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Transcript: Trump Is a Weak, Failing President—Dems Should Act Like It
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

Transcript: Trump Is a Weak, Failing President—Dems Should Act Like It

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Suddenly the losses for Donald Trump are piling up on many fronts at once. His border czar just announced the drawdown of federal agents in Minnesota after protests there turned public opinion. Job creation during Trump’s first year was more abysmal than we thought. The country is losing manufacturing jobs. And new polls show that the public now says Joe Biden did a better job than Trump is doing, which is the ultimate humiliation. Trump is a weak and failing president, and critically, there are now signs that Democrats are really acting like it. But there’s more for Democrats to be done on this front. And The New Republic has a special issue out right now that is chock-full of great new pieces laying out how Democrats can mount a more effective and aggressive opposition. We’re talking about all this with Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Mike, great to have you on.Michael Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg. Thanks. Sargent: So let’s start with where Trump is right now. Border czar Tom Homan just announced that there will now be a substantial withdrawal of DHS from Minneapolis. Let’s recall that Stephen Miller did not want to back down there. Meanwhile, we just learned that the loss of manufacturing jobs is worse than initial data suggested.Mike, if you had to pick two pillars of Trumpism, they would be: one, empty the country of immigrants, and two, usher in a manufacturing renaissance with protectionism. I think it’s notable that Trump is either deeply unpopular or failing utterly at the two things most associated with Trumpist nationalism. Where do you think we are right now?Tomasky: Notable is one way to put it. It’s striking and amazing and something I’m not sure I would have predicted. But he overplayed his hand on both things badly, horribly—as a result, I think, of the bubble that he and his people live in. He talks to aides who are complete sycophants. Nobody ever gives him any bad news. They shield him from the bad polls. He hangs out at Mar-a-Lago, eats his well-done steaks with people who tell him how brilliant he is. And he just never hears anything bad. He won’t let it into his environment.But it’s almost all bad. As you know, he has good marks on one thing: cracking down on border crossings. That he has done—those are way down, and so the public approves of that. But everything else is south, and those are the two pillars: that he was gonna bring back manufacturing and that he was gonna round up undocumented people and put them somewhere.But it goes way beyond that. It goes beyond that to prices; it goes beyond that to other aspects of the economy—the deficit, the debt, the Epstein files, which aren’t going to go away. There’s almost no good news. The one piece of good news was that the Dow hit 50,000, and they’re bragging about that like that’s some amazing thing. Well, the day he took office, the Dow was 44,000 and something. And for the Dow to grow 6,000 points in a year, in 13 months, that’s not really an unusual thing.Actually, in the last year of Joe Biden’s time in office—I went back and checked this—in January 2024, it was around 37,000. And when Biden left office, when Trump assumed office, it was 44,000. So it grew a little bit more in Biden’s last year than in Trump’s first year. So even that that they’re bragging about is a house of cards.Sargent: It really is. And so I think this partly explains why the Democratic opposition to Trump seems to have perked up a little bit. Senate Democrats just voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security without the restrictions on ICE they’re seeking. And this week, Democrats were quite merciless in their grilling of senior DHS officials on Capitol Hill.It does seem to me that Democrats as a party are more emboldened now to take on Trump over immigration. That’s something they had been generally hesitant to do. I think that’s deeply entangled with his weakness on the economy. Is that your reading as well? And why do you think this is happening now? Tomasky: That is my reading, and it’s happening because Democrats can read polls and they get their courage from Trump’s bad poll numbers, in large measure. But I would also say it’s happening because of people. It’s happening because of people on the ground.Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, there are protests against Trumpism—and not just in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, but in small towns, in red states, in university towns, of course, but all across the country—and in particular, the people of Chicago and Evanston when ICE was doing its business there. And of course, the people of Minneapolis have really been amazing.Their actions have said to Democrats, Grow your spine, represent us, do what we’re asking you to do, what we’re here to ask you to do. And they’re also proving to the country at large that MAGA is unpopular, that Trump’s unpopular, and that there’s a great critical mass of people out there who may or may not call themselves liberal and support every liberal item down the line, but who don’t want their country to be like this.Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that you put it that way because to me, it’s very clear that a lot of Democrats have been looking at what they’re seeing in places like Minneapolis, seeing this extraordinary heroism and courage of ordinary people and kind of realizing, You know what, we can’t abandon them. They can’t be on their own. They need some backing. They need institutional backing.You know, Democrats have to be part of this big pushback against the madness that Trump has inflicted on Americans. And that courage to me is deeply inspiring. And Democrats ... to some degree, had no choice but to go along, but also are genuinely inspired by it, which I think is a positive thing. What do you think?Tomasky: It is. I hope they are. And I think they are. I look at Spanberger, the first day she was in office as governor, issuing that order that Virginia’s state and local law enforcement wouldn’t cooperate with ICE. There was nothing that decreed that she was going to do that, inevitably.And she’s a moderate person. I don’t want to cast unfair aspersions on her, but it’s not unreasonable to think that that wasn’t the first item on her dance card. But she did it responding to public will. And then Mikie Sherrill has done similar things in New Jersey. They are realizing, elected Democrats, that yes, there are