Dems are losing a winnable election

Just five months until the 2026 midterm elections, the political conditions strongly favor Democrats. President Trump remains deeply unpopular, with a 37% approval rating and a 60% disapproval rating, matching President George W. Bush’s polling before Congress flipped blue in 2006, and far below President Barack Obama’s numbers before his party’s 2014 midterm losses. Even more worrisome for Republicans, economic anxiety is high. Voters now trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy, 52% to 48%, according to an April Fox News poll . Democrats should be positioned to win back the House and gain Senate seats heading into 2028.

So why does it seem that Democrats are fumbling a winnable midterm cycle?

Two recent developments within the past few weeks reveal the party’s fundamental problems leading into the fall. The first demonstrates the real limits of Democrats’ ability to fight back against Trump. And the second shows that the party’s refusal to admit its mistakes prevents it from unifying around a coherent strategy to win.

Consider how badly Democrats lost the redistricting war with President Trump over federal congressional seats. Last year, Trump coordinated a sweeping national redistricting effort designed to lock in Republican control of the House. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger decided to “fight fire with fire” by gerrymandering their own states to counterbalance Republican gains in places like Texas. But this response made things worse.

In Virginia, the state supreme court struck down the new Democratic map, ruling it violated the 2020 voter-approved redistricting reforms. Worse, Newsom’s California plan — which could create five new Democratic-favorable seats — gave Republicans exactly the rationale they needed to escalate their own gerrymandering efforts in states where the GOP initially showed reluctance to do so. North Carolina Republicans explicitly cited Newsom’s redistricting as justification for their own maps, saying the Golden State was “blocking the efforts of blue state Democrats to take control of Congress.”

The math is daunting. As of now, Republicans stand to gain roughly 13 House seats from their gerrymandering efforts nationwide. Democrats, thanks to Newsom, may gain five. That is a net gain of seven seats for Trump. In sum, Democrats’ attempt to fight back didn’t stop Trump’s redistricting efforts. Rather, they normalized a sleazy policy and gave hesitant Republican-led states the push to escalate the effort.

If Trump’s redistricting efforts hold, Democrats could fail to retake the House this fall. Without at least one chamber to create institutional leverage, Democrats would be unable to access critical tools to reach voters before the 2028 presidential election, such as investigative power, subpoena authority, and a platform for high-profile hearings. Instead, they would be forced to continue their symbolic protest and opposition for the remainder of his term.

But the real fumble of Democrats leading into 2026 and 2028 comes not from losing the redistricting fight or any of the other defeats to Trump, but from the party’s ongoing refusal to honestly examine why it lost the 2024 election.

This institutional failure has come into focus with the Democratic National Committee’s recent release of its much anticipated 2024 election post-mortem , a report that was supposed to answer hard questions about why the party lost, but instead highlights the insularity and self-protective tendencies of the small professional class of Democratic operatives who influence the party.

“The report never addresses the simplest, most obvious explanation for why Harris lost.”

The timeline of the report’s suppression and eventual release illustrates this problem. In February 2025, Ken Martin, the then chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, won the election to become the next DNC chairman. He defeated Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, who had the backing of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and other top Democratic leaders.

Martin’s strategy to win the most votes from the 448 DNC members, the majority of whom are state party representatives, was straightforward. He promised a “50-state party strategy,” pledging to invest more money in state parties across the country, including the least competitive ones. This stood in contrast to Wikler, who wanted to concentrate resources on media and battleground state elections. Not surprisingly, the candidate promising money to more of the voting constituency beat the candidate advocating for strategic spending focus.

But Martin had to do more than promise money to win. He also had to appease the numerous Democrats angry about the 2024 election defeat. Many of these critics weren’t voting DNC members, but their voices and donations mattered. For them, he promised an independent autopsy conducted by an outside auditor that would rigorously exam…