Since their decisive losses across the board in the 2024 elections, the Democratic Party has been searching for a way forward and a way to fix its growing unpopularity.

The party has been dogged by continued negative polling figures, with an ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll released last month showing 69% of people believe the Democratic Party is out of touch with most people’s concerns.

An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll released last month showed that when asked which party fights for people like you, 38% said neither party, while 24% said the Republican Party and only 23% said the Democratic Party.

While the party looks for answers and a leader to guide them to victory in the 2026 and 2028 elections, here are some of the reasons Democrats believe their party has lost its popularity.

Not progressive enough

Hard-left members of the Democratic Party have insisted the party’s attempted appeals to centrists during the 2024 campaign were unwise and that they should embrace progressive messages going forward.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have gone on a nationwide “Fight Oligarchy” tour directed against President Donald Trump and Republicans, with stops in Republican areas along with Democratic strongholds. The tour, led by two of the most well-known progressives in Congress, has been criticized by some Democrats like Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Sanders has pushed back on those critiques.

“Geez, we had 36,000 people out in Los Angeles, 34,000 people in Colorado, we had 30,000 people in Folsom, California, which is kind of a rural area. I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are. I think they understand very well that the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%,” Sanders said on NBC News’s Meet the Press last month.

“If we don’t address that issue, the American people will continue to turn their backs on democracy because they’re looking around them saying, ‘Does anybody understand what I am going through?’ And unfortunately, right now to a large degree neither party does,” he said.

Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and has run for the party’s presidential nomination twice, also took aim at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for saying the party was unified as the progressive and establishment wings of the party clash over its direction.

“United around what? Are we united around guaranteeing healthcare to all people? … Are we united in tackling a corrupt campaign finance system?” he questioned. “How do you deal with politics in America without understanding that billionaires play an enormously destructive role in both political parties?” Sanders said in an interview on CNN last week.

Bad messaging

Another criticism Sanders had in the CNN interview was the Democrats’ lack of clear messaging.

“You need an agenda,” Sanders said in the interview. “[What] the Democrats need to do right now is to have the courage to take on the very powerful special interests who, to a large degree, control the political process and the legislative process in the United States.”

A lack of clear messaging has been a constant item Democrats have pointed to when asked about the party’s unpopularity. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has been vocal about the party needing a clear message and policies, rather than focusing on candidates and personality.

“I’m not worried about [whether] we will find a great candidate,” he said. “But what do we stand for? What are we about? What are we going to fight for?” Newsom told NBC News.

“Who are we? And if we’re a bunch of dangling verbs and policy statements — I make this mistake often, too. I answer a question with 10 policy responses, as opposed to what do [I] stand for,” he added.

When asked about if she would consider a 2028 presidential run last week, former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also pointed out that the party must figure out its direction and its message to be able to compete in the next presidential election.

“How will we overcome this impression that we’re elitist, we’re out of touch, we don’t have our sense on the culture?” Raimondo said. “There’s so much to do. I don’t know how many cycles it’s gonna take. There’s a reason there were a dozen years between Carter and Clinton. And I don’t know where we are in that cycle.”

Complacent incumbents and ineffective leadership

The two top elected leaders in the Democratic Party, Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), have not been immune to the blame game, with reports about some Democrats being uneasy about both congressmen’s leadership over their caucus.

Schumer received significant pushback after he and several other Democrats helped a GOP-led stopgap spending bill pass in the Senate to avert a government shutdown in March. The move angered several Democrats and aligned groups, with one progressive group calling for Schumer to step down as leader.

Even some who still back Schumer as leader, like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), expressed their disappointment with that vote.

“I still support Sen. Schumer as leader. But I think the only way that we are going to be effective as a caucus is if we change our tactics, and we have to have a conversation inside our caucus to make sure that we are going to do that,” Murphy said on NBC News’s Meet the Press in March.

Jeffries, who succeeded former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as the House’s Democratic leader, has been criticized by some within his party through various reports, including a report from Politico last week where a former Pelosi adviser said he and Democratic leadership were “squandering” perfect opportunities given to them by Trump.

There has also been blame toward incumbents by some Democrats, including Democratic National Committee Vice Chairman David Hogg. His group, Leaders We Deserve, announced it would be spending $20 million to intervene in Democratic primaries in deep blue districts with its sights on incumbents.

“Everyone in our party says they want to start winning again, and they do — but that simply will not be possible with our current set of leaders, too many of which are asleep at the wheel, out-of-touch, and ineffective,” Hogg said, defending his group’s plans.

Media coverage

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), an influential longtime House Democrat, pushed back on claims that the party does not have a winning message, instead offering a different reason for Democrats’ unpopularity.

“Well, I think the message coming from the Democratic Party is a good message,” Clyburn said on MSNBC’s The Last Word last month. “The problem we’ve got, I’ll say, is that we have to depend upon the media to deliver it.”

“If we have the Washington Post, for instance, caving to this wannabe dictator and we’ve got other media entities that seem to rather push a narrative that will bring eyes to their newspapers or to their television sets and not really give a fair hearing or reporting to what we’re doing,” Clyburn said, referring to Trump as a “wannabe dictator.”

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Media coverage is one complaint Clyburn and Trump have in common, as Trump and the rest of the GOP claim the media do not effectively present their party’s messaging.

Alternative media has been one field Democrats have attempted to recapture, as Trump’s campaign took advantage of those platforms to reach voters during the 2024 election. Newsom launched his own podcast and has hosted some conservative commentators, while former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast.