Democrats Have Problems. The Horserace Isn’t One of Them.

Ds are doing fine electorally; less well fighting fascism.

Image credit: MarylandGovpics, CC

Last week, The New York Times published an article with the worrying headline, “The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis,” and a red alert lead: “The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.” Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone added that the DNC is struggling to raise money and summarized the details with an even more blunt warning: “The Democratic Party is in trouble.”

The Rolling Stone article featured a picture of Schumer and Jeffries, and that led many on Bluesky to excoriate the centrist Democratic establishment for failing to rally voters and tanking the Democrat’s electoral chances. “I can’t believe a party led by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is struggling to excite or motivate voters,” one typical comment read. “They’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas!”

I too think Schumer and Jeffries are stiffs who have largely failed to meet the moment. But there is little evidence that they have tanked the party’s electoral fortunes. In fact, the focus on electoral fortunes at the expense of actually fighting fascism is a big part of what’s wrong with the approach of Congressional Democrats, and with the approach of Joe Biden before them.

It seems like a strategic win for leftists to tout voter registration deficits to show the failure of the old guard. But it is not—and not just because it sets progressives up to look foolish and out of touch when Democrats have what is likely to be a sweeping electoral victory in Virginia this November.

__

Everything Is Horrible is supported entirely by readers. If you find my writing useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s $50/year, $5/month.

__

Are Democrats losing elections?

You don’t even need to project into the future though. There have been a lot of elections since November 2024. Democrats have not been losing those elections.. They have been doing the opposite of losing elections, which is to say they are winning.

As just one example, Democrats easily won the crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April, despite a massive cash barrage from Nazi Telsa CEO Elon Musk. More, according to G. Elliot Morris back in March, Democrats were overperforming Kamala Harris’ 2024 margin by about 10 points. I haven’t been able to find more recent averages, but since the Morris article there have been some eye popping and jaw dropping special results. (Edit: Morris says it’s currently 16 points, which is 5-6 points higher than in 2017.) In June, an Oklahoma Democrat overperformed Harris in a House District by 50 points. In a Rhode Island state senate special election earlier this month, the Democrats outperformed by 55 points.

Those are extremes, but they show the trend—and that trend fits pretty well with polls. Currently Democrats are up by 2.3 points in polling of generic Congressional ballot; that’s lagging 2018, but is better than most midterm performances at this point, again according to Morris. Morris also points out that the out party usually picks up around 6 points, which would mean that Democrats have a reasonable chance of winning a landslide House victory of 8 points or so.

In the Virginia governor’s race, Democrats are also doing well. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate, has a 7 point lead in a recent poll. Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general also lead the GOP.

How can Democrats be crushing Republicans in elections and polling while their voter registration drops? It seems counterintuitive…but part of the issue seems to be that the New York Times is mostly using data from 2020 to 2024.

Democratic voter registration did drop substantially before the November 2024 election. But that was a lifetime ago in terms of the political landscape. Currently Trump’s approval is 12 points underwater, and Republican policies are shockingly unpopular.

It’s possible that voter registration has turned around for Democrats and it hasn’t shown up clearly yet in the data. Or it’s possible that voters are registering as independents with the intention of voting for Ds (most frustration with Democrats is because they’re not opposing Trump hard enough!) Either way, looking at party registration before the presidential election to explain politics now is almost as pointless as looking at party registration trends before the 1980 election and drawing conclusions from that.

And you can tell it’s pointless because we have a ton of election results since 2024 and they do not show that the Democratic party is in trouble. They show that the Republican party is in trouble, at least as far as getting votes goes.

Centrists are doing nothing because they’re focused on elections

If midterms go as well as they seem likely to, Democratic leaders like Schumer and Jeffries are going to argue that their centrist triangulating (refusing to endorse socialist Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani; talking up the bipartisan virtues of the Senate gym; voting to confirm Trump appointments; caving at key moments) was the key to electoral victory.

But this is silly. There’s no messaging approach, good or bad, that can transform Trump’s narrow 2024 victory into a blue wave in specials in less than a year.

What’s changed is that Democrats in the Trump era are more likely voters, and clean up in midterms—and also that Trump is in office and is therefore blamed for everything. In addition, there’s a lot of things to blame Trump for because he’s systematically destroying the economy and the constitution both. Democrats could have just said nothing at all since the 2024 election and they’d almost certainly still be winning elections, simply because Trump is horrible at governing and people hate being governed by him. (It would have been nice if people remembered how much they hated Trump before the November election…but voters are fickle and amnesiac, unfortunately.)

