By John Eberhard
We are witnessing the death spiral of the Democratic Party.
The party now has the lowest recorded approval rating in history. A Wall Street Journal poll in July 2025 recorded a 34% approval rating, with 63% viewing the party unfavorably. Several other recent polls have similar percentages.
And of course in the last election we had Trump winning the presidency, and Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress.
So how did the Democrats get there and what is the source of their decline?
The short answer is they have embraced policies that benefit a handful of radical elements of society, that are actually destructive to the majority of Americans and what they want out of their lives.
Some commentators are saying it all started with Obama, and there is no doubt he embraced the strategy and accelerated the trend. But it all started decades before, with what we now call cultural Marxism, “woke,” or “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion).
Basically these ideologies pitted elements of society against each other, with the idea that each person is either an oppressor or is oppressed. You had feminism pitting women against men, the LGBT crowd pitting anyone who isn’t “straight” against all people who are, and the idea that every “non-white” race is against whites. And basically all women, non-straight people, and non-whites were all victims of oppression.
We have been lectured to for years on how all white people are bad, all men are bad, and straight people are bad. And if you are a straight, white male, boy you are the worst of them all.
And of course there’s the radical environmentalists, who want to sacrifice half of California for a 2 inch long fish, and who want to destroy our global economy for a non-proven model of man-made global warming.
And for years those lectures intimidated us, and the radical left made many gains in terms of power and control.
But that all seemed to change last November. The population as a whole seemed to have a collective realization that all those lectures were false, and they made a decision that they weren’t going to accept them anymore.
And one of the biggest losers in that election were the mainstream media, because despite near universal negative coverage of Trump and near universal positive coverage of Harris (who couldn’t even put a coherent sentence together), Trump won. So a large part of the population rejected or ignored the media and their biased coverage.
So why did the population thoroughly reject the Democrats and their media shills? I think it was a collective realization that the Democrats don’t work for the interests of the general population anymore. They are only for the radical feminists, LGBT community, race baiters, and radical environmentalists.
And concerns like the economy and inflation and the well-being of average Americans were not even on their radar, as the population saw through four years of President Biden, with the worst inflation in decades.
Another factor is what I called the “purity test” of the radical movements, where they get more and more radical over time and members are all expected to go along with the latest radical ideas and moving the goal posts, or else they get canceled. You see that today with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dominating the ideological debate of the Democrats.
One form this purity test phenomenon created was the trans movement, with the idea that men who considered that they were actually women be allowed to compete in women’s sports, and use women’s bathrooms and showers. So it went from gays should be allowed to marry, to men should be allowed to compete with women, and you’re a hateful bigot if you don’t agree.
Some commentators think this is what broke the camel’s back. But however you look at it, various polls show that only 20-25% of Americans agree that trans men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. So you have what commentators are calling an 80/20 or 75/25 issue, where the vast majority of the population is against it. But Democrats are doubling down on it. Witness Trump shutting down men in women’s sports, but various colleges around the US refusing to go along.
So Trump is now moving against a lot of what the Democrat party stands for, including shutting down the border and deporting illegal immigrants. Plus he is moving against various DEI policies, and moving to stop huge governmental waste.
In the face of that, what do the Democrats have to offer? They are against anything and everything that Trump does. That’s all they’ve got. They claim he is a fascist, a racist, “a threat to democracy,” ad nauseum.
But do they have any positive proposals on any of the issues that are important to the majority of Americans? Do they have anything that isn’t simply a benefit to the radical elements, or in the case of illegal immigration, that is not simply a plan on getting more votes and representation in the House? Unfortunately no.
And as long as they embrace these 80/20 issues, and fight Trump on his actions to actually improve life for Americans, they will continue on their path to the political wilderness.
It’s humorous to note that Democrats recently allocated $20 million to study the syntax of how to communicate to young men, as if it is a matter of mere wording. Rather than the fact that they have been participating in radical feminist trashing of men for decades.
If Democrats want to find a way back from the political trash dump, they will have to actually abandon this cultural Marxism, DEI and woke over-arching strategy, because the public at large has had enough. And they will have to come up with a new strategy of policies that actually benefit the American people at large and address their high percentage concerns. But I don’t see that happening for quite a while with their current leadership. So the trash dump it is. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.