millions and millions of people out there who are screaming at them, begging them, Represent our values. Represent our values against these mad people.Sargent: Well, that brings us to our special issue. You can check it out at TNR.com. It’s got lots of stuff, folks. We really, really urge you to take a look. Mike, you had the lead piece in this issue on—it’s all about where Democrats go now. Do you just want to sum up your basic argument? Tomasky: Yeah, sure. So the main question to emerge from the 2024 election for Democrats was: what happened with working-class voters? What happened with the working-class vote? And we saw that Trump did better among working-class voters—even working-class voters of color, Black working-class voters, Latino ones, and others.And Kamala Harris did much worse than Joe Biden among noncollege voters. That’s the proxy for working-class in exit polls and in the polling world. Biden got 48 percent of the noncollege vote, and Harris was down to 43. So in other words, she lost it by 14 points, which is quite dramatic. And that was the difference.So I start by saying, what’s the answer to that problem? And the piece is a 10,000-word answer to that question. Just to boil it down to a few sentences, it’s this: The best way to show working-class people that you’re on their side is to be on their side and to pick fights for them—to go after the people, the corporate bad actors chiefly, who are nickel-and-diming them, who are making their lives hard, who are making their daily struggles more difficult than they need to be. People feel this all the time.And I have a passage in there that seems to have resonated with some people who I’ve been in touch with about the piece. There’s a certain argument among a kind of centrist Democrat that, Oh, the electorate doesn’t want the Democrats to do these big things. They just want to get back to normal. They want to get back to some pre-Trump idea of normal.I say no. For millions and millions of people in this country, the normal that has obtained for the last 10 or 20 years has sucked. The normal has had them falling a little more behind every year, has had them being terrified about losing their job—now losing it to an AI chatbot—has them terrified at the prospect of having an unexpected medical bill that they can’t cope with, has them worried about their kids’ mental health that the government’s not doing anything about, which I think is a big sleeper issue.Normal has been very, very hard for people. We liberals and elected Democrats need to demand more, and Democrats need to push for more. The old normal isn’t good enough. They need to create a new normal where they unrig the system and wrest political and economic power out of the hands of these multimillionaires and billionaires and into the hands of regular people. And that means fight; that means conflict. They need to seek conflict and take these powerful interests on by name and be willing to make some enemies. That’s the argument in a nutshell.Sargent: Well, I want to pick up on a certain aspect of that. You do point out in your piece that Democrats have been showing some fight lately—winning the political battle over Obamacare subsidies, for instance. But you pointed out that, in a way, Dems still aren’t proactively setting the terms of the debate in a way that forces Republicans to talk about things in ways that put them on the defensive.That seems to me to be like a sort of subset of the broader case you’re making, but an extremely important subset. Take immigration, for instance. Yeah, Dems are loudly condemning all the lawlessness and the violence and the killing. That’s great. But there’s an occasion to also say, Our way of doing immigration is better. Yours is terrible. Mass deportations are an utter failure. There’s another way.In other words, there are like these opportunities in Trump’s weakness to say, “We are better.” What do you think of that, and how does it fit into your broader argument? What should Dems be doing more of? Tomasky: My broader argument is mostly focused on my contention that Democrats need to go after the people who are making working people’s lives hard. That’s mostly not Trump. I mean, it is, but it’s mostly these corporate bad actors who nickel-and-dime people and pharmaceutical companies who won’t allow generics to sell cheaper drugs and all sorts of things like that. I list many in the piece.So that’s my main point, but proactively going after Trump is an important sort of one-B. It’s an important sub-point because they often find themselves—Democrats—on the defensive. Trump’s out there talking to the press every day and he, by his nature, creates conflict and he names names and he names enemies. Boy, does he name enemies.I’m saying Democrats need to do more of that. But they also need to put Trump back on his heels more than they do. They’ve been doing a better job of that—with Epstein in particular, I think that’s really getting through, what’s going on there. And the Republicans shouting “Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton” isn’t doing it for them. So strategies for putting Trump on the defensive are also really, really important.Sargent: Agreed. I want to go to a big-picture point you made, where you noted that Democrats have faced major movements or major moments of both challenge and opportunity twice in their history. The 1930s produced the New Deal; the 1960s led to far-reaching advances in civil rights.And what I really found interesting about your case is this idea that we’re facing a similar scale of challenges, but also a similar scale of opportunity. And it’s very clear that, generally speaking, right now, the sheer ambition of Democrats doesn’t match the moment.How do you want to see Dems do that? We need Democrats to think bigger, and some basic sense that they’re just not conveying—there’s almost a smallness and narrowness. Your call for ambition, I thought, is really striking. Can you talk about what they should do? Tomasky: Well, thanks. I’m glad it struck you because that was the concluding section of the piece. And as I was thinking about the piece—I wrote it last December—I’d spent weeks reporting it and months, really a couple of months, thinking about it. And I decided to conclude the piece with a section that really did try to get elected Democrats who read the piece to think in much bigger historical and ambitious terms.What I said was, if you look at the Democratic Party historically, the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century wasn’t much to write home about. The Southern variant was white supremacist, and the Northern variant was very corrupt, built around urban machines. When you get to the twentieth century, the party starts to find its