Top Democrats say their party is in its deepest hole in nearly 50 years — and they fear things could actually get worse, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column:

• The party has its lowest favorability ever.
• No popular national leader to help improve it.
• Insufficient numbers to stop most legislation in Congress.
• 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.

• 🚨 Klein 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."

🔮 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."

• Axios' Tal Axelrod contributed reporting ... Share this column.

David Axelrod — CNN senior political commentator and former senior adviser to President Obama — texted me after reading this weekend's great story by Axios' Alex Thompson, "The 10 theories driving Dems' identity crisis":

"Isn't it possible that all 10 of your Why Dems Lost list are true? In different proportions, of course."

I told him that makes it quite a complex puzzle:

• "It does. But the question of how the party is working people became identified as a party of elites and institutions when so many Americans are alienated from both, seems fundamental to me.
• "It's easy to sit back and wait for Trump to implode. But this question is a harder one. And for the long term, pretty damned important."

Read Alex's story.

The Trump administration's drive to eradicate a small amount of fraud in Social Security is risking the agency's public mission, current and former Social Security Administration officials tell Axios' Emily Peck.

• Why it matters: It's also starting to ignite some political blowback for the Trump administration.

🎨 The big picture: "Social Security has always talked about its twin missions of stewardship and service," says someone familiar with the agency's long-standing efforts to combat fraud.

• But now, we're in a moment where fighting fraud is in the driver's seat.

With the agency's most recent cuts to phone services, experts say field offices could flood with people, who'll see delays getting service or may not be able to access benefits at all.

• Keep reading.

Twenty-five years ago this week, "the roughly five-year dot-com bubble popped, leaving trillions of dollars of investment losses in its wake," Bloomberg reports.

• The S&P 500 hit a new record on March 24, 2000 (25 years ago today), that it wouldn't touch again for about seven years.
• The tech-heavy Nasdaq hit its high-water mark three days later — for the last time until 2015.

📉 Zoom in: "Those peaks marked the end of an electric run that started with the blowout initial public offering for Netscape" in 1995, Bloomberg notes.

• The S&P 500 almost tripled between August 1995 and March 2000. The Nasdaq rose eight-fold.
• "By October 2002, more than 80% of the Nasdaq's value was gone, and the S&P 500 was essentially cut in half."

Go deeper.

Law school applications this year are off the charts nationwide — especially in Washington, Axios D.C.'s Cuneyt Dil writes.

• Why it matters: A presidential transition year, changes to the LSAT exam, and more attention being paid to the law and courts are leading more people to apply to law school.

Applications to nearly 200 law schools nationwide jumped 20.5% compared with last year, The Wall Street Journal reports (Gift link).

• The competition makes it harder for those seeking a career pivot — particularly in D.C., where people can't depend as much on federal jobs anymore.

🧮 By the numbers: Georgetown University Law Center has already received its most applications ever — 14,000.

• That's up 25% from last year. The office hired extra part-time staff to read applications. Georgetown has 650 seats and three wait-list levels.

American University's Washington College of Law tells Axios it's running roughly 15% to 17% ahead of last year's applicant pool. Howard University School of Law says it has seen a 38.4% increase.

• Share this story.

The White House is seeking corporate sponsors for this year's Easter egg roll — a 147-year-old tradition, CNN first reported.

• Why it matters: Allowing businesses to use the White House to advertise their brands could upend long-standing precedents and regulations around the use of public office for private gain.

Financial backers can choose from three packages that cost between $75,000 and $200,000, according to a nine-page deck posted by the N.Y. Times.

• The most expensive option — Platinum — includes a 900-square-foot booth, tickets to a brunch hosted by First Lady Melania Trump and 150 tickets to the event (100 general admission + 50 VIP).

🔬 Between the lines: The effort is being conducted by the experiential event firm Harbinger, founded by GOP aides in 2013, The Times notes.

• The event is held largely without taxpayer dollars. The American Egg Board donates tens of thousands of eggs but doesn't receive the type of publicity advertised in the sponsorship pitch.
• All the money raised will go to the White House Historical Association.

See the deck ... Read the NYT story (gift link).

ABC News "Nightline," the pioneering broadcast Ted Koppel launched as a nightly update on the U.S. hostages held in Iran, will air a half-hour 45th-anniversary episode late tonight at 12:35 a.m. ET.

• The program started in 1979 as a nightly update, "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage."

After his show was christened "Nightline" in 1980, Koppel pioneered technology and formats, took viewers behind the scenes on the campaign trail, and brought together leaders around the world.

• "I'd like to warn our affiliates," Koppel, who built massive clout during the Roone Arledge heyday at ABC News, would say to extend a juicy interview.
• As a sign of Koppel's status, his unit had a parquet floor at the ABC News bureau on Desales Street in Washington.

🎤 Koppel, 85, now a senior contributor to CBS News' "Sunday Morning," reflected during a 2013 CFR conversation with Ken Auletta: "[I]t really was our impression from the beginning that by putting a little spinach on the table every night, we were serving an audience that was not, otherwise, being served."

• "I did 26 years' worth ... 6,000 programs," Koppel continued. "[A]t the end of my tour, we still had about 4 million people a night watching the program. There was a time earlier on when we had 12 or 13 million people a night."

Read Koppel's conversation.

After being widely mocked on MAGA media, Disney's live-action "Snow White" remake got off to a rough start.

• The film — which had a $250 million budget — opened with $43 million in domestic ticket sales, well below expectations.

It arrived in theaters "dogged with controversies, including criticism about the film's depiction of the seven dwarves, complaints about changes to the nearly 100-year-old story and calls for boycotts because of co-stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot's public stances on the Israel-Hamas war," Variety notes.