Democrats Are Still Lost in the Wilderness

By Audrey Fahlberg

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

Moderate first-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan believes that the Democratic Party’s problems aren’t just substantive but also stylistic. Her party, she says, has lost its cool factor.

 

“We’ve just sort of lost some alpha energy, and I have, like, maybe a few ounces more of that than the average Democrat,” she told a gathering of moderate Democrats in early June in Washington, D.C. Referring to her victory in the 2024 Michigan Senate race, she added, “And that — in a place like the Midwest where our idols are the coaches of our professional teams, and people really like command — I think that was really important.” Speaking like a “normal person” is seriously underrated, she said, in a clear jab at the elite jargon that has become so prevalent in contemporary Democratic circles in recent years. “Even though I say more ums and I don’t speak as perfectly, maybe, as some really, really polished politician, we feel strongly that that’s just being a normal person. Being on Team Normal right now really helps.”

 

Dubbed by some event attendees as the “CPAC of the Center Left,” the June WelcomeFest conference in D.C. brought together centrist liberal pundits, pollsters, and politicians eager to chart a winning electoral path for the Democratic Party. Given the recent upsurge of anti-Israel sentiment in the party, it was no surprise that the event became the target of protesters who jumped onto the stage to yell “Free Palestine!” in the middle of a speech by pro-Israel Democrat Ritchie Torres.

 

Here lies one of the many problems that Slotkin-style Democrats face in their fight to push the party in a more centrist, middle-class-friendly direction: A radical leftist flank constantly seizes the microphone and shouts down any suggestion that the Democratic Party, whose popularity is reaching a historic low, should moderate after one of its most bruising presidential defeats in recent memory.

 

Out of power, leaderless, and out of touch with the working class, congressional Democrats have spent the first six months of Trump’s second term poll-testing various political messages to see which ones might appeal to the voters they lost in 2024. At the start of the new administration, they focused all their political energy on railing against Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy. Once the billionaire tech CEO stepped back from Trump’s inner circle, Democrats shifted their attention to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, telling voters that congressional Republicans are slashing Medicaid for the needy to offset tax cuts for the rich.

 

The new flavor of the moment is to inveigh against the perceived excesses of the Trump administration’s deportation tactics — a major political gamble for Democrats considering that Biden’s immigration failures were a main reason for Trump’s political comeback in 2024. But Democrats are so confident that voter approval will drift away from Republicans that more than a handful of progressive lawmakers are now comparing immigration-enforcement officers to the gestapo and renewing their controversial calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 

It won’t be easy for the Democratic Party to rehabilitate itself after the Joe Biden era, when Democrats ignored voters’ long-running concerns about the octogenarian president’s cognitive and physical decline, let alone his administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, border security, and the economy. Further alienating swing voters was Kamala Harris’s substance-free presidential campaign, which took weeks to develop a concrete list of campaign proposals and struggled to explain how she’d govern differently from her boss if elected president.

 

The 2025 political landscape has also been rocky. Six months into the second Trump administration, the Democratic National Committee’s fundraising woes and internal leadership fights under its new chairman, Ken Martin, haven’t helped matters, and congressional Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer haven’t exactly emerged as generationally inspirational figures.

 

Despite these challenges, Democrats have a prime opportunity ahead of the 2028 presidential primary to engage in a vigorous internal debate about the party’s ideals. In the eyes of many voters, Democrats are the anti-Trump party of abortion, high taxes, open borders, and profligate spending. The party has no clear message on trade or foreign policy, and Democratic politicians are at war over whether the party should moderate on divisive cultural issues like DEI and whether transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in K–12 and college sports.

 

Centrist congressional Democrats quietly worry that the grassroots enthusiasm behind progressive superstars such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders — who have a strong following among the party’s populist left flank — will shift the party further left at a time when the better move might be to meet voters in the middle. The success of Zohran Mamdani, a little-known New York state legislator who’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary suggests that the party’s base voters are craving a bold, “everything should be free” message that paints billionaires as the enemies of progress.

 

Progressive Representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) tells National Review that congressional Democrats are hosting regular “listening sessions” to figure out what the party’s message should sound like heading into the 2026 midterms. “I think we have to go big — so if they’re taking away health care from 15 million people,” he said of his Republican colleagues’ legislative reforms to Medicaid in the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “I think part of our platform should be universal health care.”

 

Some policy wonks in the party have found a new optimism in the call for an “abundance theory” of liberal politics, especially as articulated by the writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They argue that the progressive regulatory state has become a barrier to Democrats’ goals on climate change, affordable housing, scientific development, and public infrastructure projects, and that Democrats must work with — not against — the market to achieve their policy aims. The problem is that the demands of labor unions and activist interest groups often run the show in Democratic primaries, and there’s no sign that an anti-regulatory, anti-zoning progressivism is the magic — let alone organic — solution to Democrats’ electoral woes.

 

Even though Democrats are still searching for a way to revitalize their brand after their bruising 2024 presidential defeat, many project confidence that the party will get its mojo back.

 

“I don’t think we’re lost,” insists first-term Senator Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), who has spent recent months hinting at his 2028 presidential ambitions. In his view, Democrats are going through the normal process of recovering from an electoral defeat.

 

“We’re going to go through a hiccup, but . . . we know who is going to move in the right direction for this country.” Republicans, Gallego tells NR, are making things easier for his party by passing “their horrible bill.” He predicts that “it’s going to kick millions of working-class people off their health care, take food from needy people to give tax cuts to the rich. . . . The Republicans are actually helping us get our sh** together because they’re being so bad.”

 

There’s some room for Democratic optimism ahead of 2026. Beyond the electoral maxim that midterms hurt the party in power, Republicans must also soon grapple with the tricky political reality that they performed much better in recent years when Trump was on the ballot, given his unique ability to convince minorities and low-propensity voters to show up to the polls.

 

“I’d argue that when Trump leaves office, knock on wood, their disarray is going to be worse than what people are looking at with us,” says Maxwell Frost, the Florida progressive. “That’s going to be dreadful for them: figuring out who’s going to be the new leader of their party.”

 

Others say there’s reason to believe that their party will recover more quickly this time around than it did after Trump’s first presidential victory nearly a decade ago.

 

“The Democrats were so demoralized after the 2016 elections that in spring of 2017, they let a Republican judge on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court go completely unopposed. You would never see that happen right now,” says J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst for Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Another thing working in their favor? Coalitions aren’t stagnant. “One party is never in the permanent minority. We’re always going to have one of them bounce back. That’s just how it is.”

 

Over the next few months, it’s likely that Democrats’ poll-testing of different messages will continue. The perennial challenge for them in their search to rebuild their brand is figuring out how to avoid the reflexive anti-Trumpism that misunderstands Trump’s appeal among working-class voters. That’s no small challenge at a time when the party is under immense pressure from the Democratic activist class to fight back against the president’s every move.

 

Democrats ignore this problem at their own peril, says Representative Jake Auchincloss (D., Mass.). As he put it onstage at the WelcomeFest in June: “Americans know what Democrats are against. They don’t know what we’re for.” If Democrats want to earn back Americans’ trust at the federal level, he continued, “we have to explain what we are for.”