What Have Democrats Delivered for Their Constituents?

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

 

I stick by what I said yesterday in that other Washington publication that the Democrats have picked a pretty good time to be remarkably unpopular, because there aren’t that many elections going on in 2025, and in the ones that are, Democrats look pretty good right now.

 

And you can find Democrats insisting, generally accurately, that the party as a whole having a poor image among the entire electorate doesn’t mean that particular Democratic candidates are in trouble in the 2026 midterms. Races aren’t “generic Democrat” against “generic Republican.”

 

But that analysis probably lets Democrats off the hook too easily, because if your party’s elected officials are doing even a halfway decent job, you don’t get 63 percent of the electorate thinking unfavorably of the party as a whole.

 

So let’s shift to a different question: What have Democratic leaders delivered to their constituents, at the national, state, and local levels in recent years?

 

I won’t rehash four years of arguing about the Biden administration policies, but even if you’re a loyal Democratic voter, you have every right to be as bitterly disappointed as I am as a Jets fan, or insert your preferred infuriatingly underperforming sports franchise here.

 

You could argue that out of everything that happened in the Biden years, the sudden surge in inflation and rising cost of living were the single most consequential and far-reaching event, and the one that shaped the 2024 presidential race the most. As the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research summarized, “Inflation has been the main economic concern throughout Biden’s presidency.”

 

Early in Biden’s term, former Harvard president and Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers warned the Democrats that excessive stimulus spending was creating inflationary conditions, but his party ignored him. In July 2021, President Biden insisted, “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” When he said that, the inflation rate was 5.4 percent; it peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and remained above 3 percent until June 2024.

 

The Biden administration boasted of gargantuan, inflation-fueling spending bills, but by the end of Biden’s term, the results were thoroughly underwhelming — most famously, spending billions but only building 58 new charging stations. Even Democratic senators called the progress “pathetic.” Biden himself complained to staffers in December 2023 that there were still no major construction sites for photo opportunities to tout the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill he signed into law in November 2021.

 

(In 2022, then-38-year-old Ezra Klein made the amazing discovery that “government is a bureaucratic, slow-moving institution. It’s too easily captured by special interests. It’s often incapable of acting at the speed and scale our problems demand. And when it does act, it can make things worse.” Keep in mind, Klein had been writing about politics since 2003. It’s just a crying shame that no one else had ever bothered to look at the issue of government bureaucracy before.)

 

It took a while, but Democrats also gradually soured on how the Biden administration was handling illegal immigration; when Biden was elected, Democrats largely believed immigration was not a threat, the proportion who believed controlling and reducing illegal immigration to be an important goal was near its all-time low, and opposition to increased border patrols and opposed border wall construction was near its all-time high. By the end of the Biden years, Democrats had started to sound more like the Republicans they had demonized as xenophobic.

 

And we haven’t even gotten to the fact that the Democratic Party as a whole tried to Weekend-at-Bernie’s Biden into a second term. If every elected official in the Democratic Party except for Dean Phillips was ready to play along with the idea that the doddering octogenarian was doing just fine and all the footage of him looking out of it were “cheap fakes,” why should Democratic voters trust them? Why should anyone trust them?

 

Looking beyond Washington . . . sure, lots of people still enjoy living in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois, as long as they can afford it. Even with a small increase in 2024, California’s population is lower than it was before the pandemic; at best, it’s now a slow-growth state. “Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6 percent; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15 percent to nearly 30 percent.” California is losing middle-class families and businesses and gaining illegal immigrants. As I’ve written before, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s popularity outside of his state appears to be based on a completely inaccurate sense of the quality of life in the Golden State:

 

U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education. The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

 

Can anyone point to California’s high-speed rail project — $15 billion spent so far over 16 years, with not a single stretch of track laid down — and conclude, “Yes, this is good government?”

 

Doesn’t it trouble Illinois Governor JB Pritzker that on his watch, Boeing, Caterpillar, and the hedge fund giant Citadel all chose to move their headquarters to other states, lamenting the state’s business environment and Chicago’s inability to get crime under control?

 

Doesn’t it bother Governor Tim Walz that the Minnesota state government keeps getting robbed blind, for billions of dollars’ worth of fraud, in every major state spending project?

 

We on the right often point out the deep and worsening problems in America’s biggest cities — rising crime rates, seemingly exploding homeless populations, people using drugs out in the open, businesses fleeing downtowns, a general sense of growing lawlessness and menace. Now, in most of America’s big cities, the local Republican Party can hold their membership meetings at a table at Shake Shack. You can’t blame the GOP for the policies enacted in these cities.

 

Karen Bass apparently thought being mayor of Los Angeles was a form of semi-retirement. The county government is no better; we’re almost at the end of July, and Los Angeles County has issued 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.

 

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson got what he wanted and now enjoys a job approval rating of 14 percent.

 

I pointed out earlier this week that since the start of the year, crime in New York City has declined some, not that it’s doing incumbent Mayor Eric Adams much good. The city appears hell-bent on electing Zohran Mamdani, a pro-“globalizing the intifada” communist who thinks prisons have no real purpose and pledged to disband the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group.

 

Our old friend Reihan Salam had a terrific essay in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend, pointing to data confirming that Mamdani is the candidate of “downwardly mobile elites” — young adults who grew up wealthy or well-off, and who now believe there is no way they can live as well as their parents did. These voters are often frustrated, bitter, over-educated and under-employed, and eager to blame society and capitalism for their inability to live the life they dreams. (You know, losers.) That’s a terrible demographic to let set your party’s course and priorities!

 

The Blue City, State, and Nation model is a malfunctioning machine still running on autopilot. For a long time, Democrats could argue they delivered higher taxes but also better government services and a better quality of life. But the counterevidence to that argument has now grown so gargantuan that not even Democrats believe it anymore. Their reflexive defense of their elected leaders is “but Trump!” And Lord knows, Trump has more than his share of flaws. But Trump isn’t putting a gun to the head of any Democratic official and making them sign bad ideas into law.

 

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re right of center. But if you were a Democrat who believed that a strong and larger government can build a better life for people, would you be satisfied with these results? How many Democratic officeholders would you want to say, “good job” to?

 

There are some popular Democratic governors out there, but at the risk of sounding like a political hipster, you probably haven’t heard of them. The most popular Democratic governor in the country is Andy Beshear with a 66 percent job approval rating. (Note Kentucky has a heavily Republican state legislature, so it’s not like he can steer his state too far to the left.) Governors Josh Green of Hawaii and Ned Lamont of Connecticut have job approval ratings of 63 percent.

 

Under President Trump and the currently GOP-controlled Congress, there are problems, no doubt. Trump is erratic and contradictory, and at times, the current populist desire among Trump and his MAGA fan-base to have the government intervene so deeply in the economy sounds a little bit Communist. But there’s indisputably “energy in the executive” and an effort to tackle all kinds of problems — the border, previously insufficient immigration law enforcement, excessive environmental regulations, sweeping tax reform, stopping transgender surgeries on those under age 18, barring boys from participating in girls’ sports.

 

Do Democrats look at their leaders and see energy anywhere?