Do Democrats Need a Rebrand?

**Peter Hamby** (0:02)
You have to step into the 2027 and 28 media environment as a content production studio. The thing that Democrats have to do in the next election is reclaim not just swing voters, they have to get drop-off voters, low propensity voters, to not just come out and vote, but vote for them and not for the Republican.

**Dylan Byers** (0:30)
Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Grill Room. It is Tuesday, August 25th.
I'm sure you can feel it in the air. Fall is coming. Football, falling leaves, all that stuff. And politics. A long time ago, before I covered the business of media, I covered the intersection of politics and media. I spent a lot of time there. That's when I got to know Peter Hamby. My partner here at Puck.
Peter is brilliant at analyzing political campaigns specifically. And as we head into the fall and into the 2026 midterms, which is of course the launch of the 2028 presidential campaign season, we're going to rely on Peter for all of his insights and his work with our partners at Echelon Insights. We sort of crunch the numbers on all of the latest political polling data. Peter's recent work for the best and the brightest here at Puck has focused on the Democrats and the Democrats' sort of perception problem. Obviously, we're at a time when GOP-Trump favorability is really low. Ostensibly, that should provide a big opening for the Democrats. And yet, the Democrats seem to be enduring their own identity crisis. Tension between the moderates and the left, story as old as time, but notable in this media environment. And it is going to, I think, present the Democrats with a particular challenge as they try and navigate the 2028 landscape when there is not just a very robust right-wing media, but also a burgeoning left-wing media that remains disorganized and oftentimes at war with itself. So how Democrats navigate that and try to assert themselves come 2028 is going to be very interesting. And that is what I wanted to have Peter on to talk about today. So without further ado, let's get started.
Peter Hamby, welcome to The Grill Room.

**Peter Hamby** (2:56)
How are you? Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

**Dylan Byers** (3:00)
Thank you for doing this. You often have me on The Powers That Be to talk about media and ask me the questions. And it is such a delight to actually get to ask you the questions this time around.
Especially just, you know, there's like, you and I have been in journalism and in your case, like political journalism, and in my case, close, proximate enough to it to know that no matter what's going on in politics, pre-Trump, post-Trump, mid-Trump, that there is, there are cycles to this thing. And much as I approach the end of August and I can like feel football and fall coming back into my life, I can feel the midterms, Peter. I can feel them. And I owe some of that to you. You've been writing recently about, the way I see it as a sort of perception problem, I think, that Democrats have, and that there is actually like some real dissonance between the way that hardcore Democrats feel about the Democrats right now and that voters at large feel about the Democrats right now. And I suppose that shouldn't be altogether too surprising in this like very partisan era.
But still, some of what you've written about over the past few weeks has struck me as very notable. And notable too as a sort of media story, because I think it gets to like how, something I actually talked about with Jim Vande Hei last week, how Democrats are going to win a media narrative as we head into the midterms. And then of course, as we head into the general election two years from now. But so I guess I want to like tee you up here to talk about some of your recent findings in terms of, I guess what you would say is like, how Democrats feel about Democrats, and then how the nation feels about Democrats and the sort of like media narrative around the Democratic Party right now, which should, given how poorly the GOP is doing, seems to me like should be on a lot stronger footing than they are.

**Peter Hamby** (5:10)
Dylan, I want to say one thing before getting into the Democratic data, which is heading into the midterms and then the presidential election, which will start immediately after that. The midterms are in 70 days or something. This is an election fundamentally about Donald Trump, who is the president, who is badly underwater. He is 20 points underwater, I think, with his net approval rating, underwater on every single issue, trade, immigration, which is shocking. That used to be his calling card, the economy, inflation, foreign policy. A deeply, deeply historically unpopular president who has inflicted so many political wounds on himself, from tariffs to Iran, to his everyday blabbermouth, to corruption, scandals, et cetera. And so that needs to be said out of the gate. The reason I'm so fascinated by Democrats is that after 2024, we heard so much from electability Democrats, from leftist Democrats arguing over the future of the party, what they need to do after Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lost the election. And so they're still sorting through that. And I continue to be struck in polling by the fact that while Republicans and Donald Trump have collapsed in popularity, not that they were ever that popular, but last year in 2025 when Republicans came back into power, they were just like two points under water was their net approval rating, according to our partners at Echelon Insights. Today, they're like 13, 14, 15 points under water. Democrats just haven't really budged. Well, Democrats appear to have momentum. They have a seven to eight point lead on the generic ballot. Depending on the poll you look at, they obviously have been cleaning up in special elections. They won governor's races in 2025, in New Jersey, in Virginia. Gavin Newsom in Prop 50 blew the doors off out here in big blue California just by running against Donald Trump to fight back against congressional redistricting, gerrymandering.