Democratic Party leadership is making it clear that they intend to coast on anti-Trump sentiment rather than serious self-examination, open primaries, and vigorous policy debate and too many of their voters are just fine with that.
Anti-Trump Sentiment Led to Big Dem Wins in 2025
A string of wins in 2025 elections including the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and a near-win in deep red territory has Dem leadership backing away from promises to publicly reckon with what went wrong in 2024.
It’s easy to see why when we read analysis like this from Bolts:
Trump’s return to power has been followed by … Republican setbacks, including Democrats’ sweep of all 13 statewide elections that took place this November, plus myriad gains for local offices.
Now, with this year’s contests nearly all completed after Tuesday, which saw Democrats stage an upset and flip a state House seat in Georgia, the extent to which the GOP struggled in legislative races has also come into view.
Democrats, buoyed by Trump’s unpopularity and a fired-up base, flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.
According to Bolts’ analysis, Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections.
The swing is even stronger than in 2017, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election…
So far all signs point to these trends continuing into the 2026 congressional elections.
DNC Uses Anti-Trump Sentiment as Excuse to Bury 2024 Post-Mortem
And a few election wins and some good polling numbers are all Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin needed to excuse his decision to bury the 2024 “after action report” he promised at the beginning of the year, per The New York Times.
Party officials have conducted more than 300 interviews with Democrats in all 50 states to create a document that Mr. Martin had once pitched as crucial to charting a path forward.
Mr. Martin will instead keep the findings under seal. He believes that looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress, according to a D.N.C. spokeswoman who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the thinking behind his decision.
“Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” Mr. Martin said in a statement. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
The core mission of raising and spending enormous amounts of money:
Some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.
Since the election, it has come out that a former top aide to Mr. Biden, Mike Donilon, received $4 million from the campaign — even though he did not work meaningfully with the Harris campaign after Mr. Biden left the ticket.
The decision to bury the report is also believed to be hiding another uncomfortable truth:
Wonder why https://t.co/xRxY7Trueq pic.twitter.com/GfUOYgEHnq
— Hamid Bendaas 🇩🇿🇵🇸🇮🇷 (@HBendaas) December 18, 2025
Martin’s decision engendered an immediate backlash from former DNC member David Hogg, AOC chief-of-staff Mike Casca, Bernie Sanders whisperer Jeff Weaver, Pete Buttigieg’s Scheherazade Lis Smith, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Massachusetts Senate Candidate Seth Moulton.
None of that really matters to Martin and the Democratic congressional leadership though.
Anti-Trump Sentiment Driving 2026 Polling
Polling numbers like these have the Democratic Party deciders feeling fat and sassy:
pic.twitter.com/UDFD7xNvpK
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 22, 2025
So fat and sassy that they’re complaining about all of the primary challenges incumbent Democrats are facing from the left.
What Part of ‘Let’s Coast on Anti-Trump Sentiment’ Do Progressives Not Understand?
CNN’s piece headlined “‘They’re attacking their own’: DC Democrats irked by surge of left-wing challengers with House majority on the line” tells quite a tale.
Democrats in Washington say primaries are simply part of life in a big-tent party. But privately, many see the surge in far-left challengers as an expensive headache that distracts from the party’s goal of seizing control of Congress next November. And it has infuriated some Democrats — including among the most vulnerable members — who fear the party will have to divert money away from the bigger fight against the GOP to protect incumbents in safe seats.
“I think we’ve got individuals who might be caught up in the moment, caught up in the internet,” said Rep. Greg Meeks, a fellow New York Democrat who has watched liberal challengers line up against many in his home state delegation. “To me, it is them missing the boat, though, because what they’re upset about and angry about is the President of the United States, and what we should be doing is uniting behind Grace [Meng] and Adriano [Espaillat] and [Ritchie] Torres.”
Rep. Juan Vargas of California was even more blunt: “The problem is, they’re attacking their own. It’s like, attack the other guys. … We will have spent this energy and money fighting amongst ourselves. And it’s really dumb.”
Top Democrats believe that most of their sitting members will ultimately prevail. But they acknowledge that the dozens of showdowns between incumbents and liberal insurgents across the country offers further proof of how younger, more progressive candidates are determined to pull the party leftward with a new generation at the helm…
And if there’s one thing a corrupt, ossified gerontocracy can’t stand is the prospect of a new generation at the helm.
