The Democratic Party’s short-term prospects look great. The party’s long-term prospects look dismal.
First, the party’s auspicious present: Democrats are favored to win the House and have a shot at taking control of the Senate in the midterm elections later this year.
In 2028, the steady collapse of support for President Trump has increased the likelihood of a Democratic presidential win.
But in 2030, the Democrats’ glory days turn ugly as the party’s fortunes face the threat of a downward spiral.
First, if the Democrats do win back the White House and the historical pattern holds, voters will turn against the party in the White House. In all the midterm elections held during the first term of a president in the modern era, the president’s party has lost House seats with only two exceptions, in 1934 and 2002.
Even more damaging than the historical pattern, the 2030 census will inflict two brutal body blows to the Democratic Party by putting the party in a significantly worse position in the contest to control the House and the presidential battle to win 270 votes in the Electoral College.
According to current estimates based on population trends, Republican states will gain and Democratic states will lose six to 12 House seats and, with them, the same number of Electoral College votes.
Democratic-controlled states could presumably make up for two to three of those losses by using redistricting to eliminate Republican House seats, but there are constraints: major Democratic states — New York and Washington, for example — use independent redistricting commissions intended to prevent or limit explicitly partisan plans.
Not only does this make it much harder to retain or win control of the House, it also means that a Democratic presidential candidate in 2032 could sweep the Midwest battleground states and still lose the election.
The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading “The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,” a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida, posted on The Bulwark.
Schale wrote:
Why is 2032 keeping me up at night? Because as Americans move to warmer climates, somewhere between eight and 12 congressional seats will move from states Democrats traditionally win to states Republicans traditionally win. It will put whatever success we Democrats have this cycle at permanent risk.
Schale on the battle of presidential elections:
With those eight to 12 congressional seats moving from ‘blue’ and ‘blue wall’ states to redder regions, that same path to 270 Electoral College votes now lands you somewhere around 260.
But, Schale continued, the challenge in the presidential math is like child’s play compared with the math for the House of Representatives:
Florida and Texas are expected to gain eight new seats between them after the 2030 census. These are states that have G.O.P. trifectas that will control redistricting.
Other states that could see new seats include Utah, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. How many legislative chambers do you think Democrats control in these four states? If you guessed zero, you nailed it.
Going even deeper into the weeds produces a bleak picture of Democratic long-term prospects. A mounting array of data clearly shows that in presidential, Senate and House contests, the Democratic Party needs to markedly improve its competitive ability in both purple and MAGA states and districts to avoid marginalization.
I wrote last week about the difficulty the Democratic Party is having in shifting in a more moderate direction to appeal to a larger constituency. The essay, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?,” focused on the forces inside the party working against the adoption of less extreme stands with broader appeal. But there are also large external and structural hurdles that Democrats will have difficulty overcoming.
One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, facing the party’s candidates who seek to win in ruby red to purple states and districts is the deep disdain voters in those regions hold for the Democratic Party; they rank the party far below either Trump or the Republicans.
NBC News polling data provided to The Times by Bill McInturff and Gordon Pryre of Public Opinion Strategies shows how high the hurdle is. Combining the results of all the surveys NBC and CNBC conducted in 2025 reveals that voters in the red states Trump carried easily view him positively, 51 percent to 42 percent, or a nine-point margin. The voters of those states have a 46 percent to 40 percent “favorable” rating for the Republican Party, a six-point difference.
Democrats, in contrast, are pariahs: 22 percent positive, 60 percent negative, for a net 38 points adverse.
Things are only slightly better for Democrats in the crucial swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the favorability gap between the parties is smaller: negative nine points for both Trump (43-52) and his party (40-49) — not good, but still a lot better than for the Democrats, who have a net negative rating of 26 points (29-55).
