Democrats Only Know One Way To Win Elections— Playing Their Pathetic "Lesser Of Two Evils" Card

Yesterday, in a post about the 2028 presidential election there was a quote from Chris Murphy (D-CT): “We have become the party of the status quo, when we’re not. We’re actually the party of change, the party of transferring power from powerful people to people who have no power.” Being the party of change is an important reputation to have… but the Democrats lost it when they started embracing Wall Street and fat cat donors back when Clinton (and Rahm Emanuel) were in the White House.

And yesterday Aaron Blake took a look at polling tea leaves that flew in the face of what Murphy was asserting. “There’s new evidence,” he wrote, “that the Democratic Party’s reputation is in a bad place. That doesn’t mean the party is doomed, electorally speaking. There’s plenty of reason to doubt that, given lots of history and its performance in the 2025 elections thus far— but it is a complicating factor for the party’s path forward.”

He was looking at the new CNN poll released Sunday which found that respondents “were more likely to view the Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders (40% to 16%) and even the ‘party of change’ (32% to 25%). Neither party won close to a majority in either category. But the former is notable because there is such a gulf between the two parties. And the latter is notable because the party that’s out of power is usually viewed as the party of change. Not this time.”

Of course, that is all about Trump. While the Democrats actually do not have strong— or inspiring— leaders, the Republicans have one who plays the authoritarian strongman.

“Only about 1 in 6 Americans said Democrats have stronger leaders than Republicans. As remarkably, only 39% of Democrats said that.” Trump is also a change agent— albeit not in a good way.

“It’s likely this is, in part, about Democrats’ failure to position themselves as change agents,” wrote Blake, “but also about what Trump is doing— and about people not necessarily seeing ‘change’ as a good thing. However you feel about the changes Trump is making, there is no question he is pushing lots of them. You see that in his and the Department of Government Efficiency’s rapid overhaul of the federal government and in Trump’s historic efforts to expand executive power— in ways that are often being halted by the courts because they go too far, too fast. It’s possible that people just see Trump changing lots of things, whether for good or ill in their opinions, so the ‘party of change’ mantle doesn’t mean what it usually does… But it’s also pretty clear that Democrats have failed to make themselves into a viable and attractive alternative to the party in power.”

The new CNN poll also asked which party people viewed as the “party that can get things done.” Republicans led on this by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, 36% to 19%. Only 49% of Democrats and 11% of independents picked the Democratic Party as the more formidable one.

Keep in mind that Republicans have been sinking in almost every special election since November. People may not have any confidence in the Democrats— why should they?— but they recognize that the GOP is much worse. “In other words,” wrote Blake, “being not-Trump could be good enough to at least reclaim a very closely split House. But if the Democratic Party wants to run up the score in 2026 and really chart a path for the 2028 election, it has some real work to do on its branding.”

Nate Cohn approached the topic from a different direction. His research shows that Trump’s presence on the ballot may have actually cost Republicans a more decisive victory. “Voters,” he wrote, “wanted change, badly. They were repelled not just by Biden’s faltering condition, but also by rising prices and perceived failures of Democratic governance on everything from immigration to energy. While it didn’t yield a more decisive Republican victory, the backlash against pandemic-era restrictions, rising prices and ‘woke’ all help explain why a close election felt like a conservative ‘vibe shift.’ The race was close for one reason: Donald J. Trump. He was an unpopular felon who had alienated millions of Americans with his comments and actions over nearly a decade. Obviously, Trump possesses important political strengths, but his weaknesses plainly made a landslide victory more challenging. To the extent the election offered the Republicans an opportunity to win big, he was not the candidate to capitalize on it. Although we’ll never know what would have happened with a different Republican— who undoubtedly would have had plenty of flaws of his or her own— there is little reason to doubt that there was an opening for Republicans to do better and perhaps much better.”

Only 40 percent of voters approved of President Biden’s performance, and nearly three-quarters thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. The public’s evaluation of the economy was nearly as damning as it was in 2008, at the depths of the financial crisis. The president’s party has never retained the White House with numbers that bad.

The favorable national political environment helped Republicans build a four-point advantage in party identification, according to the exit polls, and make steady gains in party registration. It helped yield an enormous breakthrough among young and nonwhite voters, whom Democrats had long taken for granted.

Harris was not well positioned to overcome these headwinds. In the exit polls, only 46 percent of voters had a favorable view of her, compared with 52 percent with an unfavorable view, a tally that would make her the third-least-popular major party nominee on record, after Hillary Clinton and Trump. She was seen as ‘too far to the left’ by nearly half of voters, and she brought plenty of baggage from her time as vice president and her ill-fated 2019 presidential bid.

If this was all you knew, you would almost certainly guess that the incumbent’s party was going to lose by more than the 1.5 percentage points that it did.

… The polls found Trump and Republicans with a significant or even double-digit lead on many of the issues that mattered most to voters, like the economy, immigration, foreign policy and crime.

There were two notable exceptions: democracy and abortion, where Harris had the edge. These issues helped keep the election closer than it would have been otherwise, but they support the possibility that Republicans probably should have fared better in 2024.

Pollsters tend to read a lot more into polls than is warranted. That’s their job though. Since the election, the Hispanic population which had swung significantly right, is now swinging left. Do they like the Democrats more? There’s not a reason in the world they should. In fact, there are reasons they should like the Democrats even less! But the lesser of two evils premise is smacking them upside the head— and bigly. Trump and his minions are worse for their communities than anyone ever believed they would be.

Yesterday, Andrew Howard reported that new polling shows Trump cratering among Latino independents (down by a staggering 43% to 29%) and Latinas. “Overall, his approval among Latinos dropped from 43 percent to 39 percent.”

Only 38% of Latinos think Trump is doing a good job on the economy, and that approval drops to 26% among independents. “Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said that the economy is getting worse under Trump’s administration, and 19 percent said the economy is improving. ‘I think there are a lot of Latinos who didn’t necessarily vote for Donald Trump. They voted for change,’ [pollster Melissa] Morales said. ‘They voted for something different than they were experiencing in their everyday economic lives… There is a huge disconnect between what Hispanic/Latino voters want the President and Congress to focus on versus what they believe Trump and Republicans are doing.’”