Schumer and Jeffries did in fact talk as if they wanted to just say nothing and let Trump discredit himself; their electoral strategy was mostly to get out of the way. And again, this might well work okay electorally. But the problem is that fascism is not just, and not even primarily, an electoral movement. And focusing entirely on elections is a big part of what got us here.

As I’ve noted elsewhere. Biden and his somnolent Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to speedily hold Trump accountable after January 6 in large part because they thought doing so would be unpopular. Instead, they hoped Trump would just disappear on his own and that they could focus on putting in place popular policies that materially benefited people. The focus on elections led them to avoid fighting fascism and destroying its institutional power, because fighting fascism in a country with a lot of fascists is divisive and messy.

Schumer and Jeffries have mostly operated from a similar blueprint—epitomized perhaps in Jeffries response when the Trump administration filed criminal charges against New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver after she attempted to perform oversight at an ICE facility. Jeffries said House Democrats would “respond vigorously in the days to come at a time, place and manner of our choosing.”

This was supposed to sound measured and decisive. Instead it just came across as an excuse to do nothing or not much. The focus on strategic judiciousness rather than vigorous resistance is an electoral strategy. Jeffries and Schumer want Trump to discredit himself, and don’t want to interfere with that process by doing anything too visible.

That appears to be why Democrats are not vocally denouncing the invasion of Washington DC; they believe analysts who tell them that it’s not a winning issue. They don’t seem to have considered that a military force local to Trump is in a position to overthrow election results a la the January 6 coup—but with more firepower and much higher chance of success. Refusing to oppose a coup in progress because opposition (supposedly) polls badly is a strategic error, to put it mildly.

Elections alone can’t beat fascism

No doubt you’ve noticed some problems here. Just for starters, if Trump starts arresting Democratic House members and throwing them in jail, those members will have some trouble campaigning—or voting in the House, for that matter. Beyond that, Trump’s mid-cycle gerrymander plot indicates that he plans to overcome any delegitimization by simply cheating. Even if you are callous enough to shrug at the damage and harm Trump is doing in the name of electoral calculus, you can’t ignore the fact that an electoral response to fascism is insufficient when the fascists are launching an all-out assault on the electoral system.

Fortunately, an enraged revolt of the base and the dawning realization that Trump is in fact the threat to democracy they kept saying he was has gotten Democrats moving (too slowly but still) to fight. Congressional Democrats have started routinely refusing unanimous consent on Trump nominees, slowing the process to a crawl. They’ve also started trying to physically visit constituents illegally seized by ICE, which has been an effective means of helping to free some of those constituents.

Most strikingly, California’s Governor Newsom, with broad support from the party, has moved ahead with efforts to pass a gerrymander to partially counter the ones Trump is demanding from Texas and other states. This is exactly the sort of move that you can see Biden eschewing in 2021 as unfair or too partisan or too antidemocratic. The fact that centrist Democrats like Newsom and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are on board with it suggests that the party is in fact learning some lessons, however belatedly.

Don’t conflate fighting fascism with winning elections

Those lessons are broadly progressive ones. It’s the left, after all, which often points out that electoral politics are not the only politics, and points to the virtue of protest, resistance, and organizing.

Yet, the left is demonstrating that it too can get hyper-focused on elections. And thus you have progressives in media and on social media adamantly insisting that failure to fight has destroyed Democratic electoral chances, even though this is obviously false.

Rather than arguing that progressive policies will lead to inevitable electoral successes, it might be better for everyone to just acknowledge that policy nuances don’t have that big an effect on elections even though they can have a big effect on politics. Specifically, we need to cultivate a throrough-going willingness to fight fascism, or else we will end up in a cycle of doom, where fascists shred the Constitution while in power and Democrats refuse to repair it for electoral reasons in the brief moments where they regain some modicum of control.

We need Democrats to win elections if we’re ever going to get out of this. But winning elections alone is not sufficient if Democrats won’t wield power when they have it. We need to build consensus now to destroy MAGA and its fascist support structure. And we won’t do that by scolding centrists for losing Democratic elections when Democrats are pretty clearly winning them.