Shifting to an examination of the demographic obstacles confronting Democratic candidates who want to reach out beyond the party’s base shows a similar pattern. Noncollege whites — pollster shorthand for the white working class — continue to be a key constituency in MAGA states and districts. The polling firm Civiqs, which has interviewed hundreds of thousands of voters over the past decade, found that the assessment of the Democratic Party among these voters has generally worsened over that time period.
In January 2015, 62 percent of the Civiqs respondents had “unfavorable” views of the party and 29 percent favorable, or 33 points more negative than positive. By January 2026, the unfavorable assessments rose to 70 percent and the favorable fell to 22 percent, 48 points more negative than positive.
Over the same 10-plus years, Hispanic noncollege voters have gone from a modest positive rating of the Democratic Party, 48 percent to 41 percent, to a decisively negative view, 55 percent unfavorable and 36 percent favorable.
In other words, not only will Democrats have to make gains in hostile territory in the post-census 2032 campaign if they are to remain competitive in the contest to control the House, the hostility has been growing, not receding.
If all this was not ominous enough, the piling on continues with a large-scale March 24 analysis of polling trends from 2007 to 2025, “Two Decades of Partisanship in the Cooperative Election Study,” by Brad Jones, senior research director at the Scientific Research Group, which makes the following points:
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From 2008 to 2024, the percentage of voters who identify as Democrats or leaning toward the party minus the percentage that identifies as or leans toward the Republican Party slowly but steadily shrank from 10 percent to 3 percent.
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While Democratic identification fell, Republican support remained relatively constant.
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Every age group of voters, with the exception of the youngest, moved away from the Democratic Party, although Millennials are still net positive for Democrats.
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Every race, education and gender demographic group shifted toward the Republican Party with one exception: white male college graduates, who went from 7 percent more Republican than Democrat to 3 percent more Democratic.
Democratic numbers may improve as the party moves toward (and then past) selecting a presidential nominee, and there are clear signals in both polling and actual elections that the party’s standing with Hispanic voters in particular is improving, but even so, any improvement is from a strikingly weak base line.
What, then, should Democrats do to staunch the bleeding or, better yet, regain majority party status?
I posed these questions to leaders of three centrist Democratic advocacy groups whose mission is to address this problem: Jim Kessler of Third Way, Adam Jentleson of the Searchlight Institute and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute.
I asked for their views of some ideas I laid out. These included an aggressive effort to encourage and finance independent candidates in the mold of Dan Osborn in Nebraska and exploring the possibility of creating an independent subsidiary of the Democratic Party to provide institutional support for similar independent anti-MAGA candidates in anti-Democratic states and districts.
Before going further, I should acknowledge that there was no enthusiasm for my third-party suggestion, despite my contention that the idea should be explored given the extreme frailty of the Democratic Party.
Jentleson, the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute and a former aide to Senators John Fetterman and Harry Reid, argued in an email that he was not against supporting independent candidates like Osborn “as a tactic, but I think it has its limits”:
I’d caution against this as a panacea. There are a lot of operatives shopping proposals and millions of dollars sloshing around in the system that are basically all glorified kludges to work around the fact that too many Democrats take positions that are far outside the mainstream.
Instead of trying to pull off all these overly complicated, better-in-theory-than-practice, Rube-Goldberg-esque high jinks, a much simpler and more effective approach would be for Democrats to simply take positions that are in step with the voters they are trying to win.
I asked Jentleson how he would go about getting Democrats to take less extreme stands, and he replied:
Well, that is our mission at Searchlight, but it starts with showing that it works. Look at what Rob Sand (Democratic candidate for governor) is doing in Iowa. Right-wing radio listeners are mad because the top local host can’t lay a finger on him.
Jentleson cited Sand’s quotes during an interview with the conservative radio host Simon Conway. Sand replied “no” when asked if he supports trans women’s participation on women’s sports teams and said he would have stood and applauded when Trump declared in his State of the Union address: “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way and a former legislative and policy director for Senator Chuck Schumer, in both the House and the Senate, took a different tack in his response to my questions, arguing that Trump’s collapsing support gives Democrats an opening to try to revive
a Democratic Party that can win in Nebraska, as Bob Kerrey did. Or in North Dakota, as Heidi Heitkamp, Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad did. Or in Arkansas, as Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor did.
