62 Percent of Democrats Want Current Party Leaders to Be Replaced, Poll Finds

New polling finds that most Democratic voters want the current leaders of the Democratic Party to be replaced, as current leadership has failed to unite behind a coherent message to resist President Donald Trump’s fascist power grab.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday found that 62 percent of self-identified Democrats said that the party should replace Democrats with new leaders, with only 24 percent disagreeing with that statement. A plurality of respondents, at 49 percent, said that they’re unsatisfied with current leaders.

The survey included over 4,200 respondents, including 1,293 Democrats, and was conducted earlier this month.

The poll comes at a time of crisis for the party. After Democrats suffered enormous losses in the 2024 election, many conservative and mainstream liberal analysts had pushed a false narrative that Democrats lost because they hadn’t gone far enough to the right and embraced more of Republicans’ outright fascist viewpoints.

This has consistently been shown to be untrue when voters have been surveyed about their views on key issues. Indeed, the Reuters/Ipsos polling suggested that Democrats want party leaders to go further left on a wide variety of economic and social issues.

For instance, roughly 4 in 5 Democrats or more said that they want the party to prioritize universal health care, affordable child care, and raising taxes on the rich. A smaller majority of respondents said that the party actually prioritizes such issues.

But in reality, the majority of federally elected Democrats actually oppose proposals like Medicare for All, and many party leaders have actively worked to sabotage support for such ideas. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) Medicare for All bill introduced this year, for instance, only had 15 cosponsors out of 47 Democrats in the caucus — Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) not being one of them.

Far from taxing the rich, party leaders have also cozied up to billionaires — with some in the party recently suggesting that Democrats should court Elon Musk, friend of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, during his public breakup with President Donald Trump this month.

Schumer and other leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have faced intense scrutiny in recent months in particular, with both leaders having been effectively absent as the Trump administration has escalated its violent and authoritarian tactics both domestically and worldwide.

For instance, opposing war with Iran could be a major boon for Democrats, as the prospect is extremely unpopular among Americans, recent polls have found, who strongly favor diplomatic options. And yet, as Trump has threatened to directly declare war on Iran, Schumer and Jeffries have egged him on. Figures like Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, meanwhile, have been totally silent; Harris, after all, named Iran as the U.S.’s top enemy on the campaign trail last year.

The importance of opposing the war and embracing other left-leaning issues seems to be understood by one party leader, David Hogg — who, tellingly, was recently ousted from his position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee after he criticized the party for its complacency in the face of the Trump administration.

“Any Democrat who supports this war with Iran needs to be primaried,” said Hogg on social media this week. “Our generation grew up going through two multi trillion dollar wars we should have never been involved in. We are not fucking going back to that. If you think this is a good idea, read a history book.”