Six months after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress, a new poll conducted by The Associated Press- NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows Democrats are deeply pessimistic about the future of their party.
According to the findings, only about one-third (35%) of Democrats are "very optimistic" or even "somewhat optimistic" about their party's future. That is down sharply from July 2024, when about six in 10 Democrats polled had a positive outlook about politics in the U.S.
"Democrats have been in disarray for a while," says Jenna Ellis. "That's been the main talking point from the GOP and the Trump administration, but I think it's accurate because they don't have a cohesive message; they don't have a leader, and they frankly don't have any solutions for the American people."
She also observes their internal struggles.
"You still have a few kind of commonsense Democrats, and then you have the other extreme of these incredibly woke, socialist, cultural Marxists – people like Kamala Harris," Ellis notes. "I think the Democrats are really struggling for that reason. When you're struggling internally as a party, then you don't have a message that you're selling to the American people."
While 59% of Democrats are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States, the poll shows that about half of Republicans (55%) are "very" or "somewhat optimistic" about their party's future – up from 47% last summer.
The nationwide poll was conducted May 1-5, 2025 using the AmeriSpeak Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,175 adults. The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 4.0 percentage points.
