Democrats are facing the worst ratings in decades in my polls and others, dropping to as low as 29% favorability in the CNN poll, down from 62% in 2008. The reasons are pretty clear — after the 2024 election, voters reevaluated the job that President Joe Biden did and began scratching their heads at the actions and positions of Democrats in Congress. Unless there is a major reset, I expect they will have an unexpected wipeout in next year’s midterm elections.
Back in the late 90s, Democrats stood for a balanced budget, expanded health care benefits, tough immigration policies, and smaller government. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over.” Boy was he wrong.
Step by step, Democrats drifted from these policies that produced near 75% approval ratings for Clinton. Tax and spend came back in the Obama years as tax rates went up and Obamacare kicked in, and he moved decisively to the left in the last two years of his presidency.
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The groundwork for DEI was laid with the attacks on the police and calling out other institutions as racist. Climate change moved up to the top of the agenda as pipelines were shut down and regulations were issued to slow energy producers and the idea took root that climate change, not ISIS, was the biggest “existential” threat we faced.
The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump pushed Democrats further to the left on cultural and economic issues as the chief goal of the party was to lay down resistance to Trump and everything he stood for. The point was to rip it all down and prevent him from shifting away from the Obama policies.
This culminated in the surprise nomination of Joe Biden even after losing Iowa and New Hampshire. He struck a grand bargain with the left so he could go into the election with a united Democratic Party. After his election, he seemed to abandon virtually every position he ever took in his over 50 years as a moderate senator.
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Biden not only stopped construction of the Trump border wall but also opened the border, flooding the country with millions of new migrants. He backed censorship of online speech and aided the COVID coverup of the virus’s origins.
He ordered DEI to be a part of every aspect of government; sided with the trans gender movement. He ballooned the deficit with huge pandemic spending ever after the crisis had passed and the Inflation Reduction Act was a multi-trillion-dollar climate change bill.
He went from the author of the crime bill to the signer of thousands of pardons to criminals.
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As president, Biden furiously appointed left-wing judges and made left-oriented appointments to the agencies.
On foreign policy, he backed Ukraine but held them back. And the president backed Israel but restrained them and increasingly pulled back from full support to try to please the left which has become anti-Israel.
By the time he departed the Oval Office, the left, and a set of extreme policies, had remade the Democratic Party from a working-class and middle-class party to a coalition of elites and Black voters. Those making over $100,000 a year and college-educated voters backed Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, as well as 86% of Black voters. But those making between $30,000 and $100, 000 a year now voted for Trump. And Hispanic voters made a major move in 2024, shifting by about 20 points into the Republican column as they continue to grow as an even larger share of the electorate than Black voters. Their Democratic margin shrunk from 23 points to 4 points.
Now after the 2024 election, voters have basically taken a look back and Joe Biden’s ratings and that of the Democratic Party have tumbled as they see a weak leader who let the left run his administration and drive massive spending that resulted in crushing inflation and massive deficits, deliberately left the border open that could easily have been closed, and took the country in uncharted cultural directions.
The result is a Democratic Party in ruins which will have to wait for the next Bill Clinton to come along and reset it again and return it to its common sense, middle-class roots. Otherwise, the new Republican Party is positioned to deepen its support with these lapsed Democratic voters.
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