Voters still have a sour view of Democrats six weeks after President Donald Trump and Republicans swept into Washington with control of all branches of the federal government, according to a new poll.
A plurality of voters -- 40 percent -- said the Democratic Party doesn't have any strategy whatsoever for responding to Trump, according to the survey by the liberal firm Blueprint that was shared first with POLITICO. Another 24 percent said Democrats have a game plan, but it's a bad one.
A paltry 10 percent said that the party has a solid technique for dealing with Trump. And that's coming from a Democratic outfit's survey.
The unsparing findings, issued by a group backed by mega-donor Reid Hoffman, amount to a major rebuke of the party's approach to the dawn of Trump's second term. And they come at a moment when Democrats are already feeling despondent after their roundly mocked response to Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday, which was lambasted as unproductive and amateurish.
"Voters correctly identified that the Democratic Party has lost its way," said Evan Roth Smith, the top pollster for Blueprint. "The Democratic response [Tuesday] night was more or less a continuation of what we've seen from Democrats so far. Which is, there was nothing overtly wrong about it, but it didn't actually do anything to ameliorate this core issue Democrats face, which is voters aren't quite sure what we stand for and would like us to get back to the basic principles of the party."
On Capitol Hill, top Democrats put on a brave face Wednesday in the wake of their widely criticized reaction to Trump's speech. But across the party, the damage was still reverberating, as elected officials and strategists scrambled to clean up their response. It was an effort mired in finger-pointing and with little agreement over how Democrats should oppose Trump.
The strategy for countering the president's speech -- or lack thereof -- laid bare how divided Democrats still are on how to counter Trump's steamrolling of Washington, and how ineffective their efforts to blunt him remain.
...
In an illustration of how sharply Democrats are split over how to take on Trump, one of the party's rising stars, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida), said his colleagues' rowdiness on Tuesday was the point. He was among a group of Democrats who departed before the end of Trump's speech.
"It is rude. It is disrespectful," he said. "That was the whole point of it -- to disrespect him."
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Meanwhile, some Democrats insisted there was no disagreement within the party over how to attack Trump, despite evidence to the contrary.
Democrats are in the same position they've been in since Obama: They are cowed by their hardest-left, most partisan maniacs who they dare not cross and who they're always trying to placate.
They continue losing moderates and normies, and have no plan out of this spiral towards extinction except continuing to hope that the moderates and normies either don't mind or don't notice that they're hard-left maniacs, or hoping that the moderates and normies become as radicalized as they are and join the hard-left partisan maniacs.
They have no other plan except this. This is the same "plan" they've been trying since 2015: We'll just scream and cry and whine and slander people until they give in to us out of exhaustion.
But the trouble is that this plan already did work... for a while. For a while, normies were willing to just give in to the Screamers and Emotional Blackmailers in hopes that they would be appeased and just leave the normies alone for a while.
But they never did leave them alone. So now the normies understand that there is no appeasing these people, so they're done appeasing them. Forever.
The Democrats have been stuck in the "Denial" stage of grief since November 8, 2016. They just can't get past that first step. They just keep up making up reasons why they didn't really lose and therefore don't have to change at all and definitely do NOT have to stand up to their hard-left rabble, whom they're terrified by.
We didn't really lose in 2016. It was Russia what done it.
We didn't really lose in 2024. It was Disinformation and White Supremacy what done it.
We don't have to change, ever. We just have to Scream Our Satanic Psuedo-Religion louder until people start appeasing and placating us again.
The Lump gained temporary control over John Fetterman's brain and said something sensible. (Note the Lump was dormant while Fetterman was voting to keep men in girl's sports.)
The Democrats have decided that all they need to change is their "messaging." The creepy hive-mind videos they all posted on Tuesday is one of their efforts to "appeal to the kids on TikTok."
Here's their follow-up effort.
I'm so ready to vote Democrat now. They're so young and hip and cool. They understand all the Memes that a young person such as myself enjoys when riding my Razor scooter.