Sometimes you have to look a little deeper than the headlines to understand polls, and I did so at New York this week:
A new Reuters-Ipsos poll provides the unsurprising news that rank-and-file Democrats are displeased with their party’s leadership. The numbers are pretty stark:
“Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that ‘the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.’ Only 24% disagreed and the rest said they weren’t sure or didn’t answer.”
Some of the more specific complaints the poll identified are a little strange. “Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.” This is largely hallucinatory. With the arguable exception of those in Maine, who earlier this year fought with the Trump administration over the power to regulate their own school sports programs, most Democrats in the public eye have given this sub-issue (inflated into gigantic proportions by demagogic ads from the Trump campaign last year) a very wide berth. It’s not a great sign that Democrats are viewing their own party through the malevolent eyes of the opposition.
But beyond that problem, there’s a questionable tendency to assume that changing “the leadership” will address concerns that are really just the product of the party having lost all its power in Washington last November. And to some extent, the alleged “disconnect” between party and leadership is exaggerated by the lurid headlines about the poll. For example, “86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern.” That’s not a particularly large gap, and, in fact, there are virtually no Democrats in Congress who are not grinding away like cicadas on the message that Republicans are trying to cut taxes on “wealthy Americans and large corporations.”
The more fundamental question may be this: Who, exactly, are the “Democratic leaders” the rank and file wants to replace? It’s not an easy question to answer. I am reasonably confident that a vanishingly small percentage of Democrats could name the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, despite some media stories about turmoil at the DNC since his election.
According to a recent Economist-YouGov survey, 36 percent of self-identified Democrats had no opinion of the “Democratic leader” closest to actual power in Washington, Hakeem Jeffries, who is very likely to become Speaker of the House in 2027. Of those who did have an opinion, 51 percent were favorable toward him and 13 percent were unfavorable, which doesn’t sound much like a mandate for “replacing” him. In the same poll, Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, had a 48 percent favorable and 28 percent unfavorable rating among Democrats, which is surprisingly positive given the massive negative publicity he earned for botching a confrontation with Republicans over a stopgap spending bill in March. Indeed, the favorability ratios for every named Democrat in that poll are a lot better than you’d expect if the rank and file were really in a “throw the bums out” kind of mood: Bernie Sanders is at 82 percent favorable to 8 percent unfavorable; Pete Buttigieg is at 62 percent favorable to 9 percent unfavorable; Elizabeth Warren is at 67 percent favorable to 12 percent unfavorable; Cory Booker is at 56 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable; Gavin Newsom is at 56 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable; and Gretchen Whitmer is at 49 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable.
Democrats obviously don’t have a president to offer unquestioned leadership, but back in the day, losing presidential nominees were often called the “titular leader” of the party until the next nominee was named. Under that definition, the top “Democratic leader” right now is Kamala Harris. Democrats aren’t mad at her, either: Her favorability ratio per Economist-YouGov is a Bernie-esque 84 percent favorable to 10 percent unfavorable. Her 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, comes in at 65 percent favorable and 13 percent unfavorable.
These findings that aren’t consistent with any narrative of a party rank and file in revolt. The source of Democratic unhappiness, it’s reasonably clear, is less about party leaders and more about the party’s dramatic loss of power, even as Donald Trump has asserted the most massive expansion of totally partisan presidential power in U.S. history. No new set of leaders is going to fix that.
Barring a really nasty and divisive nomination contest, the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will become the unquestioned leader of the party, at least until Election Day. Jeffries, as noted, could enormously raise his profile if Democrats flip the House in 2026, and midterm elections could create new stars. Other Democrats could have big moments like Cory Booker’s after his 26-hour speech deploring Trump’s agenda or Gavin Newsom’s during his toe-to-toe messaging fight with the administration over its assault on his state. But in the end, Democrats on the ground and in the trenches won’t be satisfied until their words can be backed up with real power.
Here’s a good polling suggestion that Democracy Corps or anyone else Ruy talks to can do:
First, identify a LARGE pool of voters who fit the following description: they did NOT give Bush a positive approval rating individually as of election day AND/OR preferably AND were part of that majority who felt in polls as of election day that the country “was moving in the wrong direction”.
Then you determine if they did not vote for Kerry, did they (a) vote for someone else, especially Bush, or (b) stay home, after having voted in either 2002 or 2000, especially for a Democrat.
Those voters who did NOT give Bush a positive approval rating or felt that the country was “moving in the wrong direction” AND who voted for Bush or stayed home after having voted in the past for a Democrat can first be assessed for what percentage of the total number of voters they comprised. You need to first assess the percentage of those who actually voted as a percentage of the total vote, possibly with a breakdown in key states, and then check to determine how LARGE the number of voters who stayed home but were seriously potential voters based on recent voting for Democrats and their disaffection with the status quo was. These voters cost Kerry the election.
Now, WHY didn’t these voters vote for Kerry. Two issues seem prominent — they thought he was wishywashy or a flipflopper AND/OR they were concerned about the war on terror and did not have confidence in Kerry (the Bai distortion). Voters don’t always or generally give specific indications of why they voted they way they did or why they didn’t bother to vote, but there is where a decisive number of bodies are buried. You could also measure what IF those two groups of voters had turned on mass to Kerry? What would it have done to your constituency analysis. Prediction on the latter — add those voters who felt the country was going in the wrong direction but didn’t vote for Kerry to the Kerry column, by breakdown of category, and most of those gaps you are measuring in various social groups close like a mousetrap that has been sprung.
The mandate was for being successfully snookered by the mass media AND spinmeisters justifying the lying and the chorus of hounds that didn’t bark, including when spinning the polls, on the abovementioned issues. Another mandate for a rigged election, cashed in all the moreso as real the less real it is.
Everybody is so busy “serving” and “doing the job” that no one really serves democracy and all that is left is the hollow shell of a system as it goes down the tubes.