A Democratic researcher asked various focus groups to compare the two parties to animals.
"Republicans are seen as 'apex predators,' like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive," reports the New York Times.
The researcher asked a man in Georgia what animal the Democrats reminded him of. He replied, "a deer in headlights."
“You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway," he added.
That's a pretty good summation of the Democratic Party in June 2025. Donald Trump's blitzkrieg of executive orders, pronouncements, and the passage of the "Big, Beautiful Bill" have paralyzed the Democratic Party.
Partisans are enraged that all the Democrats are offering in response are gimmicks, like getting arrested at an ICE detention center, or Rep. Jasmine Crockett swearing up a blue streak on national TV.
This is not news to the American voter. Kamala Harris lost, not because she was a woman, or because she wasn't white, or even because she was dumber than a box of rocks (a couple of dumb people have been elected president).
Kamala Harris and the Democrats were slaughtered because they had no new ideas, and the ideas they presented during the election were toxic and repelled average Americans.
Perhaps no group has swung away from Democrats more decisively than young white men, 18-30. It's no coincidence that no group has been vilified, ostracized, and denigrated more by Democrats.
To fix the problem with males in general and young white men in particular, the Democrats have earmarked $20 million for a plan they call "Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan" (SAM).
Yes, it's as silly and stupid as it sounds.
Steve, Scott, and Matt all wrote about SAM with varying degrees of mirth and astonishment. The program will concentrate on trying to win back young men who have left women behind in their lurch to the right. Even worse for Democrats, the shift of young women to the left is only a fraction of the young males moving right.
SAM will “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces," including video games and other platforms where young white men congregate.
“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” it urges.
“The party has to find ways to compete in states where it’s not,” said Jaime Harrison, a former Democratic National Committee Chairman.
That's true. They can start by firing whoever came up with this cockamamie SAM idea.
Democrats are looking at Trump and the GOP's falling approval numbers and dreaming of taking over Congress in 2026. It won't matter in the long run if they fail to undertake fundamental reforms that place them closer to the mainstream.
Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, said, “The 2022 midterms masked the Biden problem,” he said, referring to Biden's age problem. “A good 2026 midterm — we should not let that mask a deeper problem.” Democrats, he said, had “lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.”
One young Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary tries to explain the shift to Trump by young men. He points out that some Democratic frontrunners for 2028 are running away from "wokeness," like Gavin Newsom, who came out against boys playing in girls' sports.
But the Democratic Party’s great de-wokening won’t be enough to regain the trust of the young men it’s lost. The failed Kamala Harris campaign, for all its flaws, did not run on “wokeness”—it largely avoided social issues, apart from legal access to abortion, which most men support. The Harris campaign’s greatest failure is that it ran on nothing at all. Ask yourself: What does the Democratic Party actually stand for—and, crucially, stand against? An inability to name an enemy, apart from Trump and the Republicans, or articulate a vision of the future, has turned the Democratic Party into vanguards for a political and economic establishment that people already perceive as a failure.
If Democrats want to win back young men, they cannot promise reform. They have to admit what Americans already feel is true: that there is something that’s going very wrong with this country—and it’s time to radically change it.
Trump's blitz upon entering office has paralyzed Democrats, forcing them to fall back on finding old solutions to a systemic crisis. That's just not good enough, especially for young men who see the American dream that sustained their parents and grandparents being thrown on the ash heap of history by greedy, grasping politicians. Democratic identity is now firmly associated with being against any traditional understanding of the American Dream. To win back young men, the party will need to change its identity.
This is something they cannot do and still remain "Democrats."
Trump is either the start of a Glorious Revolution or the last gasp of American exceptionalism. It's difficult to say at this point which way the pendulum will swing.
