Westneat: Democrats in doldrums

“Now that the election is over, everybody wants to be an independent,” Elway remarked.

The poll captures the murky future facing Democrats. They just won every statewide race here for the first time in 80 years. Yet there is angst within the ranks.

“Our brand is fundamentally broken,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, has been saying to anyone who will hear him out.

Nationally, new polls show Smith may be right. A Quinnipiac University poll recently found Democrats with a minus 26 rating, 31 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable — their worst showing in the 17-year stretch of the poll.

Some of this is that nobody likes a loser — and the Democratic base really doesn’t like losing to Donald Trump. It might be why Washington Democrats appear to be getting so little credit for their big wins. The Trump win nationally trumped it all.

What to do about this malaise? The state Democratic Party chair, Shasti Conrad, is arguing that Democrats nationally ought to copy Democrats here — by being more aggressively progressive.

“In a sea of red, Washington Democrats bucked the national trend,” she declared in an after-election report. “We delivered the strongest Democratic performance in all 50 states. Our losses in 2024 must not be allowed to make us turn on one another — or on the policies at the root of our Democrat Party. … I credit our success to the fact that progressive policies are popular.”

Smith said this papers over the party’s serious problems.

“We won. I get that,” he told the Washington State Standard. “But is it because we’re doing such a fantastic job, or is it because the Republican Party is simply unacceptable to over 50 percent of the electorate in the state of Washington?”

So should the party lean in left to get its mojo back? Go moderate? The polls show the challenge. Right now, Democrats are unpopular even with women, their strongest support group. The party’s failure to sustain abortion rights nationally may have taken a toll — it’s one thing to say you’re going to protect women’s rights, but then you have to actually do it.

This is Smith’s point as well. In conversations I had with him after the election, he argued that Democrats do have a messaging problem. But more than that, it’s a governance problem. The sense of dysfunction coming out of some Democrat-run cities on the West Coast, especially with homelessness and crime, is a potent signal that Democrats can’t run things.

“I have Democratic colleagues in the House who bring it up all the time, from districts all over the country, that what’s happening in the cities is hurting them politically,” he told me. “They say: ‘You guys have to get it together out there.’ ”

The governance problem is real. One example is public schools. Conrad praised Democrats for achieving “investments in education,” which is true — they’ve poured money into the schools. But the results? The state has had a terrible “return on educational investment,” argued Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University.

The national corollary to this would be immigration. Americans previously had accommodating views on migrants, polls showed. But people clearly saw the Democratic administration lose control. So enough of them tipped back to the extreme of Donald Trump.

In the end, Trump probably is the north star that could guide Democrats out of the political darkness. Bouncing back probably hinges less on policy or performance right now than on one word: fight.

Does a party with aging leaders and a burned-out base have that fight in them? It’s one of the burning questions of the year, and so far they can’t seem to agree where to start.