The Democrats Actually Are in Disarray

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

 

If you’ve been hanging around the political opinion game for long enough — as Sy Sperling might have said, I’m not merely a participant, I’m also a client — then surely you have heard the phrase “Dems in disarray” repeated online. Usually it comes from the left, as a mockery of what’s perceived to be the media’s preference for covering the Democratic Party’s internal squabbles: They just want to sow a narrative of chaos. The party is as strong as ever. (Keep in mind, this is a Democratic critique of the mainstream media — if it sounds ridiculous to you, that’s because it is.)

 

But for once everyone is finally conceding the truth of the point: The Democrats are currently utterly lost. As strange and objectionable, in many ways, as Donald Trump’s second term has been, as middlingly unpopular as it now stands — with Trump’s approval ratings currently sitting within his historical average, neither positive nor overwhelmingly negative — the Democratic Party is in far worse shape. The numbers don’t lie. Democrats are held in contempt by the nation at large: a recent CNN poll has their approval rating at a historic low of 29 percent. No easy fix beckons, and things may in fact get worse for them before they get better.

 

For the Democratic Party is being pulled apart by horses: On one hand, the party is increasingly held in contempt by once reliable voter demographics (Hispanics, African Americans, working-class men) as out-of-touch elitists taking orders from the Ivy League and the progressive ultra-left. On the other hand — and just as relevantly — the party is crippled from within by that same hard-left faction, which has held the ideological whip-hand over Democrats’ social agenda for a decade now.

 

These people are the problem. The inflexibly ratcheting social demands of the progressive activist/academic elite are the reason Democrats are in enormous trouble and will be even after Trump is forgotten. And these people are both practically and (more importantly for Democratic politics) morally entrenched within the party at all levels except the top strategic layer. They will not concede power easily, if at all. A civil war thus brews in the Democratic Party’s intellectual/activist wing against its reform-minded moderates. (Grab your popcorn.)

 

I’ve kept quiet about the so-called abundance agenda being pushed by all the usual good-government Democratic suspects this spring, primarily for this reason. Whatever the abundance of its internal contradictions — and I could mount a detailed critique if I thought anyone even slightly cared — what matters most is the simple fact that it has taken on the aspect of a front in this many-faceted emerging civil war. As Noah Rothman noted in the piece linked above, even the abundance agenda’s own proponents understand it to be an act of rebellion against an entrenched anti-growth orthodoxy within the party.

 

Another obvious example beckons: The hilarious plight of David Hogg, the whippet-faced punk set to be voted out of his newly acquired vice chairmanship at the Democratic National Committee next month for being a mutinous weasel, is emblematic of how the Democratic Party is currently consuming itself in internecine war. Hogg, recall, was essentially given the gig by a bunch of older, clueless Democratic Party grandees who voted for him in the hopes he would help bring disaffected young progressives back into the fold. But Hogg understands himself to be working not for the Democratic Party, rather for the progressive movement — hence his announcement that he would use his position and powers to support primary challengers to insufficiently woke Democratic incumbents.

 

The future looks even more grim for the Democrats for structural reasons. The 2030 census is expected to subtract a swath of House seats (and thus electoral votes) from California and New York, in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. While this bodes ill for remaining Republican incumbents in those states (who can expect to be brutally redistricted away by 2032), it bodes in many ways even worse for the remaining Democrats, who will be left fighting over the division of a shrinking pie.

 

Understand: A significant number of those currently angry with the Democrats are angry at them for their failure to resist Donald Trump volubly enough, not for being too far to the left. These are the people Democrats absolutely must carry reliably as part of any victorious national coalition, given their preponderance within the party electorate. They will make demands accordingly. If anything, expect the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in its biggest states to lean even more progressive in years ahead as the moderates lose internal battles for position.

 

Rich Lowry writes that the left “will never recover” from Trump. I am not so sure; history is far more contingent than that, and to believe that the left’s power has been broken by the zeitgeist of Trump is perhaps to mistake a dormant ideology for a defeated one. But there is no doubt that the Democrats are at a historic low point in terms of cohesion and future viability, even as Trump’s wild (and often inexcusable) behavior in office leaves them such a vast opening. I close with a traditional toast, and wish confusion upon my enemies.