At the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting in Maryland last month, the Democrats elected Ken Martin as their new chair and David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg is 24 years old and appears healthy, which means he has decades ahead to contemplate the wreck of his party.

And a wreck it is. The Democratic Party is leaderless, adrift, and unpopular.

It’s also deeply confused. With some notable exceptions—my AEI colleague Ruy Teixeira, Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston, political consultant James Carville—Democrats not only find it impossible to agree on why they are in such a hole; many deny they are in a hole.

The denialists live in an alternate universe. Joe Biden left office with an approval rating of 39 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. His average job approval in the Gallup poll was 42 percent, the second-lowest rating among presidents since JFK. A separate Gallup poll found that most Americans believe that under Biden the country lost ground on debt, immigration, inequality, the economy, world affairs, and crime. Not much else is left.

Donald Trump defeated Harris 50 percent to 48 percent nationwide and won every swing state. Practically the entire country shifted right between 2020 and 2024. The DNC is just about the only political institution Democrats still control. Trump’s Republicans hold the presidency, Congress, most Supreme Court appointments, and most governorships and state legislatures.

The GOP’s strength is historic. For the third straight year, Republicans began 2025 with a slight edge in party registration. More registered Republicans than registered Democrats voted in 2024. That hasn’t happened since 1928, when Herbert Hoover faced Al Smith.

The Democrats’ polls are dismal, too. According to CNN, 48 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of the Democrats. According to Quinnipiac, that number is 57 percent. YouGov’s tracking poll puts Democratic un-favorables at 59 percent.

Yet numbers don’t capture the full extent of the problem. Democratic elites are doubling down on identity politics at precisely the moment when the public is telling them to stop.

Take Ken Martin. “We’ve got the right message,” the new chair says in the New York Times. “What we need to do is connect it back with voters.”

I don’t know what message Martin is talking about, but it’s not what voters are hearing. During the week he was elected chair, the Times released a devastating survey of attitudes toward the major parties. If you are a Democrat, it reads like an indictment.

The poll asked Americans to name Democratic party priorities. Voters replied that the Democrats stand for abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, and oppose climate change—which is a fair summary of what Democratic elected officials and their media chorus talk about daily.

Yet Americans have different concerns. Their top issues are the economy, health care, and immigration. The Democrats’ fixations hardly register. In fact, voter priorities align more closely with Republican positions. The GOP, Americans said, stands for controlling immigration, improving the economy, and lowering taxes. This overlap between public sentiment and Republican stands explains the GOP majority.

Republicans haven’t been this in sync with the public in a generation. While Democrats inside the MSNBC bubble gabbed about pronouns, Republicans appealed to working- and middle-class Americans struggling with high prices and interest rates.

Americans agree with Democrats on exactly one topic: health care. But voters don’t see Democrats as emphasizing health care as much as climate change and sexual identity. For voters, health care is about insurance access and cost. For Democrats, health care is subsumed into abstract crusades for democracy, minority rights, transgenderism, and the green-energy transition. The Democrats consider public safety and the cost of living to be trifles by comparison.

Denial, litmus tests, and bizarre ideas define today’s Democratic Party. The Biden administration said illegal immigration would be seasonal, inflation temporary, and the world safer after the Afghanistan disaster. When voters registered their disapproval, the administration said these poor saps had fallen prey to misinformation.

The White House said Biden was fit as a fiddle—until he withdrew from the race. The Harris campaign said America was feeling the joy—but she wouldn’t face Joe Rogan. Democrats spent $175 million on pro-choice advertising—yet had no answer when Trump’s campaign hammered Harris’s support for sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison.

Rather than face facts, Democrats have retreated into the protective shell of Bluesky. They blame setbacks on voter backwardness. They pin responsibility on anyone but themselves. At a Georgetown forum on January 30, MSNBC personality Jonathan Capehart asked DNC candidates if they believed racism and misogyny had played a part in Kamala Harris’s defeat. Everyone raised their hands. “That’s good,” Capehart purred. “You all pass.”

The DNC meeting showcased this flight from reality. It opened with a land acknowledgment. There was an extended debate over whether proportional representation required electing nonbinary candidates. While votes were tallied, delegates boogied to the Cupid Shuffle.

The choice was telling. The Cupid Shuffle is 18 years old. Far from the electric movements of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, today’s Democratic Party is the party of the establishment, of people who are comfortable, of a dance played only at bar mitzvahs. It’s become the party of rule makers and scolds. It’s for people who think James Taylor is edgy.

Worse, it’s the party of Joe Biden. In the past century, four presidents served single terms: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Biden. Hoover’s and Carter’s failures launched eras of opposition dominance. Bush’s legacy is more complicated, since Republicans won Congress in 1994 and the White House in 2000. Still, the GOP won the popular vote just once between 1988 and 2024.

We could be entering a similar period in which Biden’s unpopularity haunts the Democrats for multiple election cycles. To prevent this, Democrats will have to do more than hope for a public backlash to Trump overreach. They will have to find leaders who reject both the Biden record and the politically correct progressive utopianism that shaped it.

Successful presidential candidates typically run against their own parties. The way to demonstrate your capacity to lead the country is by challenging party orthodoxy. Parties benefit from such bouts of creative destruction. Ronald Reagan fought the Nixon-Kissinger-Bush consensus on economics and foreign policy. Bill Clinton campaigned as a “New Democrat” who would end welfare as we knew it, mend affirmative action, fight crime, and support free trade.

George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” distinct from Newt Gingrich’s revolutionaries. Barack Obama felled the Clinton dynasty thanks in part to his early opposition to the Iraq War. And Donald Trump overthrew the GOP of Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney by calling for a border wall, economic nationalism, and America First foreign policy.

By this logic, Democrats will be on track when they elevate figures who talk less about racial, sexual, and gender identity and climate apocalypse, and more about incomes, immigration, and national greatness.

But don’t expect it to happen soon. As I write, the 2028 Democratic front-runner is Kamala Harris. She enjoys a double-digit lead over her closest rivals. The DNC reacted—yes—joyfully when she appeared by video. Which tells you everything about a party that just doesn’t get it.

Photo: AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.

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