Opinion | The Problem for Democratic Optimists

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : An influential paper, "Darker Blue: How Small Donors Drive Congressional Polarization," by Chenoa Yorgason, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford, reported that when Democratic candidates increased their support from small donors, they shifted leftward: When candidates join ActBlue, contributions from non-large individual donors substantially increase, primarily driven by un-itemized donors, who give less than $200 to candidates.
42% : The problem for Democratic optimists, however, is that neither substantial mobilization nor a cogent strategy to counter Trump has materialized.
40% : The biggest challenge is the longer-term party-building that's needed to address the party's biggest problems, such as conservative dominance of social media platforms; poor governance in blue states and cities (which hurts the brand and causes voters to locate in more affordable precincts of red America); the party's organizational weaknesses (which have a lot to do with the decline of its traditional mass base of organized labor); and the fact that Democrats are the party of government in an anti-system era.
38% : The biggest challenge, in Hacker's view, isn't the near-term response: Democratic voters are going to follow whoever effectively takes on Trump.
34% : " Democratic voters, Erickson argued, know that the far left has seriously damaged the Democratic Party brand, making it unpalatable as an option to many swing voters, even if the alternative is Trump and his MAGA crew.
34% : Democrats have a chance to become the party of change, seeking to re-democratize the corrupt lawless system that Trump and Musk are creating.
32% : "Most Democrats have abandoned the extreme 2020 ideas -- defunding the police, eliminating ICE, etc. -- that their eventual presidential nominee, Joe Biden, opposed during his successful primary campaign.
22% : As Galston and Kamarck wrote in their essay, If President Trump fails to fulfill the promises that drove his campaign, Democrats could defeat his successor in 2028.

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