Democrats Face Leadership and Cash Shortfalls Even as Republicans Confront Midterm Headwinds
Republicans enter the 2026 midterm season under clear political pressure. Gasoline prices have surged to four-year highs—topping $4 a gallon by late March and reaching roughly $4.48 nationally by early May, according to AAA—as the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict has choked global energy markets and pushed inflation to a near-three-year peak. President Donald Trump's approval rating has slid to the lowest point of his second term, hovering in the high 30s to around 40 percent, with disapproval climbing well into the 50s. More than six in ten Americans blame Trump for the pain at the pump, a majority say U.S. military action in Iran has done more harm than good, and even his support among Republicans has softened from its early-term highs. Democrats hold a steady lead on the generic congressional ballot—by roughly five to ten points depending on the survey—and the structural map favors them: Republicans cling to a razor-thin House majority, Democrats need to flip only a handful of net seats to take the chamber, and 22 of the 35 Senate seats up this cycle are held by the GOP, with Virginia's mid-cycle redistricting having shifted several formerly safe Republican districts toward the Democratic column. Yet for all those advantages, the Democratic Party is contending with internal turmoil—over leadership, money, and its own direction—that threatens to blunt its response just as the opening looks widest.
By Alexander Walter
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At the center of the Democratic disarray is the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Ken Martin, the former Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party leader who won the chairmanship in early 2025 after the party's sweeping 2024 losses. Martin promised a rebuilding agenda built around the slogans "Build to Win, Build to Expand, and Build to Last," but a little over a year into his tenure he faces what more than two dozen Democrats have described as a growing crisis of confidence. Donors, operatives, and even some of his own would-be allies have questioned his leadership style, his fundraising, and his handling of internal disputes. Reporting has portrayed him as thin-skinned and insular, prone to personalizing criticism, over-promising and under-delivering—he frustrated party leaders by pledging more money to last fall's Virginia and New Jersey races than the committee could afford—and overly reliant on a circle of Minnesota loyalists that some insiders derisively call the "Minnesota Mafia."
The financial gap with Republicans has sharpened those frustrations. At the end of March, the Republican National Committee had outraised the DNC by nearly $10 million for the month—$21.2 million to $11.4 million—and the disparity in reserves was far starker: the RNC reported roughly $116 million in cash on hand to the DNC's $13.8 million, nearly eight times as much, while the DNC carried some $18 million in debt. Donors and operatives have aired mounting anger over how the committee spent its money during the 2024 cycle, and insiders have floated procedural reforms, including a resolution that would require Martin to rein in DNC spending and balance its budget. Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich captured the mood in remarks to The Bulwark, saying the job would be difficult for anyone but that Martin "seems to be uniquely ill-suited for it," and calling Martin's appearance on the "Pod Save America" podcast "mind-blowing." Martin's defenders push back, noting that he raised more in his first year than any previous chair in an equivalent cycle without the White House, that the committee has met its big-dollar targets each month in 2026, and—as one ally put it—that "the scoreboard matters more than the spreadsheet," pointing to Democratic overperformance in recent off-year contests. Notably, even amid the national party's struggles, individual Democratic candidates, particularly top-tier Senate contenders, have posted strong first-quarter hauls, as donors increasingly choose to invest in specific races rather than in the DNC as an institution.
The dispute that came to symbolize the dysfunction was Martin's handling of the party's post-2024 "autopsy"—a roughly 200-page examination of why Kamala Harris lost, drawn from more than 300 interviews across all 50 states. Martin had promised even before taking the chairmanship to release the report, then reversed course in December, arguing that airing it would distract from the drive to retake Congress in the midterms. That decision drew sustained criticism, and former Vice President Harris added a new layer to it: NBC News reported that Harris, who has been weighing another presidential run, told donors she had no objection to the report's release, though she had not raised the matter with Martin and was unaware of his decision to keep it under wraps until it happened. Critics argued that burying the document conveniently shielded both Harris and the party consultants whose work it scrutinized.
