Who's driving this donkey? Losing Dems need a moderate pivot, but...

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved over his 2016 and 2020 performances with nearly every demographic subcategory, and became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.
65% : By contrast, Republican favorability stood at 43% -- still underwater, but 12 points better -- while Trump enjoyed the highest approval rating of his political career, 53%, according to a February poll from CBS/YouGov.
48% : To take one small but telling example: The campaign to remove Trump from the presidential ballot under the 14th Amendment was spearheaded by a 501(c)(3) called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), part of the nonprofit and advocacy machine run by longtime Democratic operative David Brock.
45% : " Maybe a charismatic new party leader could defy this infrastructure and pivot to the center, the way Trump defied a powerful GOP constituency, the institutional pro-life movement, during his 2024 campaign.
43% : (As the Department of Government Efficiency has highlighted, many of these groups were not only powerful within the coalition; they were also being subsidized by taxpayers.)
30% : According to an election postmortem by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint, published in mid-November, swing voters who broke for Trump -- as 52% did, compared with only 36% for Harris -- saw Democrats as being more supportive of immigrants than of American citizens (73%), wanting to "promote transgender ideology" (72%), being "too focused on identity politics" (67%), and having "extreme ideas" about "immigration" (69%) and "race and gender" (63%).
28% : But as Donald Trump proved in 2016, a party exhausted of ideas, with a leadership class sporting a record of failures, makes a prime target for a hostile takeover.
9% : It was the outgoing Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign that cooked up Russiagate and tried to use the resulting hysteria to consolidate the national security establishment against Trump.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.