At a Brooklyn street festival in August, Zohran Mamdani failed to bench-press 135 pounds. Why he was even subjecting himself to such a stunt is a good question. Call it a sign of the times. The likely next mayor of New York — a trim 34-year-old socialist who wants to freeze rents and open government-run grocery stores — grimaced through two attempts, the bar quivering inches above his chest before a spotter stepped in.
The optics were brutal, as was the ridicule. Current Mayor Eric Adams posted a video of himself benching at the same event, dubbing his opponent “Mamscrawny.” Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines — a prominent critic of transgender women in women’s sports — boasted she repped 165 while weighing only 130. Miami’s Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, posted a video pressing 225 for 13 reps.
Politics have always been about spectacle — think the Gipper chopping logs, Bill Clinton playing his sax, or Barack Obama playing basketball. All performative politics meant to convey strength, accessibility, virality. But the message was coded.
Now, as with much of our political moment, there is no nuance. And pumping iron, or struggling to do pullups, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently filmed himself doing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has become a sort of litmus test.
These displays of machismo play well with the MAGA base, where strength-as-spectacle is part of the brand. But when Democrats try the same stunts, they not only fail; they embarrass themselves. They also reveal something deeper, maybe even existential: a party so desperate to reconnect with voters that it resorts to gestures it doesn’t understand.
For Democrats, the state of affairs is dismal. According to a poll by The Wall Street Journal, the party has reached a 35-year low in popularity. Polls by Quinnipiac and NBC News also found a majority of voters do not view the party favorably. According to The New York Times, the party has lost 4.5 million registered voters to the GOP from 2020 to 2024.
Democrats are still processing not just losing the 2024 election, but how they lost. Exit polls showed Democrats slipping among Black men and Hispanics, constituencies they thought they could count on. President Donald Trump even gained women voters between 2016 and 2024. In another big shift, nonvoters favored Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points. This revealed “an uncomfortable truth for Democrats,” researchers at Tufts University concluded. “This wasn’t about turnout, messaging or campaign tactics. When the same realignment appears among people who don’t even vote, it signals something more fundamental — the Democratic Party has lost touch with where Americans, engaged or not, actually stand.”
So far, the official party response has been muffled. After a spring devoted to embarrassing leadership battles, the Democratic National Committee spent the summer dodging hard questions. The DNC’s much-touted postelection “autopsy” was repeatedly delayed. And if that report ever sees daylight, rumor has it that it won’t probe former President Joe Biden’s hiding-in-plain-sight senescence or Harris’ built-in weaknesses and strategic failures.
Consultants have filled the vacuum. Some urge a hard left turn: no compromise on social issues and more billionaire bashing. Others blame hard-liners for saddling the party with out-of-touch purity demands.
The party is lost, uncertain whether its future lies in moderation, or something more radical.
Tracing the fall
How Democrats lost their way is a story about money, hubris and the rise of the consultant class. But it’s also a story about the Republican Party, and how it pivoted to meet the demands of voters in a way the Democrats are still struggling to understand.
That pivot, which shocked the world in 2016, was actually decades in the making. The hubris was clear only in hindsight. In 2002, political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” that Democrats would build a lasting center-left majority, grounded in favorable demographics and “progressive centrism.” Democrats could hold working-class voters, consolidate growing minority support and claim the cultural middle ground. Republicans would remain tied to neoconservatives of the military industrial complex, the evangelical right and corporate interests. Democrats would be the reasonable party: protecting social programs, advancing equal opportunity and showing cultural restraint. Republicans would be trapped by their failure to adapt to an increasingly diverse, urban and moderate electorate.
