Lakshya Jain looked into Quinnipiac University’s annual first-quarter congressional polling for Politico and has a warning for Democratic officeholders. The base of the party is angry with how its leaders in Congress have, in their view, failed to adequately challenge the fascist regime.

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

Instead, the numbers suggest that the fury is at least partly fueled by the Democratic base’s dissatisfaction with congressional leadership’s relatively conciliatory approach to Trump this time around, and their inability to stop him.

Yet, a strong plurality, according to Gallup polling, would prefer that the party moderate its positions rather than lurch to the left. In fact, less than a third of the base wants the party to become more “liberal.” So, this is a bit of a mixed message, and I think it undermines some of Jain’s analysis.

Jain argues that “the Democratic base’s disillusionment runs so deep that it’s eerily reminiscent of Republican grassroots sentiment in the period leading up to Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party” and “the numbers are clear: No longer satisfied with the status quo in their party, Democrats are on the verge of a Tea Party-style, intra-party revolt.”

I’ve seen this idea that the base is on the verge of a Tea Party-like revolt bandied about a lot recently, often as a cautionary tale. But one thing that I believe is certain is that the Tea Party revolt was a demand that the GOP abandon moderation in favor of a far right approach. Yet, partisans can be fed up with their congressional leaders without wanting them to become radicals, and that appears to be where the Democratic base is right now. It’s just different in a fundamental way than 2010.

I think there’s a plurality of Democratic voters who believe Trump won because the party moved too far to the left which is not how John McCain’s defeat in 2008 was diagnosed by GOP partisans. Rather than moderate, they instead produced the Tea Party wall of total resistance. When GOP party leaders did an autopsy of the 2012 election, they concluded they had been overly opposed to comprehensive immigration reform and had alienated too many moderates and Latinos. But that advice was soundly rejected which led to emergence of Trump.

The warning for Democrats is based on the idea that the GOP leadership tried to ride the enthusiasm and zeal of the Tea Party and wound up losing control of the party to a bunch of nihilists and fascists. But this warning seems out of place if the base isn’t asking for out-of-the-mainstream policies, but actually more nearly the opposite.

Now, if you’re an incumbent Democratic officeholder, it may not matter so much why you lost in a primary election. If you were too liberal or too conciliatory or too moderate, you still lost. When the base is this angry, incumbents are a natural target for its wrath. And so incumbents definitely should be concerned. But it’s far from clear how they should react.

But I actually don’t much care how they react. The reason they’re in this predicament is that there is dissatisfaction with their lack of power, and they can’t wave some magic wand and fix that problem. They can fight battles they will lose and temporarily mollify those demanding impossible solutions, but they’ll only demonstrate their powerlessness once more. They’ll be back where they started, only with more bullet points in the negative column. The base will remain apoplectic no matter what they do, but only because it doesn’t realize or accept that the solution is to win elections and get majorities, not to ask the losers of elections to wield power that minority parties do not have.

There is no necessary contradiction between a party losing incumbents in primaries and winning a lot of seats at the same time. Jain uses the 2014 example of Republican political unknown Dave Brat toppling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary to demonstrate what might be in store for congressional Democrats in 2026. But 2014 was a massive midterm win for the GOP. Would you trade a single member of the Democratic House leadership for a huge midterm victory for the party?

And, again, unlike with Dave Brat, who was a true radical, the revolt against incumbents this time around doesn’t seem to be based in ideological insanity. People just want Trump stopped, somehow and some way. They don’t want business as usual. They don’t want Democrats voting to confirm unqualified radicals to cabinet positions or helping to fund the government when those funds are controlled by Elon Musk. These aren’t radical requests. They’re really a defense of the system.

So, if this passion for resistance is successfully tapped by the Democrats to win the midterms, I don’t think we should expect it to result in some Frankenstein’s monster of a party that no one can control that takes the country off in some disastrous direction. And if it costs some incumbents their jobs, I don’t think that’s a bad trade at all.

Bad things will continue to happen and get worse until the fascist regime is defeated. The congressional Democrats cannot defeat them on their own, so it’s up to the base to do it for them. I say, “Bring it on!”