August 1, 2025

RUY TEIXEIRA: Democrats Should Give Up on #Resistance 2.0.

How thrilling—[Cory Booker] wants to fight! Cue the applause from Democratic activists, who can never get enough of this stuff. But to what avail? Famously, it failed to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election. And so far nonstop Democratic fulminations in Trump’s second term have been notably unsuccessful in resuscitating the party’s toxic brand. The recent Wall Street Journal poll found Democratic party favorability 30 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable), the worst result in 35 years. Ratings for both Trump and the GOP were much higher.

And voters, despite their negative views of Trump’s performance on key issues, still prefer Republicans to Democrats on these issues:

  • Illegal immigration (R+24)
  • Immigration (R+17)
  • The economy (R+12)
  • Inflation and rising prices (R+10)
  • Foreign policy (R+8)
  • Tariffs (R+7)
  • The Russia-Ukraine war (R+5).

This shouldn’t be much of a mystery. Voters are taking Joe Biden’s famous advice and applying it to the Democratic Party: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Voters are doing just that, comparing Democrats to the alternative and Democrats are coming out on the short end of the comparison. Voters evidently believe, whatever the problems with the Trump/GOP approach on these issues, Democrats are unlikely to do much better and conceivably quite a bit worse.

In short, voters get that Democrats hate Trump; they’ve already priced that in. Endlessly reminding voters of that fact and how Trump must be #Resisted! does nothing to change Democrats’ fundamental problem: voters neither like nor trust them and therefore do not find them an obvious choice over their opponents.

If that’s true, why do so many Democratic politicians persist in reading—loudly—from the #Resistance script?

Because they’re enthrall to their rabid social media-obsessed base, whom they spent a decade relentlessly programming to believe that Trump is SuperMechaOrangeHitler, and who went all in on transing kids and illegal immigration. How do you simultaneously keep their support and dial back the rhetoric to say, 1995-era language? The best you can do is hope that a candidate with rock star appeal such Obama in 2007 emerges, and hope that the economy fails sufficiently or can be portrayed to have failed sufficiently to allow him or her an opening. (See also: Carter, Jimmy in 1976, and Clinton, Bill in 1992.)

UPDATE: How badly are the Democrats polling on the issues? So badly that even house organ CNN has noticed:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll