The Wilderness Democrats

By Mark Antonio Wright

Thursday, February 06, 2025

 

It’s a fairly common (and annoying!) tradition at National Review to wake up to discover that Jim Geraghty has swooped in and beaten you to the punch on an article that you’ve been planning to write. (If you don’t subscribe to Jim’s Morning Jolt, well, you should.)

 

This morning, Jim lays out all the reasons why the Democrats are finding themselves deeper and deeper in the wilderness than any American political party in two generations:

 

In the minority, Democrats can’t subpoena anything and can’t call hearings, although they can call witnesses at hearings called by the majority. They can demand this or that — Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats want a second hearing for FBI director nominee Kash Patel, Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats want to know what security precautions had been taken to prevent unauthorized leaks of information by staff at the Department of Government Efficiency — but the GOP majorities and Trump administration can just ignore them.

 

And as Jim explains, the Democrats are not only powerless in Washington, they’re leaderless, which is arguably far more important.

 

Is there a single Democrat — active politician or elder statesman — that rank-and-file members of the party can count on to carry their flag?

 

Chuck Schumer (age 74) may be a wily pol and a prolific fundraiser, but he’s old, he’s cranky, and he’s totally uninspiring. (Just witness Schumer’s attempt at leading a “We Will Win” chant this week.)

 

Hakeem Jeffries, whatever his other qualities, seems completely overshadowed by the “speaker emeritus” resident in his own caucus, Nancy Pelosi, who is apparently content to stay on in Washington forever. Recall that last summer, when Democrats were desperate to find a way to push Joe Biden out of the presidential race, it wasn’t Jeffries who Democrats looked to for help. It was the 84-year-old Pelosi.

 

And of course neither Schumer (New York), Pelosi (California), or Jeffries (New York) hail from the heartland, which would help a party in search of traction anywhere but the coasts.

 

Former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are checked out and focused on their legacies. Joe Biden? C’mon.

 

What about the Democratic National Committee? Can Ken Martin, the Minnesotan recently elected chairman of the national party, and activist and newly elected vice chairman David Hogg possibly be the foundation for building a rival majority coalition that can win the American middle class back from the Trump GOP? Consider me skeptical.

 

The governors — from California’s Gavin Newsom to Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer to Illinois’s JB Pritzker to Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro — are, at the very least, theoretically plausible alternatives, but not one of them is yet tested at the national level. And Newsom’s handling of the California fires this winter may well have destroyed his political future.

 

Indeed, it’s more than notable that the most visible, energetic Democrat around at this moment — a Democrat who’s carved out a distinctive ideological profile with working-class appeal — is Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, and Fetterman has been seen meeting with Donald Trump and has even been rumored, probably without much basis, to be considering aligning himself formally with Trump!

 

There’s no question: The Democrats are in a tougher position — leaderless, powerless, and nearly ignored — today in the winter of 2025 than were the Republicans after the Obama blowout in 2008 or the Democrats after George W. Bush won reelection in ’04. They are in deep, deep trouble.

 

I will, however, disagree with Jim on one issue. He writes: “Nature abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later someone will emerge as the clearest and most compelling voice of opposition to Trump,”

 

and that figure will quickly get a leg up in any aspirations to the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. My guess is it will be someone who echoes former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s declaration, “I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”

 

Well, maybe — but maybe not. Sometimes political parties that seem utterly defeated find a charismatic captain that can lead the way out of the wilderness. That’s what happened in the years between Republicans’ disastrous Watergate midterms in 1974 and the Reagan Revolution in 1980, a short six years from the wilderness to victory.

 

But sometimes political parties, either because they’re captured by an unpopular ideology or because they’re divided and leaderless, can’t get out of their own way. That’s what happened to the Democrats between 1980 and 1992, when the unlikely persona of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton emerged from nowhere to lead Democrats back. That’s what happened in the United Kingdom between 1979 and 1997, when the Labour Party went from disaster to disaster and spent nearly 18 years shut out of power.

 

So yes, Trump and Republicans could fumble the ball at the five-yard line. Inflation and an atmosphere of chaos could open the door for the hapless Democrats to make a comeback.

 

But there’s no guarantee of that: The Democrats are fully capable of traveling further and further (and further) down the wilderness road of American politics.