MSNBC kicked off like a funeral on Monday morning when "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski was forced to announce that the Democratic Party had hit a new all-time low in approval rating. 

You can almost see the life leave Brzezinksi as she pauses before sharing the numbers, which show Democrats hold just a 27 percent approval among registered voters in NBC News' latest poll, which has conducted surveys since 1990. She then goes on to underscore the point by quoting CNN's recent poll, which shows only 29 percent of American adults have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 

ALSO SEE: Democrat Party Favorability Rating Falls to Record Low 

Enjoy Morning Cope ☕️ pic.twitter.com/2oCjqHKW9E

— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) March 17, 2025

While it's good to see some acceptance of reality from the mainstream press, there's a difference between admitting things are bad and admitting why they are bad. The latter is far more difficult for MSNBC personalities to do as it would require them to reject much of their flawed worldview and consider maybe they are the problem. Sure enough, Brzezinski brought on Molly Jong-Fast to soothe her soul.

Democrat policies are really popular but they just don’t message well is the ultimate left-wing cope. pic.twitter.com/m45yeFOwy8

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) March 17, 2025

JONG-FAST: Look, this is a policy vs. politics problem, right? Biden world, very good on policy, grew the economy, very bad on politics, right? Unable to communicate with voters. We're seeing this sort of hangover from that a little bit, and also, losers are not popular. So they lost, people are lost, Democrats are mad, there's a ton of Monday morning quarterbacking.

But the reality is, there's good policy here, and it's popular too. Like, think about Project 2025. This summer, Project 2025, which is basically all this stuff Trump is doing, right? Disassembling the Department of Education. Ending the national oceanic, you know the weather. I mean, this is all stuff that is in Project 2025. Bad policy. Wildly unpopular policy. So here's the problem, Democrats have to actually do politics now and that is where we are. 

Let me start by first saying that any time someone has to continually end an argument with "right," that is a sure sign they don't really have a good argument because good arguments are self-evident. To be clear, Jong-Fast is not "right" about anything she says there. This is not a "policy vs. politics" problem. They just lost to a guy who was under federal indictment while awaiting sentencing for state-level criminal convictions. Of course, those prosecutions were absolute nonsense, but the point is, that Democrats had every chance to capitalize politically from their gross weaponization of the judicial system, and they still got their doors blown off. 

I've made this point before, but it bears repeating given what Jong-Fast claims. Every single time a Democrat loses an election, analysts claim it was because they had a messaging problem. The 2024 was not about Americans being too blinded to how amazing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were. It was about a wide open border, an economy that wasn't producing for most people, an American aversion to wokeness, and an overall sense that the government was corrupt, bloated, and only served to serve the interests of specific groups (all of which was true). 

The Democratic Party does not need a new coat of paint. It needs to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt as something that can appeal to normal Americans. That will never happen as long as its members continue to pretend everything but their actual views are the problem. 

So what is Jong-Fast citing when she claims Democrat policies are popular? She's likely alluding to past polling on cuts to social security and the like, but the Trump administration has been clear they are not going to touch those programs (though it should if we want to have a country 50 years from now, but that's another discussion). So what exactly is a point of contention where Democrats have an advantage over Republicans? It's certainly not the border and immigration. It's not cultural issues like transgenderism and boys competing in girls' sports. It's not foreign policy, where Biden faceplanted over and over. It could become the economy if disapproval of tariffs continues to grow and a recession hits, but we aren't quite there yet (and Democrats are apparently far too stupid to make that their focal point anyway). 

The point is, Jong-Fast and every other Democrat who believes this is just about "messaging" and "politico" and not policy is coping. That's simply not the case, and until they admit the real problem they are facing, nothing about their prospects will change.