Vaudeville legend Will Rogers once wrote, “I am a member of no organised party. I am a Democrat.”
In this month’s elections, the Democratic Party cleaned up. To the casual observer, the party is well-placed to capitalise on widespread discontent towards Donald Trump and sweep next year’s midterms. Yet these results mask an unpopular and divided party.
The Democratic Party, formed in the early-19th century, is by some measures the oldest in the world. In 200 years, its ideology has radically and repeatedly shifted. It was a party of white supremacy, and a network of clientelist city machines. In the 20th century, it was reinvented as the locus of social democracy, before taking a neoliberal turn under Carter and Clinton.
The party has ever been an uneasy coalition between North and South, city and country, populists and insiders. The rigid US electoral system necessitates a maximum of two stable parties, which accounts for their ideological incoherence.
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Imagine a system in which Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, Labour, the SocDems, the Greens and PBP are all forced inside a single party, and you have some idea of the problem.
Its voters remain social democratic. For all the talk of Trump transforming the political landscape, rank-and-file Democrats look a lot like they did under Obama. Disproportionately non-white, women, young, working-class, highly educated, urban and non-Evangelical Christian.
They want higher social spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, gun control, climate action, big tech regulation, public and private housing construction, a more humane immigration system and an end to the lawlessness emanating from Washington. They elevated Obama, Clinton and Biden to their nominations.
But in 2025, they have witnessed those projects crumble. From the heavy-on-symbolism, light-on-substance Obama years, to the catastrophically compromised Clinton candidacy, to the diminished and morally shameful last gasps of the Biden presidency, the Democratic base has known little but failure and regret.
These failures, and the nightmarish second Trump term, have radicalised a previously cautious constituency of tens of millions. Democrats in 2025 are seeing their 2017 nightmares come true: masked state agents abducting undocumented neighbours, tech oligarchs unleashed on the federal government, extrajudicial assassinations in Latin America as a prelude to war, and everywhere a disregard for the rule of law. And amid it all, a total failure of the Democratic leadership to rise to the occasion.
Neither Chuck Schumer nor Hakeem Jeffries are generally considered charismatic megafauna of the political landscape. After attempting to appease Trump, they found some fight when voters began calling for their removal. They held the line on the government shutdown for a few weeks, before reverting to type and folding without any meaningful wins.
After Obama’s election, Republicans – who had been expected to moderate – entered their ‘Tea Party’ era
Now, apoplectic Democratic voters are starting to find support among House Democrats demanding that Schumer resign. Jeffries is facing a primary challenge from socialist Chi Ossé.
Outside of hereditary monarchies there are few organisations more hidebound. Europeans are comparatively cut-throat: lose an election and the leadership is turfed out. Democrats value seniority over success. Hence the insistence that an elderly and increasingly frail Biden was up to the task of governing, or the unedifying spectacle of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s last years in office.
Since the Democrats’ neoliberal turn, their leadership has successfully nullified or co-opted the populist left, from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s final run was undone by both party leadership and risk-averse primary voters, who turned to Biden as the safest choice. That caution was dispelled by the next four years. Biden’s decline, odious Gaza policy and the failure to prevent a second Trump term caused a lasting ideological transformation.
The election of socialist Zohran Mamdani has scrambled the calculus of what it takes to succeed in Democratic Party politics. Sanders in 2016 appeared to conjure a coalition from nowhere to oppose the neoliberal consensus, but failed to find enough people to overcome the institutional grip of leadership.
Mamdani found those votes, reaching deep into unlikely constituencies and turning out non-voters thought to be unreachable. He showed that the party divide over support for Israel’s occupation is between elected politicians and their voters, who overwhelmingly support a more critical policy toward the country.
Centrists argue that socialism is unpopular outside of big cities, but few things are more unpopular than the party brand itself. Democratic voters are not all committed socialists, but neither are they slavish neoliberals. They want someone to oppose the Trump regime, and to execute policy that concretely helps people.
Neither are available from the establishment wing. Next year’s primaries promise a knife-fight for incumbents. In the case of Maine candidate Graham Platner, they may even be willing to overlook considerable personal flaws – including a Nazi tattoo he previously had (he has said he didn’t appreciate its semiotics) – for someone they consider authentic.
After Obama’s election, Republicans – who had been expected to moderate – entered their “Tea Party” era; voters demanded candidates move right, or face primary challenges.
Their crowning victory was the defeat of Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor, something which is no doubt on Jeffries’s mind. They remade the party, and from there the Trump movement was born. A comparable process may be in motion in the Democratic Party, and it may be exactly what the US needs.
