The moment is ripe to deal a debilitating blow to Trumpism and the MAGA movement.
Right-wing populism is staggering. Democrats are not only favored to win back control of the House, but they also have a long-shot chance of taking over the Senate.
President Trump’s favorability ratings on both his job performance and the issues that propelled him into the White House have nose-dived. The ICE and Border Patrol killings in Minnesota have focused public attention on the dangers of autocratic rule. His second term has been dominated by a bizarre combination of narcissism, corruption and a lurching foreign policy.
But if Democrats are to succeed in excising the Trump malignancy from the body politic, their party faces a major hurdle: public distrust, if not downright animosity.
Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, summed up the Democratic dilemma in an email responding to my queries:
Democrats would be extremely foolish to think that the temporary advantage given to them by Trump’s unpopularity amounts to a permanent fix of their deeply rooted image problem. The party’s favorability ratings remain at record lows.
And while Democrats may temporarily be de-emphasizing some of the rhetoric that made them so unpopular, most voters do not believe that they have had a real change of heart about wokeness or D.E.I. — much less that they have a coherent set of political ideas to fill the resulting vacuum.
Put another way, Democrats — and their liberal allies — must persuade voters to have faith in the legitimacy, fairness and strength of the party, its institutional supporters and its network of advocacy groups. They need to be able to restore the left’s claim to the mantle of free and fair elections, neutral administration of justice, individual rights and an end to corruption.
Four studies conducted in the second half of 2025 reveal the depth of the predicament Democrats face. Even as support for Trump deteriorated, each analysis found that the public, including many Democratic voters, had a dismal view of the Democratic Party.
“Many Democrats see their political party as ‘weak’ or ‘ineffective,’” The Associated Press reported based on a July poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which it said also found “considerable pessimism within Democratic ranks.”
The A.P. quoted Cathia Krehbiel, a 48-year-old Democrat from Indianola, Iowa, who called her party “spineless,” adding that “they speak up a little bit and they roll right over.”
A Pew Research survey showed that in late September “67 percent of Democrats say their own party makes them feel frustrated.” Asked why, “the dominant pre-shutdown response of frustrated Democrats (41 percent) is that the party has not pushed back hard enough against the Trump administration.”
In October, the group behind the centrist Democratic WelcomePAC issued “Deciding to Win,” an analysis of “election results, hundreds of public polls and academic papers, dozens of case studies, and surveys of more than 500,000 voters” that found that “since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party’s agenda, decreasing our party’s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people.”
The authors tracked key word usage in Democratic platforms from 2012 to 2024 and found the frequency of the word “hate” increasing by 1,323 percent; “white/Black/Latino/Latina” by 1,137 percent; “L.G.B.T./L.G.B.T.Q.I.+” by 1,044 percent; and “equity” by 766 percent.
Over the same period, usage of “father/fathers” fell 100 percent; “crime/criminal” by 30 percent; “responsibility” by 83 percent; “middle class” by 79 percent; and “veteran” by 31 percent.
Finally, in November, Politico’s Elena Schneider reported the findings of a 21-state research project funded by Democracy Matters involving polling, dozens of focus groups and message testing.
“Working-class voters see Democrats as ‘woke, weak and out of touch’ and six in 10 have a negative view of the party,” she wrote, later adding:
The initial feedback is grim: Working-class voters don’t see Democrats as strong or patriotic, while Republicans represent safety and strength for them. These voters “can’t name what Democrats stand for, other than being against [Donald] Trump,” according to the report.
Some widely read voices in the center-left commentariat argue that the problems of the left are both deep and entrenched — that over the past decade, liberalism has lost its way, taking Democrats and liberal institutions down a progressive ideological path that has marginalized Democrats in the minds of many voters.
On Dec. 3, Matthew Yglesias argued in his essay “The Fox in Liberalism’s Henhouse,” posted on The Argument’s website:
Modern liberalism was experienced at fending off challenges that announced themselves at the front door, but one of the most successful anti-liberal challenges crept through the side gate. Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism.
This new version turned out to be antithetical to what Yglesias argued are the fundamental tenets of liberalism,
the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice.
