One hundred days of Democratic Party failure

The standard media evaluation of the new president’s first 100 days brought little but bad news for Donald Trump. Polls showed support for Trump was the lowest of any president at the 100-day mark in almost 80 years, with more people disapproving than approving of his position on just about every major issue.

But the growing opposition to Trump’s rule of ruin hasn’t provided much good news to the supposed “opposition”, the Democratic Party. Only 29 percent of US adults have a positive view of the Democratic Party—its lowest favourability since 1992, according to a CNN poll. Only 63 percent of self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold a favourable view of “their” party. Partisans usually support their “team” at levels of 80 percent or higher.

The same CNN poll found most Democrats wanted the party to fight Trump and the Republicans harder. Analysts suggested the Democrats could be in for a “tea party” moment like the Republicans experienced in 2009-10. Then, a combination of grassroots right-wing energy and support from billionaire donors channelled a conservative backlash to the Obama administration into a radicalisation of the party. In many ways, the “tea party” of the 2010s laid the groundwork for Trump’s MAGA takeover more recently.

The possibility of a Democratic “tea party” reflects the complete fecklessness of congressional Democratic leaders and other hangers-on who are positioning themselves as advisers to the party. Some want to accommodate Trumpian themes like anti-trans or “anti-woke” messaging. Others say Democrats should just focus on “bread and butter” economic issues and downplay Trump’s assaults on immigrants.

Democratic Party “normie” politicians and leaders think that Trump’s historic level of unpopularity will translate into Democratic gains (and a US House majority) in the 2026 midterm elections. Then, they assume, the Democrats will have a foothold to begin to unravel the damage that Trump and Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew have done.

This is the “everything will be all right” school of thought that was supposed to have vanquished Trump in 2020. Yet you don’t have to assume that Trump will cancel the midterms or declare martial law to avoid that reckoning. As they showed between 2021 and 2024, the Democrats are perfectly capable of failing to hold Trump and his minions to account.

This is the context in which we should understand the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have led. The tour has drawn enormous crowds in Democratic-friendly areas like Denver and Los Angeles and packed arenas in more conservative places like Nampa, Idaho. It has also made sure to hit areas where Democrats think they have a good chance of defeating Republican House incumbents.

In the early days of the Trump administration, when most establishment Democrats were treating Trump as a political colossus and telling their supporters that they couldn’t do much to stop him, the Sanders/AOC road show helped rank-and-file members of the liberal side of US politics to break from feelings of isolation and despair. But Sanders and AOC are engaged in a project that the Reverend Jesse Jackson used to call “keeping hope alive” in the Democratic Party.

“No, we’re not trying to start a third party”, Sanders told NBC’s Meet the Press. “What we’re trying to do is strengthen American democracy, where faith in both the Democratic and Republican parties right now is extremely low ... What Democrats lack right now is a vision for the future. How are we going to provide a decent standard of living for a younger generation, which, everything being equal, will be poorer than their parents?”

Ocasio-Cortez is also explicit about her efforts to reform the Democratic Party, which she works into her stump speeches in the tour stops:

“We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too. And that means communities choosing and voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class ... We need to come together and spend every day for the next year working to educate our neighbours, reach out to them in order to give these Republicans the boot and replace them with brawling Democrats.”

In theory, the Democrats could advocate for more liberal policies than they do without losing their corporate backing. Similar parties in other countries, like the Liberals in Canada, support state-provided health insurance for all, for example. But establishment liberalism in the US is limited in a way that establishment conservatism is not.

Those like Sanders and AOC, and their ideological mouthpieces like the social democratic magazine Jacobin, think they can win the Democrats—or a significant section of them—to support social democratic policies, politicians and politics. But the modern Democratic Party is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise whose large donors support corporate capitalism.

So even when Democratic politicians can muster parliamentary votes in support of, say, single-payer health care, the party’s mainstream makes sure such reforms don’t pass. See California or Vermont, for example. Keeping the health insurance and hospital industrial complex in the Democrats’ “big tent” limits what the Democrats can accomplish.

Right-wing politics, on the other hand, doesn’t face the same constraints. Even if corporate leaders and most wealthy people find Trump and MAGA yahoos like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene distasteful, they know that indulging their far-right politics affords them the opportunity to win policies they really care about: tax cuts, deregulation, hobbling corporate oversight and subsidies to industry.

Consider this thought experiment. The Democrats win a landslide and both houses of the US Congress in 2026. Now they have control of a key branch of government. What will they do?

Will they repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, fund the rehiring of federal workers and the restoration of vital programs, or defund Trump’s initiatives? Will they impeach Trump and his law-breaking Cabinet members? Will they pass voting rights and civil rights reforms? Based on their bias to restoring the status quo ante, the answer is “no” to all those questions. You can almost hear the excuses now. No wonder even Democratic Party supporters tell pollsters that they aren’t sure what their own party stands for.

The rest of us must reckon with the historic weakness of the opposition forces on our side. It’s positive that large majorities oppose what Trump is doing, and that hundreds of thousands have protested the administration’s actions. But organisations like the trade unions are at their weakest in decades, and Democratic Party-aligned non-governmental organisations like Indivisible are capturing much of the “resistance” to Trump.

A future article will take up the state of this opposition to Trump.