Why Hakeem Jeffries & Chuck Schumer Should Both Step Down NOW And Call For New Leadership Elections

Everyone Knew Democrats Once Fought For The People; Now They Can’t Even Fight Trump

Ever since Bill Clinton decided to essentially abandon the New Deal and the Great Society in pursuit of Wall Street donors, the Democratic Party has had just one overarching electoral strategy: the lesser-of-two-evils approach. So how is that going now, when the White House boasts both the most corrupt administration in American history and the least competent, as well as a president whose approval rating has already sunk into the 30s after just 6 chaotic months in office?

Well, not as good as you’d think. Turns out, voters want something more than just, “We’re better than the other crappy establishment party.” On Friday night, the Wall Street Journal published a new survey that “finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party— the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.”

Aaron Zitner noted that this “is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats ‘very favorably,’ compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.” 

Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.

On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.

In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.

… The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.

“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”

This week, the House of Representatives started its summer recess, and Democrats are planning to use the coming weeks to hold town-hall meetings across the country, including in Republican-held House districts, to make the case against Trump’s agenda and norm-breaking governing style. They are hoping for a repeat of this spring’s recess, when angry voters flooded into town-hall meetings, heckling Republican lawmakers and challenging them to do more to push back against Trump.

Because anger is a stronger motivator to vote than satisfaction, the angry town-hall gatherings suggested to many Democrats that the next election could look something like Trump’s first midterm, in 2018, when Republicans lost at least 40 House seats and their majority in the chamber, restoring Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s office. The party needs to win only a few seats to retake control of the House, where Republicans hold a 219-212 advantage, with four seats vacant. Democratic prospects are more remote in the Senate, where the party and its allies hold 47 of the 100 seats.

But the new Journal survey shows that the political environment today looks different now than in Trump’s first term.

At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district.

Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate— and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.

When asked how they would vote if the election were held today, more voters in the new Journal poll said they would back a Democrat for Congress over a Republican by 3 points, 46% to 43%. That is a significant advantage for the Democrats at this early stage. But at this point in 2017, the Democratic lead was 8 percentage points.

Trump’s job approval rating, at 46%, is lower than the 52% who disapprove of his performance in office. But it is meaningfully higher than the 40% approval he drew at this point in his first term.

… [V]oters are continually looking for change. In nine of the last 10 presidential or midterm elections, voters have changed party control of the House, Senate or White House.

Trump, with his aggressive agenda and promises to shake up the political establishment, has been the epitome of a change candidate. But in the new Journal survey, 51% say the change he is bringing is a form of chaos and dysfunction that will hurt the country. By contrast, 45% agree with the alternative statement that he is making needed and helpful changes.

Republicans have built a financial advantage at this early stage of the cycle. Campaign-finance reports out this week show that the Republican National Committee ended the first half of the year with more than $80 million on hand, compared with $15 million held by the Democrats’ national campaign arm. The Democratic committee raised roughly 20% less than it did in the first six months of 2021, a comparable period in the last midterm cycle, and has in the bank a quarter of what it did four years ago.

Yesterday, we saw how two super-prominent former Labour Party members of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, have taken the first steps in launching a new working class political party to fill the void that New Labour created when Labour’s establishment decided that Thatcherism-lite was the way to go. I hope Bernie and the members of the Progressive Caucus are watching closely because their party leadership has somehow managed the impossible— losing a popularity contest to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, a coalition currently defined by felonies, fascism, and flat-out lunacy. That takes a special kind of political malpractice. But it’s no mystery how we got here. After decades of triangulation, donor-class coddling, and watering down every bold idea into a lukewarm centrist cliché, the Democrats have finally hollowed themselves out into irrelevance.

Leaving the UK example aside for now, how bad is our own situation? The GOP is led by a convicted felon who incited an insurrection, faces myriad criminal charges, boasts about his ability to commit war crimes, and is still trusted more than the Democrats on core economic issues. Why? Because voters, rightly, see Democrats as offering nothing but stale platitudes, empty slogans and an endless stream of fundraising emails. Voters don’t reward cowardice, and the current party leadership— entrenched, risk-averse, careerist and clinging to the Clinton-era playbook like it’s a security blanket— is absolutely oozing with it.

You cannot brand yourself as the party of working people when your economic agenda is carefully vetted by Wall Street bundlers. You can’t be the party of “norms” when your idea of accountability is wagging a finger at Trump while voting to give him more surveillance powers. And you don’t win trust by hiding behind technocratic excuses every time someone asks why prescription drug prices are still outrageous or why corporations pay a lower tax rate than teachers. Anzalone is right— the Democratic brand is toxic. But the problem isn’t just branding. It’s substance. It’s the refusal to confront corporate power, the patronizing appeals to civility while people are drowning in medical debt, the never-ending “listening tours” that never translate into policy. It’s the smug belief that losing with dignity is somehow better than fighting to win. If you’re not going to stand for anything, you’ll fall for everything— and the Democrats have been falling for decades, even when Republicans have managed to lose.

The party’s top brass still believe 2025 is 1996. But the electorate has changed. The country has changed. And what voters are desperate for— truly desperate for— is a party willing to stand up to the forces gutting their lives, not just deliver another poll-tested speech about “kitchen table issues” while quietly kneecapping the left. So yes, voters think Trump brings chaos. But when your answer to that chaos is a gerontocracy parroting donor-friendly half-measures and begging voters to be afraid of the alternative, don’t be shocked when they roll their eyes and stay home.

Until Democrats clean house— really clean house— and replace the Chuck Schumers, Hakeem Jeffrieses and Josh Gottheimers of the world with people who actually want to fight for something other than corporate PAC money, they will continue to lose not just elections, but the very moral foundation of their party. We may not deserve it, the country may not deserve it, but the party does. Let’s remember, this willing to look the other way while genocide is being committed deserve nothing but contempt… and there is NO lesser evil there.