purpose. And it did so particularly in answering two great crises in American history.In the 1930s, under Roosevelt, the Democrats completely changed the conception of what government could and should do by embracing Keynesianism—by putting the government in so many more spheres of people’s lives and improving people’s lives greatly in the process and building up the economy in ways that it had never been built up in that process.So in the 1930s, I say, there were a lot of people who thought that communism or fascism was the wave of the future and that democratic capitalism was going to die. But Roosevelt and the Democrats saved and reformed and changed democratic capitalism and made it much more responsive to the needs of people. So that was crisis number one that the Democrats answered. Not perfectly, of course—nothing’s ever perfect—but they answered it.Crisis number two: civil rights, finally ending Jim Crow, finally ending segregation, finally bringing these supposed fruits of freedom to everyone in the United States. That took a lot of courage. Again, done quite imperfectly and we’re still fighting for these things today, goodness knows. But they did rise to that challenge and they passed civil rights and they passed voting rights and they passed other laws that put us on the right course.I conclude by saying we face a third crisis today on that same level. And that crisis is the concentration of economic and political power into a smaller and smaller number of hands. And Donald Trump is only a part of that crisis; he’s even kind of only a symptom of that crisis.That crisis is driven by people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and all those techno-fascist libertarian weirdos who have amassed more and more political and economic power and want still more—and many of them are open enemies of democracy. It’s not just beating Trump and winning the midterms. It’s beating that. It’s unrigging the system and getting political power out of those guys’ hands. That’s the challenge. Are they up to it? So I try to conclude with what I hope is kind of a stirring call for them to rise to this occasion. Sargent: What’s striking to me about this explanation is that the true nature of the challenge is the willingness of this small group of oligarchs—or the eagerness, I should say—to ally themselves with authoritarians and fascists in the governing sphere. Breaking that kind of alliance and the power of it is, to me, another way to think about this big challenge.Tomasky: It is, yeah. And they’re not going to do it by accepting millions of their campaign contributions. That’s not going to work. They have to forgo those contributions. That money is already floating away from them. Those people are backing—I mean, Bezos and Zuckerberg, those people are backing the Republicans now.I say good riddance. Democrats shouldn’t be taking their money, shouldn’t be taking crypto money. That’s a lot of money to make up; I understand that. But that’s a whole different argument about whether candidates should be spending 80 million on television ads. We won’t get into that. But, yes, they need to free themselves from that and just become enemies of those people, because those people are enemies of our democratic republic. And there’s no compromising with them.Sargent: And if you’re going to break that sort of oligarchic/fascist class’s grip on the United States right now, you can’t only be talking about the price of eggs. You can’t be using narrow, focus group–tested language. You’ve got to think bigger and speak in bigger terms as well.Tomasky: Exactly. And this is an intra-democratic debate that bugs me and has always bugged me. Should we do this or that? Should we talk about prescription drugs or democracy? This just drives me nuts. Do all of it. Why can you only do one thing?Do many things; make all of these arguments and tie them all together. They’re all part of a larger argument, which is that our democracy—the oldest in the world—is worth saving and worth nurturing and worth growing and improving. That involves economics: it involves cheaper prescription drugs; it involves protecting democracy; it involves expanding voting rights; it involves protecting immigrants; it involves all of those things.Republicans don’t sit around and say, Gee, should we talk about tax cuts, or should we talk about God and country? No, they don’t do that. They talk about everything, and they come across to their people as more sincere and more belief-driven. And Democrats, when they have those kinds of debates and try to make those kinds of choices, they don’t come across as belief-driven.Sargent: Well, and by the way, rank-and-file Democrats absolutely want the party to behave the way you and I are discussing here. The New Republic special issue also had our own exclusive poll of rank-and-file Democrats. You can check it out at TNR.com.We dug deep into the views of rank-and-file Democrats here. Just going to run through some findings really quickly: Large majorities say government can still improve people’s lives and believe progress is happening. Mike, I think that’s not a small thing, since Trumpism is all about getting us to give up on all that.And the poll also found most Democrats still want very aggressive government action on the economy: higher taxes on the rich and corporations and aggressive action on climate, which is very big. Yet the poll also finds, I think interestingly, that there’s a fairly large bloc in the party who are more moderate. What did you take from the poll?Tomasky: This is a poll, by the way, of 2,400 or so rank-and-file Democrats conducted in early January. And we asked them a lot of questions about both their beliefs and what they want their party to do. And I think we asked them a lot of questions that pollsters don’t normally ask. That’s what I think is interesting about it.But they want a more aggressive party. They want a party that fights more, and they want a party that will go after rich people and corporations in no uncertain terms. We asked questions and we phrased them like, “Do you think the Democrats are too timid, or just about right, or too aggressive in trying to tax rich people?”And the percentage who said “too timid” was off the charts—it was like 80-something. And taxing corporations and cracking down on corporate bad actors—these were the things that really drove people. People are very supportive of abortion rights and voting rights and rights for immigrants and stuff, but the economics really came through in this, and the economics really drove this poll.You’ve got rank-and-file Democrats saying, as you said, “We believe in government.” One result that really struck me: We asked people, in general, “Do you think our society advances