If polling is any indication, the Democratic Party faces an existential crisis. A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that 63 percent of voters hold an unfavorable opinion of the party, with just 33 percent approving — the worst showing in over three decades. Democrats poll lower than both President Donald Trump and his GOP, despite their own favorability problems. “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” pollster John Anzalone explained. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”
Wither the Democratic Party? Some people have speculated that it could fall apart, as the Whigs did almost overnight in the 1850s, shattering the nation’s first two-party system and opening space for new parties to emerge until one stuck. But based on the historical record, I think that’s unlikely. Structural forces had given the Whigs fewer and fewer issues with which to differentiate themselves from the Democratic Party of the time. There was no Second National Bank left to debate about — President Andrew Jackson had killed the institution. Disagreements over soft (that is, paper) versus hard (that is, metal) money temporarily abated with the California Gold Rush. The most high-profile issue left to argue about was slavery, which split the Whig coalition and ultimately killed them off.
Today, Democrats and Republicans have plenty of issues to fight about. And while the Democratic Party is unpopular, there is still ample appetite for a strong opposition party. Whatever happens to the Democrats, it won’t be what happened to the Whigs. The more apt question is whether Democrats can recover from reputational damage so deep that a comeback feels implausible right now. How do parties claw their way back to relevance, and how long does it take?
History offers clues. After the Civil War, Democrats engineered a surprisingly swift resurgence, capitalizing on Northern fatigue and Southern resentment. By contrast, after the Great Depression shattered its brand, the Republican Party spent three long decades groping for a message that resonated beyond its base. Sometimes, a party revives because circumstances shift beneath its feet; at other times, recovery depends on strategic ingenuity and sheer political will.
The challenge for today’s Democrats is whether they can summon both — luck and agency — quickly enough to matter. If they can’t, they risk becoming something rarer in American politics: not just a party out of power, but a party out of time.
After the Civil War, Democrats were in the wilderness. By the late 1860s, the Democratic Party — particularly in the North — struggled under the weight of its anti-war, pro-slavery Copperhead wing and came to be widely derided as the “treason party.” Republican politicians, journalists and clergy painted Northern Democrats as disloyal sympathizers with the Confederacy. As President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary John Hay later recalled, “the name of Democrat was synonymous in the mouths of loyal men with that of traitor.” The Copperheads had opposed Lincoln’s war policies, denounced emancipation and agitated for peace on terms favorable to the South. Even moderate Democrats who had supported the Union war effort struggled to shake the association. “Which party elected Abraham Lincoln? Which party opposed, vilified and killed him? Which party freed the slaves?” Hay later asked. “Democrats were the party of [Copperhead Congressman Clement] Vallandigham and [James] Buchanan.” Theirs was a ‘discredited and soiled record.’”
Republicans exploited this stigma throughout Reconstruction, casting Democrats as the political home of “Copperheads and rebels.” The party limped into the 1870s broken both North and South. In much of the Confederacy, states had not yet been readmitted, and where Reconstruction governments functioned, Black voters and old-line Whigs blocked a comeback. In the North, the Copperhead stain left Democrats divided and vulnerable. Their weakness showed in 1868, when Horatio Seymour campaigned against Reconstruction and Black suffrage, confirming the party’s reputation. President Ulysses S. Grant’s electoral victory that year underscored their isolation.
By the early 1870s, however, Democrats began to claw back. Many Republicans had tired of the Southern problem; 20 years of heated debate over slavery and the Civil War, race and Reconstruction, had diminished their interest. Scandals such as Crédit Mobilier, where members of Congress were implicated in railroad kickbacks, and the Whiskey Ring, which defrauded the Treasury of liquor taxes, deepened public mistrust of the Republican party.. Democrats adapted, shifting away from emancipation and Reconstruction toward farmers squeezed by volatile money supply, urban workers burdened by industrial capitalism and Irish Catholic immigrants who bristled at the Republicans’ Protestant cast. They also benefited from the GOP’s transformation.
Born as a free-labor, anti-slavery party, Republicans now looked like the party of financiers and industrialists, leaving Democrats space to claim the mantle of ordinary Americans.
By the 1890s, Democrats had again become a national force. In the South, “redemption” and Jim Crow secured a white base through disenfranchisement and violence. In the North, they drew urban workers, immigrants and farmers alienated by Republican hard-money orthodoxy. The populist surge revealed a deep well of discontent, and Democrats proved adept at channeling it. Their resurgence peaked with William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, demanding silver coinage to address farmers’ crushing debts and denouncing Wall Street. Though Bryan lost the presidential election that year, he redefined the party’s agenda for a generation. By 1900, Northern Democrats were no longer the “treason party” but a durable national competitor, their revival driven by circumstance, adaptability and dexterity in exploiting Republican weakness.
That capacity for reinvention, born of circumstance and political agility, remains the larger lesson for Democrats today. To be sure, the party profited heavily from Jim Crow brutality, but in the North, its resurgence owed to a shift in salient issues, a capacity to stake out fresh ground and a capacity to draw a changing electorate to its banner.
