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Checking In With the Democrats
Ignoring AOC and fighting over Biden's candidacy. Ugh.
mister mix
May 24, 2025
A polling company called co/efficient ended their most recent approval polling with an open-ended question asking who’s the face of the Democratic Party. Here are the results:
Nobody should be shocked that the people making noise (AOC, Bernie, Jasmine Crockett) are 1, 2 and 3 in the poll. My guess is that Booker wouldn’t have even been mentioned if he hadn’t made that floor speech, and LOL at try-hard Gavin Newsom’s 2% reward for throwing a bunch of vulnerable constituencies under the bus.
This poll will almost certainly cause zero change in the way that the upper echelons of the Democratic Party act, or who the institutionalists choose to run committees or stand in front of cameras. Pelosi and others have made it clear that there are no circumstances while they’re still in control where AOC will ascend to a formal leadership role.
If any of you missed this post at LGM where some commenters pointed out that Democrats are way ahead of Republicans in Members of Congress dying in office, and that we’re definitely the party of the old, it’s worth a look. Apparently, a good number of the over-70 Dems are running next cycle.
In addition to figuring out ways to deny AOC a leadership role, the other damaging thing that institutional Democrats are doing is shitting on Biden long after it matters. Osita Nwanevu at The New Republic has the best piece I’ve seen about this behavior:
All told, Biden was able to pursue another campaign out of Democratic deference, careerism, and complacency. There was no spell he cast over the party; nothing he himself did to stupefy and paralyze its leaders. Up and down the ladder, the shrewd and the merely timid, all of whom knew full well that he shouldn’t run again, each took measure of the situation and figured it was safest to do nothing until doing nothing became untenable—and for several weeks afterward.
Prominent Democrats speaking out about all this a year ago would have been meaningful. Today, it means nothing. Denouncing Biden’s run now that he’s a political nonentity—out of office and perhaps very near death—isn’t taking a brave stand against the internal culture of the Democratic Party. It’s a reflection of it: a wholly cost-free and substantively empty way for opportunists to perform independence from the party now that the coast is clear and there are no toes of consequence to step on. Biden ran again, and is being condemned for running again, for the very same reasons.
To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand both the nature of the Democratic Party and the nature of political courage. […]
Party hopefuls looking for ways to mark themselves as different from the rest of the pack today have other, better options. The best way to demonstrate a measure of real independence from the Democratic Party is to tell the truth about what really ails it: wealthy, clueless donors; an approach to public policy incommensurate with the scale of the challenges the country faces; a quasi-religious faith in the virtues of bipartisanship; a related and willful blindness to the depths of the Republican rot beyond Donald Trump; and a blindness, just as consequential, to the structural features of our federal system that will continue pulling governance to the right. All are much deeper problems than Joe Biden’s ego and those who chose to flatter it. All will be much more difficult to resolve. But if Democrats are looking for a reckoning, there are quite a few to be had in that mix.
Nwanevu contrasts the vote against the Iraq War that was part of Obama’s success, with the post-facto criticism of Biden. The key point is that Obama led on the Iraq War. He was right from the start. That was leadership, and it took some courage. The late criticism of Biden isn’t leadership, takes almost no courage, and helps Republicans keep the spotlight on Biden rather than Trump.
We’re five months into the most damaging Republican administration in history, and we have a party that isn’t ready to elevate strong, popular new leaders, and is busy having a fight they should have had almost two years ago.
(About that poll: the usual disclaimer about relatively small survey preference polling applies — it’s a questionable sample of opinion in a moment in time.)
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