Democrats seem unlikely to fix what ails them. But in 2026 and 2028, they could still easily find — thanks to Trump — that they don’t have to.

A new CNN poll finds that the Democratic Party’s popularity has hit rock bottom — or worse, is still trying to find how far down rock bottom is: “Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% — a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021.” Now, we should caution that this is not necessarily all people flocking to the right; the party’s base is unhappy with its leaders:

Democratic-aligned adults say, 52% to 48%, that the leadership of the Democratic Party is currently taking the party in the wrong direction. . . . That’s driven in part by relatively high levels of dissatisfaction within the Democratic Party. Just 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party, a dip from 72% in January and 81% at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration. The decline comes across ideological wings. . . .

The Democratic base wants more confrontation and less cooperation: “Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents say, 57% to 42%, that Democrats should mainly work to stop the Republican agenda, rather than working with the GOP majority to get some Democratic ideas into legislation,” a significant decline from what those voters told pollsters at this time in Donald Trump’s first term.

Maybe my favorite finding in this poll, which should remind us of the limits of public opinion, is that since 2012, 1 to 2 percent of respondents have consistently told CNN’s pollsters that they have never heard of the Democratic Party.

Democrats have yet to really face up to their problems. There’s a natural urge to think that a lot of what the party is going through right now is just paying for the personal failings of Joe Biden. Most Democratic politicians, after all, are not as decrepit and incoherent as Biden. Many do not have his cartoonish record of family corruption covered by egregious pardons. Biden’s departure, along with that of his foreign policy and defense team, turns the page on his disastrous mishandling of Afghanistan. New leadership will turn the page: Nancy Pelosi has been supplanted, Chuck Schumer may be pushed out the door next, and there will be a new face of the party by 2028.

There are two short-term and one longer-term problems with this. In the short term, Americans have not forgotten Biden. They have not forgotten that all of the above and more — Biden’s age, his family influence-peddling, his foreign policy fiascoes — were still being eagerly defended by his party this time last year. All the way to July 2024, Democrats were entirely prepared to pass this man off to the public as a plausible candidate to be president of the United States until January 2029. That doesn’t go away overnight. Moreover, many of Biden’s worst policy ideas, such as big inflationary spending and opposition to border enforcement, are things that Democrats have not renounced and are still fighting for today.

The other Biden problem is that Biden’s ascension to the presidential nomination in 2020 was a symptom of unresolved tensions within the party. The young radicals are in tune with generational shifts in the Democratic base, but they are off-putting to even many more moderate Democratic and independent voters. Democrats flocked to Biden, especially in the flight-to-safety atmosphere of March 2020, precisely because he was a reassuring link to the past but not a long-term statement about the party’s future. His non-threatening antiquity was not coincidental. With Biden gone, the underlying tensions within the party need to be, if not resolved, at least renegotiated.

The good and bad news for Democrats is how much of Donald Trump’s mandate in 2024 was against their governance. The bad news is that a lot of people were willing to roll the dice on another ride on the Trump Coaster because they were that sick of the Democrats. The left-wing Media Matters for America put out a graphic recently on the Right’s dominance of the podcast space:

If you’re familiar with the names on this list — Joe Rogan? Russell Brand? — you will immediately realize that many of these people have almost nothing in common with one another; they are united only in being repelled by the progressive/liberal alliance that makes up the Democrats and its institutional allies. Until Democrats fix that, they will face a lot of opposition.

The good news, of course, is that this also means that Trump’s coalition is unwieldy and unstable even before you get to the fact that it is led with all of the erratic tendencies of Trump. Democrats seem unlikely to fix what ails them. But in 2026 and 2028, they could still easily find — thanks to Trump — that they don’t have to.