through large government action, like Social Security and voting rights, or through the private sector meeting people’s desires and needs?” And that was like 80–20.So that’s what they want. That’s what Democrats want. They’re pragmatic in certain ways, but they want boldness, particularly on class economics.Sargent: Just to sort of return to where we started: The 2024 election persuaded a whole lot of people that the basic pillars of right-wing populism—or Trumpism or MAGA—one, restrictionism against immigrants and emptying the country of immigrants, and two, fortifying the manufacturing base with protectionism—somehow had won the culture.The culture had turned toward those two things, and that, I think, was a big source of Democratic fear for a long time. But if you look at this, we’re really seeing that it’s not so. In a funny way, we’re actually seeing that majorities kind of support open societies. They support trade, they support immigration, and they support pluralism.Do you want to just sort of wrap it all together? I mean, the fact that we have this message coming from the electorate—this kind of anti-Trumpism, pro-pluralism, pro-democracy, pro-immigration, pro-trade—this is where the majority is. Democrats have an opportunity to become that electorate’s party.Tomasky: They truly do. I don’t think they have to make a series of awful choices between: “Do we go left, or do we go center?” I talk a little bit about that debate in the piece, too. There are genuine differences between progressives and centrists, but I think they can sometimes be overstated.What I tried to do in the piece is sketch out an agenda that I think both sides can rally around. Now, what I’m calling for is, on paper, economic populism—and that’s identified with the progressive left. Centrists might be wary of that. But I really tried not to write about it in a way that codes as left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to farmers more; that’s not left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to people who go to vocational school and trade school and community college, instead of just talking all the time about college debt.College, that’s very important—I’m not saying it’s not—but what about the 60 percent of people who don’t go to college? What are they getting out of that? They go to trade school; they go to vocational school; they go to community college. They’re dental hygienists; they’re electricians. Democrats need to talk to those people. And I think by doing that, they can build a durable majority. They can get more than Joe Biden’s 48 percent of working-class votes. And they can do it without really having made many compromises.We haven’t talked much about cultural issues, and there’s some thorny stuff there. I don’t think—again, your average American doesn’t want to be cruel to transgender people and doesn’t want to erase transgender people from society. They don’t want that. That’s not who people are. Democrats can give voice to that and represent that while still representing mainstream America.Sargent: I think what I’m hearing from you, Mike, is that there’s actually some cause for optimism in this moment. And there’s real opportunity out there, sort of tucked among all the horror that we’re living through. And our special issue is about that. It has a number of other pieces that try to lay out ways for Democrats to take charge of these big debates in the ways we’re talking about. Do you want to just close by telling us what else is in the issue?Tomasky: Sure. There’s a piece by Alex Shephard called “Not Your Father’s Democrats.” It’s built around figures like Graham Platner and Zohran Mamdani, who are on the left. But it also nods toward other figures like Spanberger, who you would not call “on the left,” but it says of these people, what unifies them is that they’re throwing some elbows—that they’re fighting, and that they’re fighting based on beliefs, and that they don’t come across like they’re just reading polls. So that’s one.Perry Bacon Jr. has a wonderful piece about how the Democrats should not just study the electorate to death; they should change it. They can do things to make the electorate more liberal and to grow more liberals in this country. Republicans did that. They made more conservatives than used to exist, and Democrats can do that too. And Perry has, I think, a handful of smart ideas about how they can and should do that.And then the last piece is about immigration. What was his name? What was his name? Sargent: I thought you’d never get to that one, Mike.Tomasky: By Greg Sargent! It talks about how Democrats can take control of the immigration debate. It points to JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom as showing the way here and goes into some very smart things the two of them have done.But also, it argues that: Democrats, don’t be shy about this. Play offense; don’t spend your life responding to Republican charges. Get out there and play offense and give your vision of the country. One of the bad things—I’ll conclude here—I understand why Bill Clinton was the kind of politician he was, because back in those days the number of Americans who identified as “liberal” was in the teens and the Democratic Party had been walloped. I mean, walloped. In three consecutive elections.Some change was needed. I get that. And he did win two elections and he did grow the economy and he did a number of progressive things. But one of the things that was bad overall about that Third Way–ism was the tendency to say, Well, the Republicans are extreme and we’re not that extreme, but we do sort of agree about this—sort of accepting Republican presumptions and saying, Well, we’re the reasonable people.But that’s over. The world has changed, the country has changed, the electorate has changed, the issues have changed. It’s time for the Democrats to assert their beliefs, seize the moral high ground, play offense, and just offer a completely different vision for our society than the one the Republicans are offering.Sargent: Elbow-throwing patriots—in other words, right, Mike?Tomasky: That’s it.Greg Sargent: Well folks, our special issue is really, really good. If we do say so ourselves, it’s at TNR.com. It’s got pieces by a bunch of different writers—you’ve heard a rundown of them—and the poll is also really interesting. Please check it out at TNR.com. Michael Tomasky, really wonderful to talk to you.Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg.

First Draft: Jared Kushner... Redacted?
Zeteo • Feb 13, 2026

First Draft: Jared Kushner... Redacted?

The president's son-in-law is at the center of a huge new scandal. Plus: the Trump administration's war on the climate and the Pakistani government's war on Imran Khan's health.

