From our earlier conversation, it can be seen that historically, the major American political parties that ceased to exist – the Federalists and the Whigs – were characterized by the following problems:
weak and fratricidal leadership;
little control over the federal government and thus, little patronage;
too focused on elite opinion over that of the common man; and
promoting policies that the average voter is not buying, and ignoring the salient issues.*
READ MORE: The Death of the Democrat Party? (Part 1)
The Democrat Party has been without a strong leader for eight years now, since President Obama left the White House to make a short trip to the suburbs of DC. This isn’t too unusual when the party doesn’t hold the presidency; however, during the Biden administration, there was still no strong leadership.
I think everyone now knows what Joe Biden’s big problem was – his senility. Biden’s weakness allowed the rest of the Biden family, Obama, the Bernie Sanders bros (led by a guy who isn’t even a Democrat), the Clintons, the black caucus, the Democrat Congressional leadership, the labor unions, the LGBT…crew, the antisemites, etc., to all attempt to assert their power. Which resulted in chaos and poor leadership.
The vice president, Kamala Harris, who is the natural understudy to the president, refused to put in the effort to establish herself as a leader and was, as a result, a total non-entity. Even when she became the Democrat nominee for president.
So, we have what we have today, which is the ninth year of chaos in the Democrat Party. Minority Leader Schumer is hated by the left-wing Democrat base for refusing to pointlessly filibuster a Trump initiative. New Democrat Chair Ken Martin is complaining that his party is bankrupt, and other Democrats grouse that Martin is "weak," "whiny," and "invisible." (Formerly) New Democrat Vice Chair David Hogg was ousted for wanting to primary older incumbent Democrat members of Congress. Labor union leaders are deserting the Democratic National Committee because of friction with Martin. Former Speaker Pelosi refuses to allow her successor to run, without interference, the House Democrat caucus.
Because of all this and more, a large majority of the Democrat electorate wants their entire leadership to be replaced.
Many politicians get into politics because they want to serve in public office, and not because they have a particular ideology or agenda that they wish to promote. Therefore, many calculating politicians join the political party that best positions them for success – the majority party (in their city, state, or the country). This means that if one of the two major parties begins to lag behind the other, ambitious politicians will be more likely to join the larger party.
Right now, the Democrats have this problem, nationally – the GOP has unified control over the entire federal government (and it controls many of the states as well.) This is a relatively new problem for the Democrats, as they lost their control over the House in 2022, and the Senate and the presidency in 2024.
As a result, they are far from being in the hole that the Federalists or Whigs were in when they were out of power for long stretches of time.
But things could get worse for the Democrats. The Trump administration is planning to reform the federal government bureaucracy, which is dominated by Democrats. There have been studies of federal bureaucrats that show how tilted the bureaucrats are against the president (and before his presidency, against Republicans in general). If the administration succeeds, the Democrats will find themselves in the situation that the Federalists and the Whigs found themselves in – before federal laws attempted to remove patronage from the system – without the ability to seed their partisans into the federal government.
This makes the 2026 mid-term elections, especially for the House, incredibly important to the Democrats. They must win that chamber to be able to block Republican reforms and to put some of their own people in positions of influence.
The Democrats continue to focus almost exclusively on catering to the small elite(s) in their party. They implemented an open border, with absolutely no vetting of illegal aliens, and now rush to protect illegals, whom the Trump administration seeks to deport, including dangerous criminals. They pretend there are no differences between men and women. They push for DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, as it was originally branded) policies that discriminate against disfavored groups. They go easy on criminals with their Soros prosecutors. They favor protecting the “rights” of crazed antisemites who are threatening American Jews and other pro-Israel supporters. They promote socialistic economic policies. They hype “climate change,” an imaginary problem which, even if it were real, the U.S. could do nothing significant about (unlike the big polluters China and India). And they continue to hate America and sympathize with our foreign enemies.
None of these are especially popular positions with a majority of the voting public. In fact, each only appeals to small slices of the electorate, and sometimes is opposed by other segments of the Democrat base. This is why they are frequently derided as "80/20 issues." Some of these policies are so radioactive that they have even pushed away normally Democrat voting groups, as can be seen in the 2024 election, when the GOP won unprecedented support among the white working class, African Americans (especially young males), Hispanics, Asians, and Jews.
While the Democrats largely push niche issues in policies that are important to their elites and no one else, they largely avoid supporting the salient issues that have arisen and instead push other broader issues that a majority of voters don’t care about or are less interested in.
The most obvious example is with illegal aliens and the open border. As millions of unvetted aliens swarmed over the U.S. border, many segments of the U.S. population, eventually compromising a majority of the voting public, became greatly concerned with the resulting chaos. Terrorism and other depraved crimes were occurring with greater and greater frequency. Nevertheless, the Democrats refused to relent. This issue and the economy were the two most important issues to return Donald Trump to the White House.
This example is perhaps most analogous to how the Whig Party absolutely refused to address the growing salience of slavery in the 1850s.
Instead, the Democrats (Biden and then Harris and the others) ran a campaign largely focused on their fanatical hatred of Donald Trump. This is because the Democrats' base is stuck in their Doom Loop that I have mentioned before, so that they can’t stop talking about him, often in the most crazed terms, and even take positions simply to spite him. The Democrats believe that this is a good way to appeal to a majority of the voters, even though it has not worked for a decade (now). And despite the fact that it is certainly no way to appeal to moderate, less engaged voters, who don’t normally want to listen to or talk to these fanatics.
Would any normal American want to listen to a fanatic?
The Democrats also ran on abortion rights, as they have since the 1980s. Although a majority of American voters might be considered “pro-choice” voters, not enough of these voters really care strongly enough about this issue to make it a consistent winning issue. And it certainly wasn’t this year.
And finally, regarding the economy, the Democrats and the MSM (but I repeat myself) simply gaslit the public that there were no problems to be seen there. They simply adopted the motto of this guy.
As a result of all of these problems, we should not be surprised to hear that internal Democrat polling has shown:
The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds. Nearly two months into the second Donald Trump administration, a majority of voters in battleground House districts still believe Democrats in Congress are ‘more focused on helping other people than people like me,’ according to an internal poll conducted by the Democrat group Navigator Research. Among independents, just 27 percent believe Democrats are focused on helping them, compared with 55 percent who said they’re focused on others.
So, the Democrats are certainly in some political peril. But please keep in mind that this does not guarantee that they go the way of the Federalists and the Whigs. But it does mean that there is an opportunity here for a third party to oust them from their perch in our two-party system.
“We'll (Just Have to) See What Happens”
*Note: I have modified the language here from my earlier column.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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