In the years before Trump’s election, voices on the right were beginning to critique what both parties had become, and to chart a path forward. In 2012, the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray published “Coming Apart,” which depicts a bicoastal elite detached from a fraying working class in middle America. Murray cited the explosion in CEO pay — which doubled from $1 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1987, doubled again by 1992, again by 1998 and yet again by 2006 to $16 million. He decried Gatsbyesque homes and other “unseemly” luxuries. But Murray, too, was a bit early. When “Coming Apart” appeared in January 2012, Republicans were preparing to nominate a private equity investor worth more than $200 million whose four homes in four states included one in La Jolla, California, worth $12 million and equipped with a car elevator. If optics is messaging, the Republican message in 2012 was clear.
Two more American Enterprise Institute scholars dropped related books in 2016. Yuval Levin published “The Fractured Republic.” “The poor,” he wrote, “are more isolated — economically, culturally, and socially — than they used to be in America.” Levin’s solution was a “mobility agenda.” Meanwhile, Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work” noted that from 1965 to 2015, millions of prime-age male workers simply exited the workforce. “It is imperative for the future health of our nation,” Eberstadt wrote, “that we make a determined and sustained commitment to bringing these detached men back: into the workplace, into their families, and into civil society.”
Vice President JD Vance’s bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” also published in 2016, became a runaway smash. His story of Middletown, Ohio, became a metaphor for the forgotten working-class voters already buying up MAGA hats. This version of Vance had no love for Trump, however. He called Trump “cultural heroin” and warned that “the eventual comedown will be harsh.” Nonetheless, Vance conceded that a vote for Trump sent “a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen.”
Some Democrats were listening, and were beginning to grow worried that the “Democratic majority” wasn’t as stable as Judis and Teixeira had predicted. In “Listen, Liberal,” released in March 2016, Thomas Frank flayed Hillary Clinton and the party for leaving the working class behind and leaving open space for a populist challenger. “Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness,” he wrote, knocking Clinton’s campaign for an “atmosphere of acute virtue — of pure, serene, Alpine propriety.”
But liberals weren’t, in fact, listening. As Trump outflanked Democrats to reach the working class, Democratic elites bragged about trading up for better voters. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., boasted in July 2016, “we will pick up three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” He predicted “a Democratic generation.”
Instead, Clinton lost almost every swing state in 2016 to Trump, and Harris did the same in 2024. Democrats spent 2025 trying to understand why they had been abandoned by voters whom Schumer had seen as dispensable and Clinton had infamously called a “basket of deplorables.” In sum, the Democrats’ shift away from working-class voters arguably began in 1993 with one Clinton and culminated in 2016 with the other.
Two decades later, Teixeira looked back on the predictions he’d made in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” and surveyed the wreckage. Sometime in the early 2010s, he argued in an op-ed last year, Democrats abandoned the working class and embraced progressive orthodoxies on race, gender and climate. “In reality,” Teixeira wrote, “a lot of these ideas were terrible and most voters outside the precincts of the progressive left itself were never interested in them.”
Reckoning and reflection
Every electoral loss prompts an internal reckoning. The postmortem after Michael Dukakis lost in a landslide in 1988 was that he lacked charisma and didn’t connect with voters. Al Gore didn’t seem authentic enough in 2000. Mitt Romney, he of the car elevator in La Jolla, was out of touch. A popular critique among the Democratic consultant class after the 2024 election is that party leaders like Clinton, Schumer and Harris lived in a progressive echo chamber. “Trump exploited that to devastating effect against Harris,” Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith said. The orthodoxy, he said, was “noticeably out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable.”
Days after the election, Smith’s polling firm Blueprint, in a survey of over 3,000 confirmed voters, found that undecided voters broke for Trump, 52 percent to 38 percent. Asked what pushed them, five of the top eight responses were immigration related. But when asked which issues were most decisive, “swing voters ranked the Democratic Party’s perceived focus on cultural issues over middle-class concerns as their top criticism, even above inflation and immigration.”
Swing voters heavily dinged Harris for specific policy positions on cultural issues: “supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants, mandatory electric vehicles by 2035, decriminalizing border crossings, and defunding the police.” On climate policies, the party was also on defense: a June Pew survey found 65 percent of Americans opposed mandates to phase out gas engines. And an Associated Press poll found that only 28 percent of independents favored EV tax credits in 2025, down from 49 percent in 2022.
