The Way Forward

Will Democrats Learn from the Establishment’s Loss?

The David Hogg affair, Zohran Mamdani’s win, and the future of the Democratic coalition.

David Austin Walsh
DemocratsElectionsU.S.
June 26, 2025

The Democratic Party is in crisis, and it goes far beyond the stereotypical “Dems in Disarray” headlines. The party’s popularity numbers are abysmal: a March poll by NBC News found that only 27 percent of registered voters have positive views of the Democrats, the lowest since the poll began in 1990. Other polls have found that the approval rating of congressional Democrats is underwater among Democratic voters, with only around a third expressing satisfaction with the Democrats’ performance on Capitol Hill. (Nearly 80 percent of Republicans, by contrast, approve of the congressional GOP.) Even big donors are beginning to tighten their purse-strings.

A good illustration of the depths of the crisis: on Saturday, June 14, an estimated 5 million people around the country participated in the anti-Trump “No Kings” protests. It was one of the largest protests in American history, mobilizing between 1 and 2 percent of the entire U.S. population in the streets. There is clearly a groundswell of anti-MAGA political energy across the country, and yet the most recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 53 percent of Democrats disapprove of how the Democratic Party is doing in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval rating, in particular, is hovering around 17 percent—and given Schumer’s vocal support for Israel’s strikes on Iran, that number is likely only to plummet more.

snip*
Part of the problem for Democrats is that there is little consensus about what exactly the party stands for in concrete policy terms beyond unconditional support for Israel, some attention to climate change, and vaguely defined commitments to racial, gender, and sexuality equity (never mind the establishment’s backing of Cuomo after his resignation following sexual harassment allegations). Liberal pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have attempted to lay out a more affirmative agenda—“abundance”—in their recent book of the same title. Any positive vision for the Democratic Party should certainly include the expansion of the state’s capacity to do things, but—as Sandeep Vaheesan argued in these pages last month—Klein and Thompson’s thinking remains structured in many ways by neoliberalism, and anyway much of the actually existing political muscle for the “abundance agenda” is astroturfed from wealthy Silicon Valley donors.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/will-democrats-learn-from-the-establishments-loss/