The illiberal ideas I’m critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups — particularly racial, gender and sexual identities — as the real subjects of politics, see “neutral” rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals.
Progressive politics, Yglesias continued,
is now awash in misguided specific ideas that are downstream of this illiberal turn. Criminal justice reform moved with alarming speed from the righteous argument that young African American men shouldn’t be subject to collective punishment via “stop-and-frisk” policies on the basis of statistical inference to the unsound view that active policing is harmful and racist unless arrest rates are uniform across ethnic groups.
“Defund the police” has been left in the dust, but the misguided crusade against advanced math classes that Kelsey Piper dissected for The Argument earlier this month springs from the same impulse to judge equality in terms of group rather than individual impacts.
The dominance of this anti-liberalism, Yglesias wrote, “leads to cringeworthy spectacles like former President Joe Biden preannouncing, before Ketanji Brown Jackson was selected to serve as a Supreme Court justice, that he was only considering Black women for the job — an absurdity that did a disservice to her as much as to anyone else.”
A month later, Noah Smith published on his Substack an equally biting critique of liberalism and the Democratic Party, “Where Does a Liberal Go From Here?”
“Here I stand, in 2026, and America’s long arc of liberalism appears to have bent straight into the dirt,” Smith wrote.
Like many liberals of the old school, Smith continued,
I watched with concern as the quest to end discrimination against Black Americans evolved into a desire to institutionalize discrimination against white Americans in universities, nonprofits, government agencies and many corporations — something the liberals of the 1990s swore they would never countenance. …
I watched as the gay rights movement gave way to a trans movement that was deeply out of step with both America’s beliefs and civil rights law. …
After decades of mass incarceration, a loose alliance of progressive D.A.s, judges and anti-police protesters shifted blue cities toward far more permissive policies toward property crime, public drug markets and low-level assaults and harassment. The progressivism that emerged in the 2010s seems to view anarchy as a form of welfare, believing that the best way to help the poor and unfortunate was to allow the worst and most violent among them to terrorize the rest of them without restraint or reprisal.
While I generally agree with Smith and Yglesias that many on the left have adopted anti-liberal stands that are alien to most voters, I think the problems they identify are less characteristic of the Democratic Party than of the institutions and social movements associated with liberalism. For that reason, I initially thought that in one respect Trump had done the left a favor by forcing colleges and corporations to abandon the most problematic and divisive aspects of D.E.I. policies, cancel culture and institutional toleration of antisemitism, and so reducing the burden on those seeking to put liberalism and the Democratic Party back on a path more appealing to middle- and working-class voters.
I didn’t account for the psychological phenomenon known as reactance. Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, described how this works in an email:
The most that can be said for Trump’s coercion is that he is turning up the heat to make some changes that are overdue. But his strongman tactics are backfiring, as many of my colleagues are resisting efforts to get Harvard to reform from within because they see it as a capitulation to autocracy and a diversion from the greater threat to academic freedom posed by government muscle.
Pinker’s comment suggests that proponents of moderation on the left face continuing opposition in academia, and Sean J. Westwood, a Dartmouth political scientist, went a step further than Pinker, telling me by email:
Trump hasn’t cleared a path for Democratic renewal — he’s possibly made one far less likely. By casting himself as the nemesis of progressive excess, he has paradoxically strengthened their hold on the Democratic imagination.
His heavy-handed assault on D.E.I. and campus speech codes hasn’t prompted soul-searching on the left; it has supplied a new grievance narrative, confirming for activists that they were right all along, that the backlash proves the threat. Victimhood, once claimed, is rarely surrendered.
It is as if, Westwood concluded, “Democrats are engineering a super-strain of progressive in a lab, purpose-built to alienate the middle of this country and the middle of the ideological spectrum.”
On a less pessimistic note, Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a Democratic centrist think tank, argued that Trump’s declining support
leaves Democrats an opening. If we can advocate a squarely mainstream approach on these issues, we can win the battle of reasonableness with American voters. While the current attacks on higher education and other institutions of our society are heinous and un-American, they have also forced some colleges, corporations and systems to stop overfocusing on nomenclature and symbolic wokeness and start defending the core values that Democrats can and should be singing from the rooftops: freedom of thought, equality of opportunity, and the Golden Rule: treating others as you’d like to be treated.