One of the “our side” champions featured in the piece is Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) who was (according to CNN) “cheered on the left as the party’s top lawyer during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment,” but there might be a few substantive reasons he’s facing “the political fight of his life” from NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (NC readers will remember Lander from our Mamdani coverage).
But as Zephyr Teachout tweeted, Goldman’s Trump prosecution had at least one major short-coming:
“Remember too well when Goldman folded on including foreign emoluments violations – the President getting paid off by the Saudis — in the first Trump impeachment. It was a shocking fold — Trump’s foreign corruption is deep Achilles heel politically, getting paid more by Chinese gov than US gov—and he just… folded.”
But there is a big problem with the congressional Democrats’ feel good narrative: no one likes them, no matter how much anti-Trump sentiment there is.
Dems Are Historically Unpopular, Just Less So Than Trump
A new Quinnipac poll shows that congressional Democrats are hated, despite anti-Trump sentiment.
CNN talking head guy sums it up in infotaining fashion:
Cong Dems now have a -55 net approval, an all-time low & lower than the Dead Sea.
2 causes: Dems gives them a -6 pt net approval(!), & they’re at -61 pts with indies!
The effect? Dems lead on the generic ballot is less than half of what it was at this pt in the 06 & 18 cycles. pic.twitter.com/Os17D7BkHR
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) December 18, 2025
And why would voters loathe congressional Dems? Let me count some of the ways.
Anti-Trump Sentiment Covers a Litany of Dem Sins
While I could dive into Congressional Dems’ refusal to jump in front of the anti-AI parade, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s long-term failure to even try to deliver Medicare for All, Schumer’s battle with members of his own caucus, the undying political career of zombie Kamala Harris, the latest episode of Democratic uber-insider Neera Tanden gets caught in an obvious lie and doubles down, but there’s one caper that’s been under my skin all month.
Let’s zero in on of the least likable members of the Democratic congressional caucus, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX).
Jeffries’ Endorsement of Trump’s Cuellar Pardon
Cuellar and his wife were indicted by federal prosecutors in the spring of 2024 accused of “accepting almost $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank” for “adding language to defense spending legislation to prioritize ties to countries in the region, including with Azerbaijan, and working to kill legislation prioritized by members who supported Armenian interests” and coordinating “with a subsidiary of the bank on legislation that would have been beneficial to the payday lending industry” among other crimes.
Cuellar finally seemed cooked, much to the relief of local progressive Democrats who came within 300 votes of beating him (and the national Democratic leadership who backed Cuellar to the hilt) in 2022 and local Republicans who have long wished to dump Cuellar.
Then, on December 3, Trump waved his pardon wand, Truthing that “Sleepy Joe went after the Congressman, and even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH” and Cuellar was free.
Unfortunately for Trump, Cuellar immediately filed for re-election as a Democrat, rather than switching parties as Trump had hoped.
Thus, Cuellar even fails to meet Simon Cameron’s definition of an honest politician as “one who stays bought.”
And that might be a clue as to why Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries celebrated Trump’s pardon of Cuellar telling CNN:
“I don’t know why the president decided to do this, [but] I think the outcome was exactly the right outcome,” Jeffries said.
“Listen, the reality is [that] this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view. The charges were eventually going to be dismissed — if not at the trial court level [then] by the Supreme Court, as they’ve repeatedly done in instances just like this.”
Cuellar is an invaluable, and apparently irreplaceable “rotating villain” who can be relied on to consistently vote against the nominal positions of the Democratic party.
For example, Cuellar was one of six House Dems to vote to end the government shut down. Talk about a clutch team player!
Pelosi apparently loved him because he was consistently the only House Dem willing to vote against abortion rights. That kind of kayfabe cosplay can’t be bought at any price, although if interested parties offer him $600,000, all bets are off.
J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, former DOJ anti-corruption prosecutors, just don’t get how the game is played and opined in The New York Times against this bipartisan pincer attack on law and ethics:
As former federal prosecutors who spent our careers rooting out public corruption, we see this for the wagon-circling that it is. The jury’s detailed, 54-page, multicount indictment against Mr. Cuellar was anything but thin, and he should have had to stand trial before a jury of his peers.
Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar was a disturbing sign that Democratic leaders, when it is politically advantageous, may be willing to join in Mr. Trump’s degradation of the justice system. The way to combat a corrupt deal is to repudiate it — loudly, constantly and on a bipartisan basis — by forcefully advocating the rule of law. Anything less by the leaders of either party will only harden and justify Americans’ deteriorating faith in government and the justice system.…We have entered an era of such diminished respect for the rule of law that the president openly admitted that he pardoned a congressman — who was indicted and awaiting federal bribery charges — because he expected political loyalty in exchange. And instead of principled opposition from Congress, the leading Democrat in the House appears to have engaged in a corrupt bargain of his own, premised on unfounded criticism of the prosecution, to secure the pardon recipient’s loyalty.
Mr. Jeffries most likely made the political calculation that retaining a House seat was worth engaging in the sort of unethical deals for which Democrats criticize Mr. Trump. Such a shortsighted choice to put party over country is harmful in several ways. Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar validates Mr. Trump’s corrupt deal making and helps the president and his allies brush off valid criticism.
Apparently these naive do-gooders just don’t get the critical role Rep. Cuellar plays with his consistent willingness to stand out from the pack by being one of only two Democrats to vote against a a resolution to prevent the use of unauthorized military force against Venezuela, thereby preventing its passage.
Although the nine Democrats who didn’t vote at all also served in their way.
And while this “pervy GOP Bill allowing strip searches of migrant children” would have passed without his help, Rep. Cuellar was one of only seven Demcrats to vote for it.
Readers will forgive my cynical sarcasm as its more entertaining than typing out my rage in ALL CAPS while soaking my keyboard in impotent tears.
Blue MAGA Voters Get the Party They Want
I’ll wrap today’s meditation on the magick power of anti-Trump sentiment with this piece on “The Cult of Blue MAGA” by Evelyn Quartz which goes a long way toward explaining why corrupt and incompetent Democratic officials enjoy such enduring support.
…we aren’t dealing with politics so much as a managed simulation of democratic politics.…For …the Democratic establishment…the purpose of politics is the fight — not the material conditions that shape people’s lives: housing, health care, time off, good wages. She largely votes for and supports corporatist policies that have gutted all these things. Instead…we get viral clips, flashy rhetoric, and photoshoots in Vogue.
What happens when critiquing power is applied selectively and only when it’s politically convenient? You get cult-like behavior.
Many of the most fervent anti-Trump, resistance-type liberals love to accuse Trump supporters of being in a “MAGA cult.”…But what these same liberals rarely acknowledge is that they, too, participate in a kind of cult. If the MAGA cult is centered around Trump, “Blue MAGA” is centered around opposing Trump — and both are caught inside a closed circuit. What happens when you tell anyone they’re in a cult? They get angry, defensive, and write you off as the crazy one.
You often hear liberals say, “I’m not in a cult — I think for myself.” And I don’t doubt that they believe this. But start talking about the Israel lobby, the military-industrial complex, the surveillance state, the role of corporate money in both parties — and suddenly the conversation is over. These aren’t crazy fringe critiques, they’re the domains where major political decisions are actually made. And yet, for many in Blue MAGA, they are the exact places where dissent becomes impermissible.…In this sense, politics is hardly about reality at all. The stage from which the two cults perform outrage completely obscures our shared humanity and what nearly everyone wants from politics: a safe and prosperous place to live, a family, friends and community, a meaningful and dignified job, access to quality health care, a life outside of work. It’s so basic, politicians know this — that’s why they pay lip service to it. But their actions speak differently; for tens of millions of Americans, many of these things are completely unattainable. Mainstream politics, as it stands, has profoundly failed.
To mask this, it becomes a battle between heroes and villains rather than a confrontation with the economic, social, and institutional forces shaping people’s lives, and neither side has any incentive — or even the conceptual awareness— to grapple with the conditions that produced Trump in the first place.
Will Democrats and their Blue MAGA voters figure out that anti-Trump sentiment is unlikely to outlive his second term by more than a few months in time to course correct?
Stay tuned but don’t hold your breath.