Poll suggests voters back Democrats shutdown demands
Semafor • Feb 13, 2026

Poll suggests voters back Democrats shutdown demands

A new Hart Research poll commissioned by the Senate Democrat-aligned Senate Majority PAC found that 54% of likely midterm voters express support for Democrats demanding reforms to ICE and blocking DHS funding unless those reforms are adopted.

How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration

If all politics is spectacle in the era of Donald Trump, few episodes illustrate this more vividly than that created by Republican governors who bused asylum-seeking immigrants from their states into Northern cities during Joe Biden’s presidency. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida ensured that in the run-up to Trump’s 2024 reelection effort, the news media—and millions of social media feeds—were flooded with imagery of immigrants camped out in urban areas: desperate mobs swamping blue states and cities and straining their social service systems to the breaking point.It was a reprehensible but crafty tactic: By manufacturing a wildly distorted and undeniably powerful and shareable display that became a stand-in for Biden’s Border Crisis, as Trump and Republicans branded it, these governors probably helped Trump get reelected in 2024. To this day, some reporters still describe it as akin to a political masterstroke.Yet now something just as powerful is happening, albeit in the other direction, and, mystifyingly, the savvy media almost never describe it in such terms. A handful of Democratic governors have found an innovative way to leverage the power of spectacle against Trump by relentlessly highlighting his ICE raids, kidnappings, and paramilitary abuses, in part by encouraging countless ordinary people to join in the project of using their phones to, as the old left phrase has it, document the atrocities. And it’s working: It’s done real political damage to Trump, just as those GOP governors damaged Biden. It’s creating a cultural moment around immigration that’s perhaps more powerful than the one created by those GOP governors. And it’s forging a new way for Democrats to go on offense on this issue—if they’ll seize upon it.The Democratic governors in question are JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. This role was thrust upon them as stewards of the biggest, most densely populated, immigrant-heavy urban areas in the country—Chicago and Los Angeles—which are in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. This has created an opening to experiment with new kinds of opposition politics well suited to the information wars of the Trump years—the wars of spectacle. It’s no accident that both Pritzker and Newsom are plainly considering presidential runs in 2028. That’s incentivizing them to break through to national liberals and Democrats with novel forms of confrontation with Trump.In short, intentionally or not, Pritzker and Newsom are engaged in a kind of shadow war over who will be perceived—by national liberals and Democrats—as the most prominent obstacle to Trump’s goal of purging the nation of as many immigrants as possible. And in a surprise, this dynamic has been a salutary thing: It’s pushing both men to create modes of pro-immigration politics that carry lessons for political battles to come.“Out of necessity, the two governors are in a race to the top in a way that’s having major implications,” Chris Newman, general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. “At a time when skittishness on immigrants’ rights is the norm in Washington, D.C., it’s a very good thing that these two governors’ political interests and immigrants’ material interests are urgently aligned.”Most obviously, the two governors have played a lead role in thwarting Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to urban areas, ostensibly done to protect federal immigration officers carrying out mass deportations. Both Illinois and California aggressively challenged the operations in court, winning numerous victories, and in December the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s ability to send National Guard troops to Illinois—leading him to end the deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland with a whimper.But that’s only the beginning. Pritzker, for instance, signed legislation in December that protects immigrants from getting detained for civil arrests at or outside court during certain proceedings and allows civil actions against federal officers who violate their constitutional rights. The bill also limits federal law enforcement actions against immigrants in schools and hospitals. In October, Pritzker established by executive order a state accountability commission that formally documents misconduct by federal agents for potential legal action against them.Newsom, for his part, signed a package of bills in September that are similarly about protecting immigrants from Trump. These measures bar schools from letting federal immigration agents on campuses without warrants, prohibit enforcement agents from wearing face masks while conducting operations, and require them to identify themselves, among other things. He signed measures allocating tens of millions of dollars to bankroll both state lawsuits against the federal government and groups defending immigrants from deportation. And he created a legal way for parents who face deportation to designate other adults to care for their kids.A Revitalized Opposition PoliticsPerhaps the deepest innovation from both governors has been at the level of language and politics. Newsom, who as leader of the country’s most populous state is probably the most prominent Democratic 2028 hopeful, is widely assumed to be Trump’s chief antagonist on immigration. But Pritzker has, with less fanfare, challenged Trump in a way that deserves attention. He has repeatedly called on Illinois residents to help document abuses of power toward immigrants. “People of Illinois, we need your help,” he posted on X last fall. “Get your cell phones out—record what you see.... We need to let the world know this is happening—and that we won’t stand for it.” At a presser around the same time, Pritzker added: “Look out for your communities and your neighbors. Know your rights. Film things you see happening in your neighborhoods and your streets and share them with the news media. Authoritarians thrive on your silence.”It turns out there’s a deeper theory of the case behind these directives, as Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff, told me. Countless Illinois residents were horrified by what they were seeing but felt deeply lacking in agency. “People needed to feel part of the pushback here,” Caprara said, noting that the goal was to “empower them to do something” and “give them something to do.”Pritzker has paired all that with language about ICE that consciously depicts it as a hostile invading army. “This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back,” Pritzker said over the summer, when Trump’s military deployment to Chicago had just become known. “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” And in October, Pritzker said: “There’s one thing I really want to say to Donald Trump. If you come for my people, you come through me.”Taken all together, this can help revitalize opposition politics against Trump. For one thing, it takes seriously the current state of our information environment. Trumpworld understands that the battle over mass deportations is an information war: The administration sends camera crews along with its deportation operations, producing slick propaganda videos that portray paramilitary, hyper-armed ICE goons as liberating heroes. