The Democratic Party—once a vessel for the working class, the marginalized, the believers in a marginally fairer shake—now lies gutted on the political shoreline, its innards picked clean by vultures in Brooks Brothers suits.
The evidence isn’t just in the streets where families choose between insulin and groceries.
It’s etched in cold, hard numbers that scream failure: a Wall Street Journal poll reveals the Democratic Party’s favorability has cratered to its lowest point in 35 years. A mere 33% of voters can stomach them, while 63% recoil in disgust.
This isn’t a dip; it’s a nosedive into the abyss of irrelevance. A YouGov poll echoes the corpse-rattle: 62% of Americans view Congressional Democrats unfavorably.
Even CNN, hardly a bastion of revolutionary fervor, records the lowest Democratic favorability rating in its polling history—a pathetic 29%.
The people have spoken. They see the empty suits. They smell the betrayal.
Enter the architects of this disaster: Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader whose idea of resistance is a furrowed brow before folding like a cheap suit, and Cory Booker, the freshly minted Chair of the Senate Democratic Strategic Communications Committee.
Booker’s ascent to leadership—a unanimous election by the very caucus strangling the party’s future—is a grotesque parody.
This is the man who staged a 25-hour speech spectacle on the Senate floor, a marathon of performative anguish designed to distract the base after Schumer engineered the real treachery: signing off on a GOP-crafted spending bill that betrayed core Democratic priorities to avert a government shutdown.
The former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, isn’t a stranger to calling attention to himself but his grandstanding has not made a difference.
Since Cory Booker went to the US Senate:
- 🚺 Women lost abortion rights
- ✊🏿 The Voting Rights Act was gutted
- 🔫 Mass shootings TRIPLED
- 🌎 Climate disaster CO₂ at 427 ppm
- 📉 Middle class SHRANK—NJ down 3%
- 💰 $29 TRILLION stolen from workers
- 📉 Booker MISSED 413 VOTES (9.7%)
While Booker pontificated, Schumer collaborated and capitulated. The New Jersey politician did not hold his leader accountable, but he led angry activists into a cul-de-sac, where their fury was able to subside.
Booker raked in millions of dollars in campaign funds, his biggest haul ever, after his marathon speech on the Senate floor. The speech wasn’t defiance; it was political chloroform, a dazzling circus act to distract angry Democrats from the cold reality of their leaders’ capitulation.
In the weeks after Booker’s speech, President Donald Trump’s administration followed up by passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, adding nearly $5 trillion to the federal deficit; a $9 billion rescissions law; and the Genius Act, which is a giant giveaway to cryptocurrency con artists.
The “Strategic Communications” chairman’s strategy is distraction instead of direction.
His communication is useless noise, except that by violating Senate ethics rules, he was able to amass a nearly $10 million windfall in campaign contributions.
“The ethics rules draw a clear line between official government business and campaign activity, and it is important these rules are enforced to prevent Congress from simply becoming a venue for campaigning,” said Kendra Arnold, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT). “Specifically with respect to fundraising, it is not allowed to be tied to any official action a Senator undertakes, including a speech on the Senate floor.”
FACT filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, asserting that Booker’s speech had a clear campaign purpose using a series of email and text donation solicitations.
Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker are the Vichy Democrats.
They collaborate with the occupying force of the oligarchy while pretending to lead the resistance.
They dine with lobbyists, cash checks from corporate PACs, and preach “bipartisanship” while Republicans strip-mine the rights of women, workers, and the planet itself.
Schumer talks of working “across the aisle” while the aisle becomes a trench dividing the powerful from the powerless. Booker leverages his media savvy not to dismantle the system, but to rise within its rotten hierarchy.
They are managers of decline, not leaders of a movement.
Pollster John Anzalone nailed the corpse to the door: “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party… Until they reconnect with real voters… they’re going to have problems.”
“Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker are never going to connect with real voters and working people because their economic priority is raising money from billionaires,” said Lisa McCormick, the anti-establishment progressive who earned nearly two of five votes in the 2018 Democratic primary.
Schumer and Booker aren’t reconnecting; they’re severing the last frayed wires.
The alternative isn’t hidden. It pulses in the streets, in union halls, in the fury of a generation priced out of existence.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—not Schumer, not Booker—tops polls as the Democrat who best reflects the party’s core values among its own base. She represents the unvarnished truth, the refusal to sanitize the crisis or compromise with fascism.
Surging from the grassroots, Lisa McCormick, the New Jersey progressive challenging the calcified establishment, embodies the necessary purge.
Endorsed by progressive groups for her fearless advocacy for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and an end to corporate bribery, McCormick doesn’t mince words: “New Jersey’s calcified, cartoonishly corrupt and incompetent political establishment has backed fools, frauds and fiends. Now they are asking voters to make the same mistakes again… if you want to end politics as usual, then you have to stop voting for the usual politicians.”
This is the clarion call the moment demands.
The Vichy Democrats offer managed decline, performative resistance, and a comforting slide into obscurity. Ocasio-Cortez and McCormick offer something dangerous and essential: a fight.
They understand that you don’t defeat a reactionary onslaught by polishing the silverware on the Titanic. Schumer’s “laser focus” is pointed at his own political survival. Booker’s “creative strategies” are merely ways to lose with dignity.
The polls scream catastrophe. The base demands blood and fire. The only path out of this 35-year favorability gutter is a clean break from the collaborators—a purge of the Vichy Democrats and the rise of leaders who won’t just occupy seats, but will wield them as weapons against the dying order.
The funeral dirge is playing. Will Democratic voters finally rise from their self-dug grave, or will Schumer and Booker keep shoveling the dirt?