Democrats need their ‘own Trump’ to succeed, podcaster argues in NY Times

A recent opinion piece in The New York Times said that the key to the Democratic Party succeeding again is having their own version of President Donald Trump. 

“If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition — one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause — the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left,” Galen Druke, host of the “GD Politics” podcast, wrote in a Monday guest essay in The New York Times.

“It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump,” Druke added. 

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Druke noted that the Democratic Party is “historically unpopular,” citing a 2025 Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel and saying that “The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is 22 percentage points underwater — 60 percent of respondents view it unfavorably, 38 favorably.” 

He cautioned that Democrats should not look for their own Trump figure who would “violate democratic norms and destabilize American institutions, but rather the one for resetting how Americans view a party and its leaders.”

Secrets behind Trump’s success, Druke said, included the president bucking his own party’s stances from both sides of the spectrum. 

Druke also hinted at the trust Democrats need to rebuild within their base after they “stood by a deeply unpopular president despite clear signs that Democratic voters did not think he was suited to another term.”

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Druke mentioned a recent CNN poll that showed the Democratic Party’s favorability rating at a record low among Americans, with 52% to 48% of Democratic-learning voters saying the party is going in the wrong direction. 

The poll also showed the favorability rating for the Democratic Party at 29%, calling it a “record low” that goes back to 1992, and saying that it was a 20-point drop from January 2021. 

Druke also said that Democrats should take a page from former President Bill Clinton’s playbook and be liberal in terms of healthcare policy, where he says the candidate should push for universal healthcare “far more progressive than the Affordable Care Act,” but have more right-leaning policies when it comes to issues like government spending and crime. 

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Democrats should treat social issues similarly, Druke said, adding that the party should “assert that the goal is for all people to be treated with dignity and that Democrats got carried away with ideas that ultimately didn’t further that goal.”

“To be truly successful, the next Democratic nominee will transform how Americans view the Democratic Party as a whole, leading the way to winning voters not currently viewed as ‘gettable’ in states that have been written off,” Druke wrote.