The San Diego Union-Tribune

The following editorial appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, June 23:

President Trump’s chaotic first five months in office have driven his popularity ratings down, leading some Democrats to see Americans as coming around to their way of thinking. But this is a delusion, because their party remains in a deep funk. The same CBS News polling this week that showed Trump’s approval at a new low — 36 percent — showed congressional Democrats were even less popular — 30 percent. After Republican Karen Handel’s victory in a House special election on Tuesday in the Atlanta suburbs, Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, declared, “Our brand is worse than Trump.”

This may be an overreaction. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes, while Republicans have won all four House special elections to replace Trump appointees, a case can be made that Democrats overperformed each time.

Nevertheless, comprehensive national polls continue to show the same underlying dynamic that has caused Democrats to hemorrhage seats at the local, state and federal level since 2010: Millions of Americans see the party as uninterested in their well-being — in Ryan’s words, “not being able to connect with the issues they care about.”

A new analysis by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group shows Trump made huge inroads among the 29 percent of voters who classify as populists — people who feel left behind by what they perceive as a rigged economy and wish Democrats paid more attention to job creation than identity issues. Hillary Clinton lost 41 percent of the populist voters that Barack Obama won in 2012 — and lost Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin and the election as a result.

Normally, years of Republican gains would trigger a sober self-assessment among Democrats. In 1992 — after three presidential elections in which the GOP won 133 of 150 states — the centrist ticket of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore led the party back to the White House.

But that was a different, less polarized time. A quarter-century later, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted in a recent column, it’s hard to find a center bloc in U.S. politics anymore. (This has troubling implications for Republicans as well as Democrats.) Among Democrats, this polarization has led the party base to abandon big-tent politics in favor of binary judgments that ascribe moral failings to those with even moderate disagreements about cultural issues. Hillary Clinton’s characterization of much of the electorate as “deplorables” was so resonant because it so neatly captured the views of many liberals.

America needs better from the Democratic Party. It needs a party that eagerly tackles the big issues of the day with realistic, pragmatic solutions. It needs a party that admits the Affordable Care Act is deeply flawed and that works to improve health care instead of just jeering the deeply flawed Republican replacement measure. It needs a party that actively seeks to reduce income inequality by changing education to focus on creating more 21st-century job skills and by making it easier for older workers to launch new careers instead of being left behind by technological change. It needs a party that pushes the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to do far more about the opioid epidemic.

But most of all, America needs a party more devoted to getting things done than to hating President Trump. Until that happens, Democrats will remain as unpopular as the president they loathe.