The Democratic Party is in crisis—divided, broke, and struggling to counter Trump’s agenda despite growing public backlash. Internal battles over strategy and leadership have left the DNC paralyzed.
Donald Trump’s polarizing second term in the White House has left the party in disarray, riven by infighting over electoral strategies ahead of the 2026 midterms and unable to raise money. So extraordinarily dire is the party’s financial situation that top officials have weighed borrowing money just to pay bills.
In a recording of a May 15 ZOOM meeting leaked to POLITICO, the party’s chairman made this extraordinary confession to his top aides:
“I’ll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job … the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”
Anyone with an understanding of U.S. politics could be forgiven for assuming that the description above is of Trump’s Republican party but it actually refers to the Democratic National Committee and its embattled chairman, Ken Martin. More puzzling than the White House’s deranged attacks on immigrants and constitutionally protected speech, or the administration’s deepening austerity measures that include cuts to the federal workforce and popular social services such as Medicaid and the supplemental nutrition vouchers known as SNAP, is the Democrats’ bewildering failure to capitalize on the growing outrage over Trump’s polarizing policies.
The DNC owes its stasis to the internecine feud that came to a head with Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in last year’s general election and which spilled over into the New Year. That split pits party stalwarts against younger progressives who want Democrats to break from the conservative tradition established by Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign in a misguided effort to “out-Republican the Republicans.”
The DNC’s election of new leaders, including 25-year-old David Hogg, as one of four vice chairs, widened the political fissures. A survivor of the 2018 shooting at Parkland High School in Ft. Lauderdale that left 17 dead, Hogg championed gun control, health care reform and a change to the Democrats’ elitist messaging, telling reporters last year:
“When people are feeling like the economy is not going well, our message should not be: ‘No, you don’t understand. Look at how much worse off all these other countries are in the G7. “It comes down to making sure that we are not choosing to live in a comfortable delusion and actively choosing to live in an uncomfortable reality where we might actually be able to win.”
As a vice-chair, Hogg’s proposal to effect generational change by raising $20 million to seed primary challenges to moderate Democratic incumbents in next year’s midterms shook up the party and led to his ouster earlier this month. But Hogg’s departure was followed days later by the resignation of two of the nation’s most influential labor union leaders from their posts.
Randi Weingarten, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers and a high-profile figure in Democratic politics, and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, declined Martin’s offers to remain at-large members of the national party after they were removed from the party’s powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee that sets the process for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process. Both labor leaders had supported Mr. Martin’s rival in the chairmanship race, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. In their messages announcing their resignation, the two labor leaders both hinted that Martin was failing to expand the DNC’s coalition. In her resignation letter to Martin, Weingarten, who is herself known as a moderate, wrote:
“While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging, and I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities.”
This message is apparently resonating with party donors. According to campaign reports released this month, the Republican Party’s main fundraising arm began the month with nearly five times the cash on hand, $72.4 million, than its DNC counterpart, which has only $15 million.
The party’s disunion is the culmination of Bill Clinton’s strategy to compete with Ronald Reagan’s GOP for the votes of white, suburban racists by effectively being more conservative. Covering the tune, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” Clinton razed the Wall Street regulations that Reagan only loosened. When Reagan left the White House, the number of conglomerates controlling the bulk of U.S. media outlets had been whittled from 50 to 29; by the time Clinton left office, the number was six. And while Reagan talked a good game about lifting trade barriers, the U.S. tariff regime was largely intact when he left office; the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed into law by Clinton opened the floodgates for employers to ship the nation’s manufacturing sector offshore.
It was, however, Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that was the focus of intense scrutiny in the 2020 U.S. presidential season, and rightly so. The Reagan and Bush administrations nearly doubled the nation’s federal prison population yet Clinton jailed more inmates in eight years than the Reagan and Bush administrations did in 12.
While Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 as a traditional liberal who pledged to do something about police killings of African Americans such as George Floyd, he quickly retreated from that position once elected, and governed as a moderate Republican. In fact, with the lone exception of Biden, each Democratic presidential nominee–including Harris–has adopted rhetoric that is more conservative than the last nominee, leaving progressives with no viable alternative to the GOP’s policies.
Perhaps the best example of this is the tepid response of top-ranking Democrats on Capitol Hill to Trump’s handling of the military conflict between Israel and Iran. After Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities on June 12, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the U.S. Senate, urged Trump to be “tough” on Iran and not make any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. In a June 13 press statement, he wrote:
“The United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran’s response. The Iranian regime’s stated policy has long been to destroy Israel and Jewish communities around the world.”
Schumer’s remarks are largely consistent with Capitol Hill Democrats who complain that Trump bombed Iran without Congressional approval but are mute on the violations of international law incurred by the attack because they too seek regime change in Iran.
As Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, a political scientist and host of “Inside the Issues” on SiriusXM Satellite Radio is fond of saying, the Democrats aren’t likely to regain their stride until they understand the difference between a minority party–whose differences with the ruling party are more style than substance– and an opposition party that challenges the very foundations upon which the government is built.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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