Democratic policymakers and candidates should grab the chance that Trump and MAGA are offering and re-establish themselves as the party of liberty.
That said, Erickson cautioned, “Democrats have to affirmatively make a move,” adding:
We are going to have to call out the mistakes and overreaches of the left that cost us the trust of voters in the middle before we can rebuild it. Presuming their souring on Trump’s excesses means we have a clean slate, without changing our own behavior, would be a dangerous mistake.
Not all academic centrists share Pinker and Westwood’s pessimistic assessment of the intractability of the left on campus.
Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia, described the ambivalent nature of the response of universities to Trump’s ideological demands:
There are many situations in life, including our personal ones, where we are happy with the consequences of someone’s actions but feel the actions themselves crossed a line. In those situations we are left with two questions: Do the benefits of the action outweigh the costs (including moral costs)? And would any other actions have reached the same end without those costs?
I’m not happy with the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics with the universities, which violate important principles and in most cases are plain stupid (e.g., targeting medical research).
But now that they have been taken, I hope that sensible people in the universities and Democrats more generally will take the opportunity to end the overreach and moderate their approaches.
We need sensible policies on campus speech and policies that help disadvantaged, especially African American, students. We never needed the self-serving, Kafka-esque bureaucracies tasked with those policies during the “peak woke.” May we never see them again.
Along similar lines, Pinker wrote on these pages last May in “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” that “the uncomfortable fact” is that many of the reforms adopted by Harvard “followed Mr. Trump’s inauguration and overlap with his demands. But if you’re standing in a downpour and Mr. Trump tells you to put up an umbrella, you shouldn’t refuse just to spite him.”
Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, has a very different take on this issue: “What Trump has done isn’t to help institutions self-correct. Instead, he has demonstrated that they can be coerced by executive power just as effectively as they had been captured by activist pressure.”
The deeper problem, Stanger continued,
is that our epistemic institutions — universities chief among them — have lost confidence in their own purpose.
They were, therefore, susceptible to internal ideological capture and are now unable to form a coalition in support of the free inquiry on which science, innovation and democracy depend. Divided, they are equally susceptible to external coercion.
What Democrats should do, Stanger argued, “is offer an affirmative vision for why these institutions matter — not as sites of ideological formation but as places where people learn to think for themselves, evaluate arguments and the evidence for them, and engage productively across difference.”
Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and the author of “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” noted in an email that “the Democrats in good shape to retake the House. The Senate is up for grabs. But,” he pointedly added, “I wouldn’t say the Democrats are in good shape.”
For the past decade. al-Gharbi wrote,
There were signs of trouble: attrition with key groups that persisted even in the face of Democrat wins, strong evidence that swing voters who went for Democrats in 2018-2020 were now swinging the other way, etc.
These were ignored, and so we end up in a situation where the Democrats lost every swing state and the popular vote in 2024 — an outcome driven by the very populations they define their coalition in terms of.
Unfortunately, al-Gharbi continued,
Democrats have little credibility because they have been supporting lots of censorship on everything from insufficiently progressive views on race and gender, to suppressing views on contentious political issues in the name of fighting “misinformation” and more.
They and their fellow travelers have spent the past decade lowering standards, defining things like standardized tests as racist (former Rep. Jamaal Bowman famously compared testing to “modern day slavery”).
Adam Jentleson, the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, suggested in an email that the Democratic Party may regain a stronger footing, but he remained very wary of excessive optimism:
I think a lot of folks have learned their lesson on a surface level — there are a lot of folks telling funders that they have learned to be more pragmatic.
But the proof will be in the pudding — what remains to be seen is whether there has been a true recalibration or just a quick strategic retreat, to be followed by doubling down on the same approaches wrapped in a thin sheen of new messaging.
The 2026 election is very likely to pose a problem for the Democrats. The better the party does in the midterm elections, the incentive to reform in preparation for the 2028 presidential contest will lose force — a win-lose proposition.
Unfortunately, when they encounter a fork in the road, politicians and political parties almost invariably choose the easier path.
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