The party’s standing is startlingly low after a defeat that felt like a cultural rejection. What comes next?
One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America’s two major parties to animals.
After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as “apex predators,” like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive.
So Ms. Shenker-Osorio perked up earlier this year when a Democratic man in Georgia suggested that a very different kind of animal symbolized her party.
“A deer,” he said, “in headlights.”
The man had more to say.
“You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway.”
Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage. Its standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990 — after a defeat that felt like both a political and cultural rejection.
Communities that Democrats had come to count on for a generation or more — young people, Black voters, Latinos — all veered toward the right in 2024, some of them sharply. And unlike Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, his victory last year could not be waved away as an outlier after he won the popular vote for the first time.
The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election. Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years. Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.
“Over a long period of time, our party overdrew our trust account with the American people,” said Rob Flaherty, who was deputy campaign manager for former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
The Democratic Party’s tarnished image could not come at a more inopportune moment. In this era of political polarization, the national party’s brand is more important and influential than ever, often driving the outcomes of even the most local of races.
And so The New York Times is beginning an occasional series of articles about the Democrats and their predicament: how it got so dire, what comes next and who could lead the way.