Kessler contended:
The difficulty for Democrats right now is not recruitment. There are plenty of compelling Democrats in red states who are very talented and can perform in elections far beyond expectations. The problem is the Democratic Party brand, which is so damaged that winning in these places is next to impossible.
The issue, Kessler continued, is that voters
believe our priorities are out of place and that issues like the economy, costs, border security and crime are secondary to Democrats. And finally, we have been unforgiving toward Democrats who hold views that challenge progressive orthodoxies from culture issues to climate to the economy.
No wonder, Kessler wrote,
We see Dan Osborn and others trying to break out from the Democratic Party cage. No one at Third Way begrudges Osborn for the choice he made. But the best solution is for candidates like Osborn to not only be able to run and win as a Democrat, but to change the party from within.
The reality, however, is that the day Osborn, an independent who came within 7 percentage points of winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2024, could run and win as a Democrat in Nebraska is not yet visible, even on the horizon.
Marshall, the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute and a key adviser to Bill Clinton as policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, is deeply suspicious of third parties:
I’m skeptical of third parties, especially ones purporting to represent independents or centrists. Even if you could organize one, it would only give the Democratic establishment another excuse not to make the changes necessary to stop shrinking their coalition and start expanding it.
Party leaders, in Marshall’s view, “need to reject progressive purity tests and develop a new reform blueprint that accommodates the moral sentiments and economic aspirations of working families.”
There is, Marshall maintained, “no deus ex machina that’s going to save the party; the change has to come from within as rank-and-file Democrats get tired of losing.”
Marshall did call for a specific reform:
Replace the party’s primary and caucus system with ranked-choice (also called instant runoff) voting. The current system empowers well-organized activists and interest groups to elect their favorites on the basis of narrow pluralities rather than broad political appeal. Under ranked choice, nominees would have to win an outright majority. This would introduce a centrist bias into candidate selection and change the balance of power within the party.
Jentleson, Kessler and Marshall bring a combination of extensive experience in the political trenches, years of pondering the Democratic future and a deep interest in finding solutions to improve the party’s future prospects.
The success of the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, who purposefully challenged left-liberal orthodoxies on race, crime, the death penalty and welfare, provides a precedent to buttress the centrists’ claim that the Democratic Party can move to the center effectively and without losing purpose.
The Democratic Party of the early 1990s was, however, very different from the Democratic Party of today.
In 1994, Gallup found that moderates were a solid 48 percent plurality of Democratic voters while liberals and conservatives each made up a quarter. By 2025, liberals were a decisive majority at 59 percent as moderates fell to 32 percent and conservatives shrank to 8 percent.
In 1992 and 1996, predominantly moderate and conservative rural voters split their ballots almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In 2024, according to the Economic Innovation Group, “Donald Trump won 93 percent of rural counties.”
At the same time, according to Pew Research, the share of voters without college degrees in the Democratic electorate fell to 54 percent in 2023 from 78 percent in 1996 while the share with college degrees more than doubled, to 45 percent from 22 percent. The share of Democratic voters who are white with college degrees grew over this period to 30 percent from 18 percent.
In other words, in 1992, Clinton could appeal, in his bid for the nomination, to a broad swath of moderate and conservative Democratic primary voters, voters without college degrees and voters in rural areas.
A presidential candidate determined to run as a moderate in 2028, committed to pushing his or her party to the center, faces a primary electorate far more deeply committed to left-liberal policies and far less amenable to moving to the center.
If, then, the best strategy to survive and compete is to shift toward moderation, especially on cultural issues, party leaders — and especially those who share the strategic thinking of Kessler, Jentleson and Marshall — have their work cut out for them.
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