There are three polling numbers you can use to understand the condition of the Democratic Party in 2026. The first is Donald Trump’s approval rating, which has dropped into the high 30s, a terrain usually associated with dramatic public rebukes and mandates for the opposition.
The second is the generic congressional ballot, which is promising Democrats decent midterm election results but is stubbornly refusing to promise a sweeping mandate or a clear shot at flipping all the crucial Senate states.
The third is polling for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, in which the leading Democratic candidate is consistently Kamala Harris, the face of the party’s 2024 debacle.
All three numbers are linked to the dominant mode in Democratic politics right now. It’s not the rebellion or radicalism manifest in, say, Hasan Piker’s Twitch-streamer Marxism or Zohran Mamdani’s telegenic democratic socialism. Notable as those tendencies may be, the Democrats’ fundamental condition is a late-Trumpian stasis — in which the president’s stark unpopularity encourages his opponents to imagine that they can keep everything basically as it was in the Biden era, with the same broad priorities and deference to activists and interest groups, and float back to power automatically.
The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of this stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; Mitt Romney did well in such polls in 2013 and 2014. But she seems to want a second run more than Romney did, and if she goes for it, she will have one notable advantage: the fact that many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.
I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.
Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.
That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do, and it’s also what you see in many of the figures contending for influence in the party, outsiders and insiders alike. Politicians as distinct as Graham Platner, Gavin Newsom, James Talarico and Abigail Spanberger have all offered new directions for the Democrats that are primarily image-based. The theory is always: What if we had the same basic policy orientation that makes moderates distrust us, except that this time we’ll talk like a bearded oyster farmer … or like Trump himself on a social media bender … or like a sunny youth pastor … or like a former C.I.A. officer?
Spanberger won, and Platner might win, and Talarico could win if the Republicans nominate Ken Paxton. And in 2028 Newsom or, yes, even Harris 2.0 could win if JD Vance is dragging a failed administration behind him like Jacob Marley’s chains.
But we already know that Democrats can win purple-state races on anti-Trump backlash and sometimes even red-state races against terrible Republican candidates. The question is whether they can win bigger and hold their gains and govern successfully, rather than just repeat the pattern of the Biden presidency and now the Trump presidency, in which a majority is won and just as quickly squandered.
For that, Democrats first need to consistently win over enough former Trump voters to claim a meaningful Senate majority — something the polls don’t show them doing yet. And then they need a theory of governance that doesn’t immediately alienate those voters — something that is nowhere in evidence at the moment.
There’s still time to discover such a theory before 2028, still time to discover a candidate who speaks to voters who are anti-Trump but also still anti-left, still time for the advance of artificial intelligence to transform the battle lines of politics.
But for now, Kamala Harris, presidential front-runner, should loom as a warning about how easily sticking together, playing nice and relying on backlash can lead a party to repeat the exact same mistakes.
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