“It’s very hard to be optimistic about the Democrats,” the advisor to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, Douglas Schoen, tells The New York Sun. The party is “totally off base.” Lacking a message, strategy, or leader, the pollster says President Trump may defy expectations in next year’s midterms.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Schoen likened Mr. Trump to the boxing legend, Mohammed Ali, at his peak. He’s “moving so quickly, he has the Democrats totally unnerved,” he said. “They can’t hit him. They can’t find him. He’s way ahead of them.”

Mr. Schoen, “exaggerating” for illustration, said the Ukraine War “could be settled and resolved before the Democrats develop a coherent position.” They’re “MIA,” with “no interesting voice.” He suggests governors take the lead, rather than Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“There is nobody making policy,” Mr. Schoen said. “There is nobody with an overarching strategy.” That weakness is reflected in his Schoen Cooperman Research surveys. It “sort of tells you how off base the Democrats are” that their favorability is 31 percent versus Mr. Trump’s 53 percent.

“The Democrats spent $2 billion on Kamala Harris,” Mr. Schoen said, “and her percentage was lower than where she started. It’s an inescapable conclusion that $2 billion bought Democrats nothing at all.” Mr. Trump dodged every uppercut, jab, and haymaker.

Mr. Schoen said that Mr. Trump “gets the public mood” that “people are frustrated with government and angry about immigration.” The president also gets that Americans “want plain speaking and somebody outside the system.”

Democrats, in Mr. Schoen’s view, aren’t counterpunching against these strengths. He sees them as “off-putting and scolding,” whereas on the other side, “people love” Mr. Trump. “His rallies and his approach were entertaining — and, in their own way, positive.”

Mr. Schoen cites as another misfire the way Democrats went after Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees on “personal stuff rather than policy.” He adds: “It wasn’t, ‘We disagree with you on this,’ etc. It was all, ‘You had an affair, you were drunk, etc.’”

In a flip from Mr. Schoen’s time in the Clinton White House, voters now judge Democrats, not Republicans, as focusing too much on “social issues” and personal lives. “Abortion,” Mr. Schoen said, “may be good in a midterm. It’s not going to win a presidential election.”

Even modest gains next year could give Democrats control of one or both chambers of Congress, but Mr. Schoen has doubts. “I worry about 2026,” he said, “because I don’t see a message, a strategy at all — and the Republicans have a message and a strategy.”

Conventional wisdom forecasts that political winds will favor Democrats. “I know that midterm elections tend to break against the incumbent party,” Mr. Schoen allowed. “I get all that.” But Mr. Trump “has the narrative” Americans favor.

In the 1998 midterms, the sixth year of Mr. Clinton’s presidency, the party holding the White House gained seats for the first time since 1932. Voters saw Republicans pursuing the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment rather than policies to improve their lives.

“Given the popular will to cut the size and scope of government, reduce inflation, and control immigration,” Mr. Schoen advises Democrats to do “what Clinton-Gore did.” Say they “sympathize” with Republican goals but want to “protect core programs” and not “fire people willy-nilly.”

Rather than “scattershot attacks” on Republicans for “everything they’re doing” and “scoring no points,” Mr. Schoen said, “embrace the broad outlines of smaller government, tax relief, and immigration reform. Differ on specific policies,” but don’t “go at Trump directly” punch for punch.

“I haven’t seen the Democrats this low in my career,” Mr. Schoen said. He advised them to “move to the center,” noting that “in the ‘80s,” with President Reagan ascendant, “there was a powerhouse” in the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference that launched Mr. Clinton into the White House.

In Mr. Schoen’s opinion, Mr. Trump “does not have a strong team around him,” which could prove a glass jaw. In the end, the pollster agreed that you can’t beat something with nothing — and when Democrats step into the ring with a president who floats like a butterfly, they’d better be ready to sting like a bee.