to full-throatedly back traditional Democratic positions the party is abandoning, and presents themselves as a fighter who will take on Trump and is fed up with a party establishment too weak to stand up to him. The question is who, if anyone, will take advantage of it.
This past week the DCCC announced its Front Line members for 2026, more or less the incumbents it will spend money on reelecting. Here’s the list with their Progressive Punch scores:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA)- F
Adam Gray (CA)- F
Henry Cuellar (TX)- F
Jared Golden (ME)- F
Don Davis (NC)- F
John Mannion (NY)- F
Vicente Gonzalez (TX)- F
Joh Riley (NY)- F
Eugene Windman (VA)- F
Laura Gillen (NY)- F
Susie Lee (NV)- D
Janelle Bynum (OR)- D
George Whitesides (CA)- D
Kristen Rivet (MI)- D
Derek Tran (CA)- D
Gabe Vasquez (C)
Dina Titus (NV)- C
Steven Horsford (NV)- C
Tom Suozzi (NY)- C
Dave Min (CA)- C
Josh Harder (CA)- C
Marcy Kaptur (OH)- B
Emilia Sykes (OH)- B
Jahana Hayes (CT)- B
Frank Mrvan (IN)- B
Nellie Pou (NJ)- A
Only two Democratic senators scored "F"s so far and the Democratic establishment establishment elevated the worst of the two, Elissa Slotkin (MI) to give the absolutely shitty Republican-lite response to Trump's address to the joint session of Congress. Slotkin, a born-wealthy, former CIA agent, Zionist conservative, is exactly what is wrong with the Democratic Party.