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts pump out enormous amounts of vile agitprop depicting immigrants as menacing criminals.There’s an informational method to this madness. As Johns Hopkins University professor Filipe Campante noted, the basic reality of the “modern information environment” is that “censorship is no longer viable,” meaning the administration must use its “own content provision to drown out any negative facts.” Trumpworld understands this, and the Pritzker approach also takes it seriously, by encouraging ordinary people to help overwhelm his propaganda with real information.And it’s working. In Chicago, the citizen documentation of ICE atrocities has been positively staggering. Indeed, Pritzker’s team consciously has sought to make ordinary people find empowerment amid dark times through participation. As Caprara describes it, the governor and his advisers realized that this had the makings of a cultural moment during early ICE raids, when they started “seeing suburban ladies out in their Lululemon pants with their whistles.” The result, Caprara said, is that for every one propaganda video Trumpworld puts out, “there are 50 videos in everybody’s timeline of actual incidents where people can see what’s happening.”This is happening all over the country: After all, everybody is carrying around a handy documentary tool in their pockets. In videos of these events, you invariably see lots of other people in the background using their phones to film them from different angles. The effect has been palpable: When an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis in January, bystanders instantly supplied videos of the killing from all different angles that decisively debunked Trump’s false claims that it represented justified self-defense. Tellingly, Trump and JD Vance aggressively pushed their own video of one angle that muddled the issue, but citizen-produced videos won the day, preventing Trumpworld’s preferred content from drowning out the truth. The same happened after federal agents killed Alex Pretti soon after. Pritzker has advanced the cause by urging Democrats to recognize that we’re in a brutal information war and to adapt accordingly.Newsom has put his own spin on these info-wars. He has aggressively highlighted Trump’s immigration raids to sound a warning about the broader threat of Trump’s authoritarian lawlessness. “Following the dictator’s playbook, Donald Trump has unleashed a blitzkrieg,” warned an ad run by a Newsom-allied group during the victorious referendum push to allow mid-decade redistricting in California. “You have the power to stop him.” Note, again, the theme of empowerment.The California governor has regularly highlighted the dispatching of the National Guard to his state to warn all Americans that this previews something bigger: use of the military to suppress voting across the country. “This is existential,” he intoned last August. “He’s militarizing American cities. This is Putin’s playbook. This is authoritarianism. It’s happening.” He’s made this point over many months, not hesitating to call Trump’s agents “secret police.”Newsom has also responded to Trumpworld’s depiction of immigrants as criminals with his own info-warring, by highlighting the positive contributions they make to American life. He has underscored the role of immigrants in rebuilding after the Los Angeles firestorms. He has highlighted small businesses who lament the loss of trusted immigrant workers. He has devoted whole speeches to the contributions of immigrants to the state’s history. And he has held events showcasing immigrant entrepreneurs. As Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, told me, Newsom sees “making immigrants much more visible and humanizing them” as central to his politics.In short: Whereas Trumpworld devotes an enormous amount of state-sponsored propaganda to pushing the message that immigration is bad, Newsom regularly amplifies the message that immigration is good.So what does all this tell us about how Democrats should handle the politics of immigration? An Argument Over How Persuasion WorksObviously, Pritzker and Newsom come from blue states, where messages of resistance are more likely to find a receptive audience. Others will note that in places like California and Illinois, Democrats still have to prove that liberal governance can really deliver. All of that is fair enough, but on immigration in particular, the two governors’ approach nonetheless carries important lessons for how the national party should proceed. It even has something to offer for Democrats in red or swingy areas, though they may want to modify it a bit.What’s really at issue here is a bigger intraparty argument over how voter persuasion really works. One school of thought—associated with some Democratic consultants and the so-called popularists—holds that swing and low-info voters won’t even consider voting for Democrats until they firmly establish that they are laser-focused on “kitchen table issues” that really matter to them. Even when big things happen on immigration—such as when Trump wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador—Democrats shouldn’t focus too much on them. That’s because doing so would make Democrats appear unfocused on voters’ “real” concerns and would raise the “salience” of immigration, where Trump has the advantage due partly to leftist positions some Democrats have adopted under pressure from activists, which they must cast off.The rebuttal to all this—one offered by writers like Brian Beutler and data analyst G. Elliott Morris—is that public opinion doesn’t work this way. Instead, voters who tune out politics are regularly buffeted by gale force deluges of information from all directions. Their convictions about public policy—and their views on what the parties stand for—are shallowly rooted at best. Their impressions are largely formed when big, jarring events, intense media coverage, social media saturation, or loud enough drumbeats of criticism vaguely