Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., explained to The New York Times why he believes the Democratic Party’s approval rating is currently “in the toilet” and what they could be doing to get the public back on their side during an episode of the “Interesting Times” podcast on Thursday.
Murphy told host Ross Douthat that the public was “very dissatisfied” with Democrats’ handling of President Donald Trump’s ambitious first 100 days in office and that is why the party is so unpopular.
“I don’t know that anyone was ready for Trump in his second term,” he claimed. “I think there was an assumption, both in the public and within the Democratic Party, that Trump 2 would look very much like Trump 1, that it’d be a lot of rhetoric and bluster, but it wouldn’t be matched with actual action.”
Murphy suggested, “I think that the broad public has been very dissatisfied with the Democrats’ reaction, and that’s in part why you see approval ratings for the party in the toilet.”
The senator seemed to hint at the idea that there may not be an election in 2026 if Democrats don’t step up their resistance to Trump.
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“I think, even to this day, a lot of folks in the party still think this is politics as normal, still think that we’re really not at risk of losing our democracy, that we’re going to have an election in 2026, and that if we just continue to push his approval ratings down bit by bit, that everything will turn out OK,” he warned.
Murphy continued, noting that Democrats are beginning to realize that “democracy itself is at risk” and that there’s no benefit in “playing ball” with Trump.
“Our response is getting better, it’s getting more precise, but there is still an open discussion inside the Democratic Party as to how urgent this moment is,” Murphy explained.
He also offered his take on how the 2026 midterm elections could look for Democrats if they don’t improve their favorability among the public.
“I’m not sure which side is going to win. I think if my side — the side that believes it is five-alarm urgent — doesn’t win, we might not actually have an election that Democrats can compete in 2026,” Murphy asserted.
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When asked by the NYT columnist why he believed Democrats were not prepared for Trump’s second term, Murphy said that he doesn’t “actually know the answer,” and chalked up the party’s ineffective messaging to a “real lack of energy.”
He then pivoted to why he felt the public would vote for someone who, according to Murphy, told them “he was going to be a dictator on Day 1.”
“I think that explanation is pretty easy: They just didn’t believe him,” Murphy claimed. “They believed him when he said he was going to be serious about lowering prices. They didn’t believe him when he said he was going to be a dictator. They remembered that he said similar things in the first term but didn’t really act on them.”
The Connecticut Democrat said that his party needs to be “flooding the zone” on social media to the same level as Trump, and that they need to be “expressing outrage every single day.”
He also claimed that one of the reasons Democrats’ “pro-democracy message” failed in 2024 is because the party isn’t seen as credible.
“For Democrats to credibly argue against Trump’s destruction of democracy, we have to make it credible that if we win power, we will unrig the democracy,” Murphy argued.
To restore credibility to the party, he suggested that Democrats focus on campaign finance reform, including a constitutional amendment to “get money out of politics,” and closing the “revolving door” between lobbyists, congressional staff, and members of Congress.
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