On multiple fronts, Harris struggled to balance shifts in public opinion against an activist base unwilling to yield, a symptom of what election prognosticator Nate Silver calls “blueskyism” after the progressive social media platform launched in 2023 to counter Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. “Bluesky … embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people,” Silver wrote. He listed three characteristics: policing ideological boundaries, emphasizing who is speaking rather than the strength of the argument and treating every issue as an existential crisis. The result is politics as tribal signaling rather than persuasion.
Policing boundaries puts careers at risk. In 2020, David Shor, head of political data science at Civis Analytics, was fired after tweeting about a 2020 study by Princeton’s Omar Wasow. Wasow’s peer-reviewed study of county-level data found that in 1968, nonviolent civil rights protests boosted Democrats’ votes, while violent protests improved Republican turnout and may have tipped the presidency to Richard Nixon. Posted amid the George Floyd protests in 2020 and denounced by progressives, Shor’s tweet led to his firing within days.
Shor was and is a loyal Democrat, having gained prominence on Barack Obama’s 2012 data team, where he helped build microtargeting models. After Civis fired him, he went on to work for Blue Rose Research and he remains a prominent Democratic data analyst. The good news for Democrats is that Shor fought his way back. The bad news is that he had to. Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, laments that Democrats struggle with (and too often oppose) diversity of thought. “You can’t be a good Democrat if you undercut core party priorities,” Schlozman told me. “We don’t want anyone who is on the wrong side of our litmus test — and there is no obvious moment when the calibration stops.”
For Democrats, the state of affairs is dismal. according to a poll by the Wall Street Journal, the party has never been less popular in 35 years than it is now.
On transgender issues, Democrats may have been lulled by polls that were framed to get the answers they wanted. A 2024 Gallup poll reported that 60 percent of American adults supported “gender-affirming care” for minors. But note the halo words: “affirming” and “care.” Polls that avoided such nudges and instead named specific procedures or treatments flipped the results. A Washington Post/KFF poll found 68 percent opposed puberty blockers for children ages 10-14, while 58 percent opposed hormone treatment for teens 15-17. Pew showed majorities or strong pluralities against giving minors “medical care for a gender transition,” against trans participation in women’s sports, and against trans bathroom access.
All of this put Harris in a bind. In 2019, she said on video that she had “worked behind the scenes” to ensure that California gave “every transgender inmate in the prison system” access to elective gender surgery at public expense. That clip became Trump’s most aired attack ad in 2024. NPR reported that the ad aired “more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states, and with a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.” Harris was widely criticized for not responding to the ad. But she had no safe move. Denial was impossible, and reversal would betray her unforgiving progressive base. Her only play was silence.
Harris was not the only one staying mum. In May 2025, Time’s Charlotte Alter found a few Democrats who would say that biological boys shouldn’t compete against biological girls in high school and college sports. Or that the party should be less gung ho about abortions later in pregnancy. But they would say neither for the record. “Yet the fact these lawmakers would only share these thoughts without their names attached,” Alter wrote, “shows how much Democrats still fear antagonizing their liberal base.”
In August, the center-left think tank Third Way urged Democrats to drop ideologically laden phrases. These include therapy-speak (triggering, holding space, privilege), seminar-room language (systems of oppression, Overton window), organizer jargon (food insecurity, the unhoused, person who immigrated), gender/orientation correctness (cisgender, LGBTQIA+, birthing person), the shifting language of racial constructs (Latinx, BIPOC, intersectionality, allyship), and euphemisms for crime (justice-involved, incarcerated people, involuntary confinement). “Latinx” is notable because the term is already passé. Coined in 2004 as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, it gained currency in academic and journalistic circles but never among the people it was meant to describe. A 2020 Pew survey found that only 3 percent of U.S. Hispanics used “Latinx,” while 76 percent had never heard of it. The League of United Latin American Citizens formally rejected the term, calling it “a distraction.” Yet state agencies, major corporations, major universities and progressive organizations all continue to use Latinx.
