Behind the Curtain: Dems' dark, deep hole

• A durable minority on the Supreme Court.
• Dwindling influence over the media ecosystem, with right-leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascendant.
• Young voters are growing dramatically more conservative.
• A bad 2026 map for Senate races.
• Democratic Senate retirements could make it harder for the party to flip the House, with members tempted by statewide races.
• There are only three House Republicans in districts former Vice President Harris won in 2024, a dim sign for a Democratic surge. There were 23 eight years ago in seats Hillary Clinton won.
• And, thanks to the number of people fleeing blue states, the math for a Dem to win the presidency will just get harder in 2030.

Why it matters: Both parties — after losing the White House, Senate and House — suffer and search for salvation. But rarely does healing seem so hard and redemption so distant.

• Doug Sosnik — a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and widely followed thinker on political megatrends — told us this is Dems' deepest hole in at least the 45 years since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. Sosnik said the 2024 election was at least as much a repudiation of Democrats as it was a victory for Trump.

As Ezra Klein noted this month in his New York Times column, if current population patterns hold, Democrats will suffer a devastating blow after the 2030 census: The party will lose as many as a dozen House seats and electoral votes.

• 🚨 He points out that in that Electoral College, Dems could win all the states Harris carried in 2024 — plus Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and still lose the White House.

The big picture: Democrats' dismal reality is not Republican spin. In fact, there's broad consensus among Democratic leaders that most current political, cultural, media and generational trends are cutting against them.

• "Democrats are losing working-class voters," Klein, co-author with Derek Thompson of the new liberal blueprint "Abundance," said last week. "They're seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party."

By the numbers: A deep, comprehensive poll by Democratic pollster David Shor of Blue Rose Research captured vividly and empirically the daunting data.

• For those skeptical of polls and sampling size, Shor's study is based on 26 million online responses collected over the course of 2024, and filtered to adjust to oddities of modern polling.
• Shor said on Klein's podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show," that his most striking finding — and the one most worrisome to him — is the surging pro-Trump/MAGA/Republican views and voting patterns of young men, immigrants and anyone other than strident liberals.

Shor estimates a 23-point swing against Democrats among immigrants. The swing is very pronounced among Hispanics who consider themselves conservatives: Democratic support dropped by 50%.

• But it's the rise of conservatism among young people, mainly men, that spooks him most. "[Y]oung voters — regardless of race and gender — have become more Republican," Shor writes in his 33-slide presentation. (Request the deck.)
• Ali Mortell, director of research at Blue Rose Research, told Axios' Tal Axelrod: "Millennials were one of the most progressive generations, and it's looking like Gen Z is about to be one of the most conservative."

The thing he's been most shocked by over the last four years, Shor told Klein: "[Y]oung people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years."

• A gender gap has exploded: 18-year-old men were 23 points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which Shor called "just completely unprecedented in American politics."
• Sosnik told us that young men who didn't go to college "are firmly for Trump, not just against Democrats." He said young white women who didn't attend college "may be as much anti-Democrat as pro-Trump. And then the outliers are college women, who are very pro-Democratic. But it'll be very hard to dislodge the Republicans' success with non-college white men under 30."

What's next: Rahm Emanuel — the former House Democrat, Chicago mayor, ambassador to Japan, White House chief of staff and possible 2028 presidential candidate — told us his party needs an emergency meeting of mayors and governors to rethink the party's perception and priorities, and see what's working in schools.

• "The public has seen us as more focused around a set of cultural interests and issues — climate, 'woke,' DEI, abortion — than the American people," Emanuel said. "All those I care about. But they consumed both our intellectual and thematic energy. The American people said: You care more about that than everything else."

Emanuel told us Democrats have to stop being a liberal-only party for liberal-only voters: "We used to have liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats. Now we're basically a liberal party, because African American and Hispanic voters went out the back door. They're the ones who walked as we became more liberal."

• Emanuel's big message in conversation after conversation: "The American dream is unaffordable and inaccessible. And that is totally unacceptable. ... The forgotten middle class has to be our North Star."

Axios' Tal Axelrod contributed reporting.