Democrats Need a Plan. Instead They’re Running for President.

Welcome back to Margin of Terror, a column in which we track how the U.S. electorate is reacting to political developments during the second Trump presidency.

There’s bad news for Democrats in the polls. Underneath the bad news, though, there’s some good news. And underneath the good news is even worse news. A good-news sandwich on bad-news bread—gross!

Let’s dig through the layers. Last week’s Wall Street Journal poll was only the most recent to find that the party’s popularity is at a historic low; its net favorability is negative 30 percent, the WSJ found, which was 19 points worse than the Republican Party’s despite the ongoing unpopularity of Trump’s presidency. As writer and pollster G. Elliott Morris observes, that’s because about three times as many Democrats as Republicans are unhappy with their own party. (Watching the people in charge lose for a second time to a convicted felon who is in the Epstein “files” for completely unrelated reasons will do that to you!)

The good news is: This does not mean the Democrats won’t retake control of the House of Representatives, or potentially even the Senate, in 2026. Midterms are usually just a referendum on the party in power, and Dems’ lead on “generic ballot” questions—i.e., whom voters would rather see in control of Congress—currently averages around three points. And Donald Trump does not have any particularly popular ideas in the pipeline. (It’s a sewage pipeline.) Almost all those Democratic voters who view their party unfavorably are still going to cast ballots for its candidates next year, it seems.

The bad news, again? Once Democrats take power, whether it’s partial power in 2026 or control of both Congress and the presidency in 2028, voters will expect them to do something about all the problems. If they don’t deliver, they will be back out on their asses the next time an election comes around. And as journalist Philip Bump explained this week using data from a Fox News poll, those loyal Democratic voters themselves don’t even believe their party has a plan to do this.

The question at the moment appears to center on what the Democratic Party itself stands for—particularly among Democrats. Consider the results when Fox asked respondents which party had a “clear plan” for addressing America’s problems.

Eight in 10 Republicans said their party did. Only half of Democrats agreed.

One of the pollsters who conducted the Journal’s survey said basically the same thing:

“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”

Bump’s insight is that this national-brand albatross gives individual Democratic candidates in tight races the perverse incentive to run against their own party—as, essentially, not one of those bad Democrats like you see in the news from Washington. This becomes a problem after elections, when the party’s members are supposed to put their heads together to pass laws that they (and their voters) all agree are good ideas. There is always a critical mass of marginal Democrats incentivized to throw a wrench in things (often creating massive headaches for future Democrats) to burnish their own brand as a maverick or common-sense centrist or whatever.

As I wrote recently, this is one of a range of issues created by the party’s singular fixation on short-term campaign messaging at the expense of long-term strategy. If the Democratic Party wants to govern successfully over a period of multiple elections—and to make progress on fixing the institutions that voters deeply distrust, in a way that manifests in anger toward whatever party happens to be in power—it might consider having an overarching message about why it exists. This message should be advertised and and conveyed in a way that’s broader than any single candidate. What should the United States be, and how will Democrats help it get there? This is the problem that the party’s voters have identified themselves in the “clear plan” result above. It’s right there in the data, and don’t we all love data???

But there is no real central authority in the Democratic Party. There is no mechanism for getting together and deciding about long-term stuff. The Democratic National Committee is largely a fundraising and logistics operation, and most campaign spending flows around it anyway, through individual candidates and super PACs. The party’s most senior figures can exert leverage through the disbursement of funds they control, but that’s a system that leads back again to the prioritization of individual campaign interests. The most effective way—really the only way—to steer the giant Democratic ship is to get elected president so that you can personally decide what laws to pass and so that others will try to spend the next several election cycles, or decades, copying not just your approach to politics but your personal mannerisms and vocal timbre. The only way to control a hollow modern party is through sheer force of personality and platform.

So, rationally, a bunch of Democrats who believe they have an idea where the party should be going next—and there are some of them who think on this longer timescale—are all-but-openly running for president. Axios catalogs a dozen Dems who have already visited early primary states this year—it’s freaking 2025—and lists nine others who are tangibly itching to run as well. And while I suggested a few months ago that an early presidential campaign might provide some of what the party needs, the idea was that it would have to be a real campaign, one that signed up volunteers, held events across the country, and stood behind specific ideas—something that led the party. Instead, the 20-plus current presumed candidates are doing traditionally coy trial-balloon semi-campaigns mostly conducted through media “hits”—there is not a podcast microphone in North America that Pete Buttigieg will not sit down in front of if you leave it out for a while—and very occasional in-person events at which reporters outnumber voters. The purpose of this kind of campaign is signaling and positioning with other insiders, not engagement with the masses. In other words, the trips to South Carolina will continue until morale improves.

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