As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knows better than anyone, the Democratic base is pissed off. And not just a little.
The intensity of the anger roiling the party is at a historic level, suggesting a breach between congressional Democrats and the party grassroots so severe that it could reshape the 2026 primary election season.
Congressional Democrats have typically enjoyed higher popularity with their voting base than their Republican counterparts. But the trauma of the 2024 presidential election defeat appears to have ruptured that relationship. A review of Quinnipiac University’s annual first-quarter congressional polling reveals that, for the first time in the poll’s history, congressional Democrats are now underwater with their own voters in approval ratings.
Just 40 percent of Democrats approve of the job performance of congressional Democrats, compared to 49 percent who disapprove. That’s a dramatic change from this time last year, when 75 percent of Democrats approved compared to just 21 percent who disapproved. The Democratic base’s disillusionment runs so deep that it’s eerily reminiscent of Republican grassroots sentiment in the period leading up to Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.
The numbers are clear: No longer satisfied with the status quo in their party, Democrats are on the verge of a Tea Party-style, intra-party revolt.
The Democratic approval data is unlike any in recent history — and it isn’t a case of bitter, disaffected partisans reacting to a loss in the last election. The first time Democrats lost an election to Donald Trump, their congressional approval ratings within the party actually ticked up, as Democratic base voters largely approved of the ways that party leadership resisted the Trump administration in early 2017. The same phenomenon surfaced among Republicans in 2021 when, despite Trump’s defeat and the subsequent chaos of Jan. 6, Republican voters remained generally positive regarding their views on the congressional GOP.
The closest partisan parallel to the level of anger currently gripping Democratic voters would be roughly a decade ago, when Republican political unknown Dave Brat toppled House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a shocking 2014 primary upset.
Two years later, Trump tore through a crowded field of accomplished establishment candidates and forever upended Republican politics.
Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.
Instead, the numbers suggest that the fury is at least partly fueled by the Democratic base’s dissatisfaction with congressional leadership’s relatively conciliatory approach to Trump this time around, and their inability to stop him. Recent polls from CNN and Data For Progress both found supermajorities of Democratic voters calling for the party’s congressional leadership to do more to oppose the president — a sentiment that sparked the fierce backlash against Schumer’s recent move to facilitate the GOP’s passage of a continuing resolution funding the government.
Historic precedent suggests it would be extremely unusual for this kind of dissatisfaction to persist without any major changes in the party, especially because these voters don’t have anywhere else to go. Third parties continue to see their vote shares decline, and polarization between the two major parties continues to rise, meaning that the odds of these dissatisfied Democrats voting for non-Democratic candidates are extremely low.
That ratchets up pressure in the 2026 primary election season. Political science literature suggests that partisans angry enough to have an opinion on their party leadership are also the likeliest to show up and vote for Democrats anyway — so it is not clear that the party will incur a turnout penalty as a result.
Instead, these numbers open the door to a potentially bruising string of primaries in both the House and Senate. There are 13 Democratic-held Senate seats up for reelection next year — many of them involving veteran senators in the bluest states — raising the prospect of a stream of younger, insurgent candidates more closely aligned with the party base, similar to what the GOP has contended with over the past 15 years.
A handful of liberal groups have already called for Chuck Schumer to step down as party leader after voting last week for a GOP stopgap funding bill. Democratic House members have also felt the sting of grassroots rage in recent days at town halls marked by testy exchanges with deeply frustrated liberal constituents.
Hoping that the unrest blows over, and that Democratic voters return to the fold eventually, isn’t a smart option. The Republican establishment learned it the hard way in 2010 and the two subsequent election cycles, when House and Senate incumbents and other party-backed candidates were frequently dragged into bruising primaries that resulted in shocking upsets.
Just ask Eric Cantor.