Consultants and control
For decades, critics have accused the Democratic Party of being held hostage to its own consultant class: a cadre of pollsters, strategists and messaging mavens who favor safe, testable, “electable” candidates over bold, authentic voices. In fact, a clip of a very angry and profane Hunter Biden railing against the consultant class recently went viral.
And yet, in spite of this long-standing critique, the party remains firmly beholden to it. If the problem is authenticity — if voters recoil from stiff, overly scripted candidates — then asking consultants how to be authentic is, by definition, an absurd exercise, and how a slim mayoral candidate in New York ends up barely bench-pressing 135 pounds. And yet, consultants still have a firm grip on the party: According to internal reports, Democratic operatives are searching for a “progressive Joe Rogan.”
In one way, the thinking makes sense. Where legacy media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post once held tremendous sway with voters, much of that energy and influence has shifted to other forms of media, and podcasts in particular.
There is perhaps no podcaster with the reach and influence of Rogan, who moonlights as a UFC color commentator and considers stand-up comedy his main gig. Rogan’s brand is built on talking for hours with guests who range from fellow comics to renegade academics to conspiracy theorists (as well as the occasional celebrity or politician) with no filters whatsoever. He has over 20 million YouTube followers, and once topped 65 million views for a single episode. He may be the most powerful broadcaster in America. (For what it’s worth, Rogan has said he does 225-pound bench press sets and can max 315.)
The campaign to find a Rogan for Democrats has included a number of schemes, according to The New York Times. One raised $7 million toward a planned $45 million. Another signed more than 90 influencers — offering up to $8,000 a month under secrecy and content-control clauses — to push progressive messaging online. A group called Speaking With American Men, or SAM, wants to raise $20 million to tap into podcasts and gaming culture. “Above all,” SAM’s prospectus stated, “we must shift from a moralizing tone to an aspirational and inclusive message that positions progressives as champions of opportunity, resilience, and economic justice.” Once SAM finds their Rogan, the plan seems to be to program him to “avoid this” and “promote that.”
Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness.
SAM was right to flag the “moralizing tone.” But they missed the secret sauce. Rogan doesn’t offer “aspirational and inclusive” messages: He just says what he thinks. And as Rogan quipped after hearing Democrats wanted to clone him: “But they had me. I was on their side!” Rogan still calls himself a “left-leaning libertarian.” He has long backed same-sex marriage, abortion rights and drug legalization. He endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary. Rogan’s pivot toward the right came in 2020 with Covid-19, when he decided the mainstream press and public-health establishment weren’t being honest. His skepticism of vaccine mandates, media narratives and progressive orthodoxy shifted his profile — though many of his views never changed.
On Sarah Silverman’s podcast on August 7, Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” noted that there are “loud voices” in the party who “scare people from saying what they believe and make you think twice about a joke.” Kimmel called these voices “repulsive,” which he meant in the literal sense of the word: “I mean, they repel people. They go like, ‘Oh, you’re no fun. I don’t want to be around you.’” Silverman added, “And people go where they’re accepted, where the love is.” At a CNN focus group in Pennsylvania after the election, previously undecided voters were asked to describe Trump and Harris in one word. One woman called Trump “crazy” and Harris “preachy.” She said she chose Trump “because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me: ‘preachy’ does.”
Crazy, but not preachy. “Donald Trump has ruined political consultants,” said Paul Sracic, retired chair of political science at Youngstown State University. After three decades at a college serving the children of factory workers, Sracic watched Ohio shift from a union stronghold to Trump country. He’s seen what works and what doesn’t, and how the rules changed. “The job of consultants was to make you into something voters could buy,” he told me. “You looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, used the right talking points. Trump broke that mold. He smashed it. In this new paradigm, you have to be who you are.”
