Too unpopular to help: Democrats hang Republicans out to dry

Considering the carnage inflicted upon the country by the Trump administration over the past four weeks you would think that the GOP would be the most unpopular political party in the country. After all, the polls show that the public is very unhappy with Donald Trump's policies while the Republican elected officials appear to be in a state of suspended animation, unable to exercise their own prerogatives as an equal branch of government even as the president and his henchmen usurp their power while basically laughing in their faces. However, despite the fact that the GOP is extremely unpopular, the prize for most loathed political party at the moment belongs to the Democrats.

The numbers are very bad. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. That's the highest it's been since they started asking the question back in 2008. By contrast, only 45% of voters are unhappy with the GOP. The Democrats are at a lukewarm 31% favorability rating.

You might wonder why people would be so negative about the party that has no institutional power and virtually no ability to stop the Trump/Musk trainwreck. But it's not actually unusual for Democrats to turn on their own party when they lose. Unlike the Republicans who simply double down, get more extreme and gather their energies for the fight, Democrats get introspective, indulge in soul-searching and self-flagellation and often end up over-compensating for their losses by making abrupt changes in policies. Sometimes they go so far in the other direction it appears that they have no values or ideology beyond what they think will "work better." That habit can leave a bad taste in voters' mouths.

I recall losses going back to the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone was convinced that the Republicans had an unbreakable grip on the presidency because they had held it for 12 years. The amount of navel-gazing that took place in those years was epic. Democrats twisted themselves into pretzels trying to find the formula that would finally get them back into the White House. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two Southern white men with card-carrying membership in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council ended up finding it, largely by offering baby boomer identity cred in combination with pretty conservative ideology.

Everyone thought they had the formula down until Gore barely lost to George W. Bush in 2000 and the Democrats spent the next few years once again running away as fast as they could from gun control, abortion rights and affirmative action. It only demonstrated that Democratic values were always negotiable. It wasn't until Barack Obama came along and changed the paradigm in 2008, winning by a big margin, that they showed some confidence again.

It's obviously important to analyze what went wrong and where better tactics and strategies could have been deployed. Understanding why the voters chose as they did is invaluable. But when you lost by only 1.4% and a couple hundred thousand votes across the battleground states, as the Democrats did last November, donning a hair shirt and behaving as if the loss was a complete repudiation of everything you believed in is overkill, to say the least. More importantly, it validates the fantasy that Trump won some kind of a mandate for his extremist agenda. But that is simply not the case. Democrats do not need to reinvent the wheel this time.

Having said that, it is disheartening to see the Democrats in Washington appear to either be ineffectual or totally missing in action. (Of course the same can be said of Republicans which is even more bizarre.) There are those who are unafraid to do politics even when they are unable to do policy, which is the comfort zone for most of them. Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brain Schatz of Hawaii are aggressively confronting the Republicans where they can. But the Democrats, in general, do not have the flair for opposition and obstruction that Republicans do — and it's what their voters are yearning for right now.

Lately, those voters have been taking matters into their own hands and are confronting their representatives at town hall meetings and at their offices demanding to know what they're going to do to stop the carnage that's taking place in D.C.. And it's not just Democrats. Republicans and independents are showing up as well. Perhaps this kind of politics is more potent coming from the grassroots anyway.

Soon, however, the Democrats are going to have a real chance to show what they are made of, and if they play this hand well, I suspect they will win back some of the respect they've lost. There is one thing left in American politics that Congress has no choice but to engage and Trump and Musk have no control over: funding the government. On that, despite their minority status, they have leverage and power because the Republicans can't agree on anything.

There are just three weeks left until the continuing resolution that was punted before Christmas runs out. And while the Senate and the House are dreaming about massive tax cuts and taking a machete to Medicaid, they apparently haven't given a thought to the fact that even with all the DOGE sturm und drang the government is about to run out of money. And as we know, Republicans in the House have a faction that will not vote for spending. They just won't. So with their tiny majority, they need Democrats to cover for their intransigence. But with Trump and Musk busily destroying the executive branch and seemingly enjoying the carnage they're creating while doing it, Democrats understand that the Republicans are going to have to deal with their people on their own this time.

The GOP has created the politics we are all living through and they have all the institutional tools they need to pass whatever they want to pass. Unfortunately, they are completely dysfunctional — and that dysfunction will likely result in a government shutdown. It could be a painful one but the government is already engulfed in Musk's firestorm so if the congressional Republicans get in on the act too, it's all the more clarifying. As Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Ct., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee told the Washington Post, "Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House. It is their responsibility to find the votes to pass the final measures." It's that simple.

There is every reason to believe right now that the Democrats are going to hang tough this time. They pretty much have to. With a 31% approval rating, they certainly don't have much to lose but they have a lot to gain as their voters see that they are refusing to go along with this MAGA trainwreck. Sometimes the best way to show leadership is to just say no, especially to bullies, thieves and thugs. The American people will thank them for it.