A few decades later, it was the Republicans who needed a comeback. Saddled with President Herbert Hoover’s reputation for presiding over the Great Depression, Republicans became the party of failure at precisely the moment Franklin Roosevelt was offering voters a bold alternative. Their opposition to the New Deal only deepened that association. By casting themselves as the implacable foes of programs that provided jobs, relief and security, Republicans alienated the very constituencies — urban workers, farmers, immigrants, the elderly — that defined mid-century politics.
The electoral consequences were severe. From 1932 until the 1990s, Republicans managed to win House majorities only twice, in 1946 and 1952, both short-lived. Their fortunes in the Senate were scarcely better, with the GOP controlling the chamber only a handful of times between the New Deal and the Reagan era. For most of the mid-20th century, Democrats dominated Congress, while Republicans functioned as a minority party, able to slow but not to steer national policy.
Much of this weakness was self-inflicted. Through the 1960s, Republicans clung to opposition to Social Security, labor protections and the regulatory state. Even as these programs became fixtures of American life, the GOP resisted acknowledging them as legitimate. The result was a party defined more by what it opposed than by what it could offer. Only when Republicans began to recalibrate — first haltingly with President Dwight Eisenhower’s acceptance of Social Security and later more forcefully with the rise of movement conservatism in the 1960s, championed by figures like Barry Goldwater and, soon after, Ronald Reagan — did they start to rebuild a coalition.
Just as Democrats clawed back from near-collapse in the 1860s by dropping a fixation on slavery and Reconstruction, Republicans in the 1970s began to recover from their exile after 1932. Nixon recognized that survival required the same maneuver: Stop fighting the last war and capture the anxieties of the present. In his “Silent Majority” speech of 1969, he not only defended his Vietnam policy but also pressed to “orient the Silent Majority toward issues other than foreign policy (e.g.: inflation, crime, law and order, etc.).” Like Democrats in the 1870s, Nixon built a new coalition that drew in suburban families whose parents had once been New Deal Democrats but now worried more about crime, campus unrest and rising prices than about dismantling Social Security or labor laws.
His strongest gains came not from Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s working-class Democratic base but from the “middle-class, white-collar suburbs” whose growth transformed whole regions. These voters — children of the Roosevelt coalition now living in ranch houses and cul-de-sacs — formed the backbone of Nixon’s majority. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips predicted that an alliance of “working-class voters who harbored deep resentments of racial and cultural liberalism, and upwardly mobile suburbanites who resented paying high taxes to support the New Deal and Great Society welfare state” would form a durable GOP majority, punishing Democrats for their “ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions.” Even Democratic pollsters Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg admitted that the average voter was “unyoung, unpoor and unblack” — “a 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.” The warning was plain: The party’s old coalition no longer matched the electorate it needed to win.
Crucially, Nixon did not wage war on the New Deal order. He presided over more school desegregation than any president before him, proposed new anti-poverty programs and even expanded the welfare state, prompting aide William Safire to quip that while Nixon’s “heart was on the right, his head was, with FDR, slightly left of center.” Like Democrats of the Gilded Age, Nixon’s GOP adapted: preserving the popular legacy of an earlier era while shifting the battleground to fresher cultural and economic divides.
The parallel runs further. Just as Democrats’ halting recovery in the 1870s set the stage for a more durable coalition by the 1890s, Nixon helped Republicans escape the trap of being the “anti-New Deal party” and redirected their appeal to a suburban middle class in transition by combatting crime, inflation and cultural unrest. In the 1980s, Reagan turned that formula into a governing majority. In both cases — the Democrats of the late 19th century and the Republicans of the late 20th — the lesson was the same. Parties survive not by relitigating lost battles, but by adapting to new issues, new demographics and the unsettled terrain of a changing nation.
History suggests that political parties rarely die outright. More often, they drift toward irrelevance by clinging too tightly to old battles or failing to speak to new constituencies and new concerns. The Democrats of the 1870s only revived once they stopped re-litigating emancipation and Reconstruction, addressed farmers, workers and immigrants squeezed by industrial capitalism, and showed the dexterity to exploit Republican scandals and overreach. Republicans after 1932 lingered in the wilderness until Nixon and then Reagan learned the same lesson — accept the enduring legacies of the New Deal, but reorient the party around fresh anxieties over crime, inflation and cultural unrest, while capitalizing on Democratic disarray in the 1970s.
The question now is whether Democrats in the 2020s can muster a comparable reinvention. Polls point to an exhausted brand, distrusted even by voters who dislike the GOP. Their challenge is not unprecedented, but it is urgent: adapt quickly to the politics of this moment — economic dislocation, technological disruption, demographic churn — or risk becoming a permanent minority. The history is clear enough. Parties that fail to change do not simply lose elections. They forfeit their claim to relevance.
That doesn’t mean abandoning core commitments like restoring abortion rights or strengthening Obamacare. But it does mean looking around the corner — reckoning with the destabilizing force of AI and automation in people’s lives and livelihoods, adjusting to demographic shifts that are reshaping the electorate and capitalizing on the majority party’s corruption or perceived ineffectiveness, just as Democrats in the 1870s and Republicans in the 1970s once did. Parties that endure don’t simply defend yesterday’s victories; they anticipate tomorrow’s battles.