The populist shift
The Tea Party was a brief “revolution” of polite suburban families whose parents shouted “darn” and “dangit” and cleaned up after themselves at rallies. For a short time the Republican’s future was Paul Ryan, a wonkish, policy-driven congressman with a smile that could best be described as “mildly functional.” In 2014, no one imagined the rise of Trump, the shift to populism and the complete remapping of the party’s base.
Nine years and two shocking presidential wins later, Democrats were suddenly anxious to figure out what they failed to predict. And many now see “authenticity” as the critical ingredient that drives Trump and eludes all but a few Democrats. One of those few is John Fetterman. He’s the closest the party is going to get to a Rogan-like figure, a burly and grouchy giant of a man who wears shorts and hoodies on the Senate floor. “He doesn’t care about orthodoxy,” Sracic says, “and he doesn’t even care about his own party.”
You can’t be a good Democrat if you undercut core party priorities. we don’t want anyone who is on the wrong side of our litmus test — and there is no obvious moment when the calibration stops.
Immediately after the election, Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, published a New York Times op-ed asking, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?” Jentleson credited Trump with “supermajority thinking,” which he defined as “envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.” Last month, Jentleson launched the Searchlight Institute, named after the Nevada hometown of Jentleson’s other former boss, longtime Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Searchlight’s mission is to nudge Democrats toward the kind of durable majority that Teixeira had promised back in 2002. To get there, Jentleson says, they’ll need more mavericks, meaning more Fettermans.
“Many voters are searching for leaders who can say no,” Jentleson said. Heterodoxy is a declaration of identity: I am someone who thinks, not conforms. Among die-hard MAGA and progressive loyalists, conformity may be demanded. But Jentleson believes those who decide elections want to know: Can I trust you to represent my interests when the choices get hard? In our conversation, he sketched the familiar two-by-two ideology grid — left and right on one axis, economic and social issues on the other. A credible candidate in a swing district, he said, must cross at least one of those squares.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 defeat, there are signs the party’s fealty to certain orthodoxies is breaking. Days after the 2024 election, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton called out the party’s misalignment on trans issues. “I have two little girls,” Moulton told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff under Obama, also was not cowed. In July, Megyn Kelly asked Emanuel if a man could become a woman. “No,” he replied. “That’s so easy, why don’t more people in your party just say that?” Kelly asked. “Because I’m now going to go into a witness protection plan,” Emanuel answered.
Other Democrats are hoping to create a bigger tent by loosening their own purity demands. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has made gun control central to his career, often calling out dissenters in the party. But after 2024, Murphy told Time, “I spent a long time trying to make the issue of guns a litmus test for the Democratic Party. I think that all of the interest groups that ended up trying to apply a litmus test for their issue ended up making our coalition a lot smaller.”
Whether abandoning certain shibboleths will move undecided voters to the Democratic side of the ledger remains to be seen. For many Democratic insiders, breaking from orthodoxy and being seen as “authentic” will only get you so far. At a certain point, where candidates stand on issues matters.
To that end, Democratic strategists see “economic populism” as their best bet, a morality tale that casts struggling workers and families as victims against corporations and billionaires. Embodied by socialists such as Sanders and Mamdani, this brand of populism portrays a moral fight between “the people” and “corrupt elites.” The archvillain usually is the “neoliberalism” that led to NAFTA and turned a generation of Democrats into globalists. “Some of our top performing messaging,” Democratic data analyst Ali Mortell told me, “are policies designed to lower the cost of living and curb exploitative practices — like going after corporate price gouging and addressing abusive practices by credit card companies, insurance companies, and landlords.”
Which brings us back to New York, with Mamdani on a bench in Brooklyn, struggling to lift 135 pounds. While the stunt may be a commentary on our times, and a rather pathetic attempt to appear manly to attract voters, it’s a distraction. Because while Mamdani may never come close to matching the WWE theatrics of Trump as political theater, he may be similar to him in another, more substantive way.