disrupt their algorithmic torpor and get them to fleetingly pay attention.What’s more, goes this line, even if it is unwise for Democrats to take very unpopular positions, this realization alone can’t solve much. Voters’ negative impressions of Democrats are also due to them getting bombarded in the present by vicious MAGA-GOP propaganda. As it happens, this is particularly true on immigration: Not a day goes by without Trump or Stephen Miller declaring that Democrats are enabling “criminal illegal aliens” to steal your jobs, bilk taxpayer-funded welfare programs, and contaminate pristine rural communities with drugs and culturally alien habits—in essence, enabling them to rape, pillage, and kill.In this understanding, not engaging on the issue just lets that agitprop dominate low-info voters’ information streams. And here again, even if some activist positions are politically damaging, aggressive distancing from them won’t alone address the larger, ongoing problem of MAGA-GOP information dominance.The events of the last year strongly favor the second interpretation. Trump’s approval rating on immigration has plunged throughout 2025: In December, an Associated Press poll found it to be at an abysmal 38 percent, down 11 points from March; a New York Times/Siena poll in January put Trump 17 points underwater on the issue. Crucially, Morris shows that Trump’s approval has dropped particularly during moments when Abrego Garcia’s deportation dominated the news, which some Democrats worked hard to highlight, and during moments when Trump’s hypermilitarization of immigration enforcement captured media attention.What’s more, as Morris also shows, public perceptions of ICE have markedly deteriorated over the last year, dropping during periods of heightened public attention to its militarized enforcement tactics, especially during deployments in Los Angeles and Chicago. ICE’s standing plummeted further after the Minneapolis shooting. As Morris concludes, those anti-ICE opinion surges almost certainly helped drive Trump’s dropping approval rating on immigration, because more voters were “learning about the agency’s enforcement tactics.”Why did all this happen? Is it because many voters heard about these things and concluded: Trump isn’t focused on my kitchen table concerns, which is what I really care about, so I no longer approve of his handling of immigration, or some such? Well, maybe a little bit. But a more dominant sentiment was probably something like this: Wow, I didn’t know this was happening. These images of violence, terror, and suffering are horrifying, and I sympathize deeply with the victims, who are being treated unjustly and remind me of undocumented immigrants I personally know. The dropping approval rating likely reflects something like that set of perceptions.As we’ve seen from the remarkable events in Minneapolis after the deaths of Pretti and Good, the countless ordinary people bravely making a stand against Trump’s stormtroopers deserve the credit for drawing national attention to these atrocities. So it’s hard to know exactly what role Pritzker and Newsom played in these national opinion shifts. But their general approach captures the basic insight here: that politics in the Trump era is about conflict and attention.By picking big fights with Trump over his deployments in their own regions, they drew more national attention to Trump’s vicious and unpopular crackdowns. And Pritzker, by calling on people to film as much of this stuff as possible, is taking this understanding of politics as information warfare further. If elected Democrats did these things more concertedly, many more voters would get bombarded by all this dramatically negative imagery and would turn against Trump over it.At this juncture, someone will point out that Trump’s dropping immigration approval rating won’t necessarily benefit Democrats, who still must improve their own standing on it and represent a concrete agenda of their own. As it happens, his sinking approval numbers do, in fact, give Democrats an opening to improve their own standing on this issue by engaging directly with Trump’s disastrous tenure, with the Pritzker and Newsom approach offering some guidance.What Should Democrats Be for?The Marquette Law School poll is one of the few high-quality surveys out there that gauges public opinion on immigration in a genuinely illuminating way. Its survey in late January found the following among American voters nationally:Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?Favor 44%Oppose 56%So a solid majority opposes removing undocumented immigrants who are longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record. Yet, tellingly, the same poll finds that when the question is framed differently—when it asks about “deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally,” but without qualifications—those numbers are largely flipped. A majority favors deporting the undocumented when asked about it as a general matter. But when respondents are asked if that includes immigrants who have generally and peacefully integrated into American life, a solid majority opposes it.So here’s my theory of the case: Intense public attention to Trump’s mass deportations, and the brutality of them, has sharpened voters’ awareness of that distinction—the one between deportations in general and deportations of working, noncriminal, longtime residents. That explains why other polls find that large majorities continue favoring a path to legalization for most longtime residents, and why still others show a big spike in percentages of Americans who see immigration as a positive good for the country.Trump’s victory in 2024 obscured these public opinion realities from view. This was partly because some centrist pundits decided that the win indicated a deep, durable cultural backlash against immigration more broadly, particularly among the working class. This idea is prominently associated with The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, leading Jerusalem Demsas of The Argument to memorably label it “Leonhardt-ism.” It’s the notion that a central national problem we face—and a central political problem Democrats face—is “the sheer number of immigrants.” As Demsas shows, that’s not supportable: There’s no obvious backlash to immigration itself, and we need more of it to offset population decline, an aging workforce, and depleted tax revenue for social programs like health care for the elderly.But lurking behind that centrist reading is a bigger argument. It’s that Trump won because the American mainstream decided that he was in some sense right about immigration in general: that not only is undocumented migration out of control, but legal immigration is having all sorts of ill social effects, that it’s a central problem in American life.Yet it’s hard to square this with the huge cultural