There is a fight between Democratic activists, who have called on Congressional leaders to fight Trump and his administration more, and the leaders themselves — who, until recently, were very publicly ambivalent about the demands of the mobilized left wing of the party.

Senator Schumer publicly rebuked the “fight Trump” wing of the party back in March when he refused to shut down the government.

Democrats need to engage in an all-out fight for the country. And so,House minority leader Jeffries and several other Democratic representatives attended No Kings Day rallies.

Democrats are energized to participate in politics right now. It looks like 5–6 million people turned out nationwide to stand up for democracy and protest Trump on Saturday. That is a big shift in organization and energy to the left from the 2024 Biden and Harris campaigns (and an increase in turnout since the first No Kings Day in June).

Meanwhile Democrats lead by 3 in the House generic ballot, according to the average at FiftyPlusOne.news, and they’ve increased their vote margin in the average special election since January by 15 points.

In the September Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, voters who were most likely to say they’ll vote next year were 9 points friendlier to Democrats in the House.

Among the most engaged voters (those saying they are definitely or very likely to vote), the margin is still D+5 (50–45). Voters were asked to rate their interest in the election on a scale from 1 to 10: Among the 10-out-of-10 voters, Democrats lead 55–41 (just 4% undecided) in the generic ballot.

But in the sense that No Kings is evidence to party leadership that Democrats want them to publicly fight for democracy and sensible government, I’d say it’s very important. And if you compare how leadership is acting now (holding firm on day 21 of a government shutdown) to where they were six months ago, I’d say we are in a better place.

Also, party identification age distributions have changed over the last 50 years. Gallup just released its quarterly estimate of national party identification on Oct. 20. Now Democrats hold a 7-point lead on party ID now, their highest since before Joe Biden was elected president.

Moreover that 7-point lead is actually larger than the equivalent Democratic Party ID advantage during Trump’s first term:

This quarter’s D+7 reading is close to the lead Democrats had for most of the past decade, including in 2012 during Barack Obama’s re-election:

This is very different from the party registration data of a few months ago when the NYT said it was a “crisis“ for Democrats. Avise back then was to take the catastrophic framing with a grain of salt, since by mid-year, the data was pretty stale (not a lot of people register to vote in the off year), and so was likely hiding the shift toward Democrats we were seeing in polls.

So, don’t clutch the pearls just now, don’t agonize, organize.

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