In New York, no one thought a socialist advocating for free buses and free groceries could ever win, let alone beat a giant of Democratic establishment politics like Andrew Cuomo. That’s why Mamdani’s primary election victory was a shock, not just in New York, but among America’s elite chattering class. It’s why Megyn Kelly dedicated multiple segments to it and why The Wall Street Journal has dedicated multiple editorials to the implications of his election, if he were to win.
The lesson of Mamdani is the lesson of Trump: the old rules of politics no longer apply. Trump neither pandered to the center nor energized the party’s base. Rather, he inserted a new party into the hollowed shell of the GOP, powering it with an upswell of voters whose fears had been ignored.
What would happen if insurgent Democrats found an anti-Trump, a charismatic socialist like Mamdani, but one constitutionally allowed to take the White House; a voice of chaos who managed to focus negative energy leftward the way Trump did rightward?
What if the resulting resurgent Democrats neutralized their social issue baggage and returned to the source of the party’s historical energy — economic populism, a focus on the working class, with clear villains to rally against?
The villains list is long: hedge-fund managers and CEOs faulted for outsized pay; monopolies and Big Tech billionaires; pharmaceutical giants; oil and gas companies blamed for price spikes; real estate speculators driving up housing costs; and media conglomerates accused of spreading misinformation.
Trump broke that mold. he smashed it. in this new paradigm, you have to be who you are.
At its best, populism combines grievance and aspiration, calling out issues elites neglect, while asserting that ordinary people can make things better. But an appeal to intractable resentments also can harbor an undercurrent of violence: if the game is fixed and only rubes follow rules, then tipping over the game board could be a valid move. And tipping the game board can take many forms, some of them more disturbing than others.
In 2016, a conservative writer named Michael Anton dubbed the battle to defeat Hillary Clinton a “Flight 93 election,” referencing the United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, where the passengers stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field to prevent the plane’s use as a weapon of terror. “If you don’t try, death is certain,” Anton wrote. He described a Clinton win as “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.” With Trump, he said, “at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” The notion of existential threat, of an election loss as promising extinction, took root and later bore fruit when Trump loyalists stormed the cockpit on January 6, 2021, and a dogged election denial took hold within the GOP.
Meanwhile, the same Sen. Murphy who wants to widen the Democratic tent has been using apocalyptic populist rhetoric. “Democrats need to act like our democracy is weeks away from disintegrating,” he said in February. He warned of a “red-alert moment” and “the billionaire takeover of government.” Such alarmist language is hardly unique to Murphy. From Black Lives Matter to Free Palestine, activists on the hard left have repeated the phrase “by any means necessary” so often that many have forgotten the literal meaning.
After 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested in the assassination of a health insurance CEO and explained his reasons in a leftist manifesto, he became a folk hero among many younger voters. An Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of young voters between 18-29 years of age felt “the actions of the killer” were “acceptable,” 19 percent were neutral, and only 40 percent opposed. On September 10, 2025, conservative activist and organizer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed allegedly by a 22-year-old extremist who had inscribed “Catch This, Fascist” on unspent bullets.
Both parties now know that playing on fears and naming villains is easier than building a credible program for economic security and opportunity. After being caught flat-footed — by Trump in 2016 and 2024 and by Mamdani in 2025 — it isn’t hard to imagine Democrats coalescing around a leader who combines a Trump-like chaotic authenticity with a leftward economic populism in a bid to reverse Trump’s inroads among vulnerable voters. A post-Trump GOP may double down to hold its gains, and a race to the bottom may follow, resulting in ever increasing division, instability and even violence. No one knows what comes next. But Zohran Mamdani’s failed bench press reminds us that political strength is hard to forecast, that the rules have changed and that the game is now wide open.
This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.