That standoff has since broken—and not in Martin's favor. On May 21, after intense internal pressure, the DNC finally released the 192-page autopsy, which faulted Harris's 2024 campaign for "writing off rural America" and failing to hit Trump with sufficient "negative firepower," among other findings, while conspicuously sidestepping more contentious questions such as the role of Gaza. But the substance was overshadowed by fury over the rollout. Martin apologized, conceding the report "wasn't ready for primetime" and writing that in trying to avoid a distraction he had "ended up creating an even bigger distraction." The reaction was scathing: DNC vice chair David Hogg called the episode "a demoralizing joke" and said Martin had lost the confidence of his staff and supporters; Run for Something's Amanda Litman said the handling showed Martin was "fundamentally not up to the task" of facilitating a 2028 primary; strategist Steve Schale said simply that the party needed a new chair; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointedly declined to back Martin's leadership when asked. Within days, Martin faced open calls to resign from elected officials and operatives alike—turning a document meant to chart the party's path forward into fresh evidence of its leadership crisis.
Harris's deliberations extend well beyond the autopsy. She has been quietly sounding out confidants and party elders about whether to mount a third national campaign, and her allies have signaled continued interest in a 2028 bid built on the argument that she won more votes—some 75 million—than any losing presidential candidate in history. She recently sought the advice of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who told her she had nothing left to prove as the first woman and first woman of color elected vice president, but cautioned that another loss could diminish that legacy. "She is being encouraged to run by a lot of people around her and by a lot of people around the country," Sharpton said. At the same time, Harris has told associates she wants to weigh in on Middle East policy—a salient issue given the Iran war—but does not intend to take an active national role on it before the midterms.
The questions swirling around Harris feed into a broader strategic debate over whom Democrats should nominate in 2028. Party insiders have openly discussed whether running another woman or person of color could again complicate the path to the White House, a conversation that itself has unsettled many in the party. MS Now host Ali Vitali observed that proving electability "will again be tricky" for Harris and "any nonwhite, non-male candidate," who "will have to prove they can win"—a framing that captures both the anxiety and the discomfort animating the party's internal reckoning. Looming over all of it are the party's two most prominent recent standard-bearers: whether figures like Barack Obama and Joe Biden can still effectively marshal support, and how Biden's legacy should be invoked, remains contested. Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Fleming Kleeb argued to Semafor that candidates who "saw through the endless yelling about his age—and stayed focused on what he actually delivered" are the ones earning Biden's endorsement and that they "will win their elections, because voters see the good Joe Biden did for our party's infrastructure and for our country's infrastructure."
The polling that frames all this offers genuinely mixed cues. A Harvard-Harris survey in March found that 62 percent of voters blamed Trump for an economy widely perceived to be in decline, and 53 percent said conditions were worse than under Biden—numbers that buttress the case of Democrats who believe drawing sharp contrasts with the Republican administration can still deliver victories. Yet other data underscore the party's vulnerabilities even amid Republican weakness: roughly 59 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party unfavorably, nearly identical to the 58 percent who view Republicans the same way, and analysts caution that the party's lead rests heavily on opposition to Trump rather than enthusiasm for a Democratic alternative—a "Not Trump" posture with a demonstrable ceiling. Gas prices, too, may ease before November, draining one of the Democrats' most potent lines of attack.
The upshot for voters and strategists is that both parties face distinct and consequential challenges heading into November. Republicans must contend with an energy shock, an unpopular war, and an unpopular president whose party in Congress has done little to distinguish itself from him—conditions that historically point toward midterm losses for the party in power. Democrats, for their part, must resolve internal disputes over leadership and money to present a unified front and give voters something to vote for rather than merely against. How the DNC manages its finances and its embattled chair, whether veterans like Obama and Biden can still rally the coalition, and the extent to which Harris or other contenders step forward will shape not only the Democratic Party's ability to compete in 2026 but the contours of the fight to come in 2028.