backlash to Trump’s deportations, with large majorities continuing to want a path to legalization, and even larger majorities now saying immigration is good for the country. What’s far more likely is that voters rebelled against the overwhelmed border and asylum system under Biden and thermostatically turned against the party in power, and centrist pundits confused this with a more profound cultural shift. By the way: Marquette data provided to me shows that, as of late January, noncollege graduates oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record by 54 percent to 46 percent, which also undercuts notions of a major working-class anti-immigration backlash.Indeed, everything we’re seeing now suggests an opening for Democrats to challenge Trump and MAGA on a deep ideological level. This can take several forms:Democrats can express solidarity with longtime immigrant residents in Trump’s (sometimes literal) crosshairs. A core MAGA diagnosis is that immigration has undermined social cohesion—or “social solidarity,” as JD Vance puts it—and that this has driven a working-class backlash against it. Empirical work debunks the idea that immigration erodes social solidarity. But even in terms of public opinion, we’re seeing majorities reject this idea, too. At bottom, majority support for a path to legalization for longtime residents is an expression of support for a deeper notion: that they have become part of our communities and now have some sort of claim to staying.Note that Pritzker and Newsom aggressively make the case that native-born Americans and immigrants, including noncriminal undocumented ones, have a shared interest in each other’s economic and social fates. Other Democrats could repurpose this and adapt it to their own regions. It’s powerful stuff that effectively challenges the MAGA worldview, which turns on depicting immigrants as a zero-sum economic, social, and even civilizational threat.Joe Rogan’s now-famous denunciations of Trump’s deportations illustrate the point: All this searing imagery has awakened people to their social and economic ties to immigrants. It’s created an opening for Democrats to restate the case for letting the undocumented get right with the law and creating pathways to come here legally as an affirmative national good. That Rogan and the “manosphere” are alert to all this suggests this realization is reaching deep into informational spaces Democrats struggle to access. They should align themselves with a better way forward and reach into those spaces with that message.Democrats can stand for some basic principles: ICE is a catastrophic, irredeemable failure, and interior enforcement must be totally rethought from top to bottom. Enforcement is of course necessary, but armed paramilitary forces should not be patrolling our streets and residential communities.Democrats can stand for an orderly system, as opposed to chaos and cruelty. They should not shy away from arguing that illegal immigration is caused partly by too many draconian restrictions on legal immigration. Many voters simply don’t know that a big part of the problem is that options for coming here legally have largely been wiped out, and that legal immigration could be managed well if Congress only tried to do so. Democrats can be for a path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants here, for a reinstatement of humanitarian pathways that Trump is erasing, and even for new economic and humanitarian pathways, while packaging this as a real way to bring order to the system.People absolutely hate ICE raids and deportations. Just like an overwhelmed border, Trump’s degradations represent a different form of chaos and disorder—a far worse one. Democrats can say there’s another way. Those in politically difficult areas can emphasize border security and restrictions on asylum that will prevent any future asylum system from getting overburdened again, while calling for offsetting those restrictions with new proposals for people to apply for humanitarian entry from home countries without showing up at the border. The bipartisan proposal from a group of senators in 2022 doing all that is a starting model here.Finally, Democrats can speak with conviction about what they know to be right, wrong, and true. Rather than haggling over the precise words “abolish ICE,” Democrats can stand for some basic principles: ICE is a catastrophic, irredeemable failure, and interior enforcement must be totally rethought from top to bottom. Enforcement is of course necessary—especially at the border and also inside the country—but armed paramilitary forces should not be patrolling our streets and residential communities. It’s correct to focus on serious criminals, but not on longtime noncriminal undocumented residents, who should not be hunted and deserve a chance to get right with the law.Let’s close by returning to that Pritzker challenge to Trump: “If you come for my people, you come through me.” Democrats can say: We will defend you and your communities from this absolute madness. They can say: We need more immigrants, not fewer. They can say: ICE is bad and immigration is good. They can speak to voters like adults about these issues. Public opinion is incredibly fluid on these matters. Democrats: You have a rare opportunity. Don’t run from it. Seize upon it, forcefully and enthusiastically.  

These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats

Janet Mills, the 78-year-old moderate who has served as Maine’s governor since 2019, is staid and a little boring—which is exactly why, last fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pushed her to run against progressive upstart Graham Platner in the state’s Senate primary. Mills was reasonably popular and polled well against Susan Collins, the Trump-enabling “moderate” who had represented Maine since 1997. Most importantly, she had been in politics a long time—she was first elected to Maine’s House of Representatives more than 20 years ago—and therefore had already been vetted.The same could not be said about Platner, who announced his populist Senate campaign last summer, seemingly out of nowhere. An oyster farmer and a war on terrorism veteran, Platner was gruff and tough—and looked like the answer for a party struggling to reach working-class voters and men. As it turned out, he also carried a ton of baggage. Soon after Mills announced her candidacy, nuclear-grade opposition research began falling.Let’s get this out of the way: Graham Platner isn’t a Nazi. He had a Nazi tattoo, sure, but he doesn’t anymore. He got it covered up in October, a few days after the world learned about the Totenkopf symbol he got inked on his chest in Croatia while on military leave two decades ago. If one can get a Nazi tattoo innocently, then Platner almost certainly did. He says he didn’t know its true meaning at the time, and there’s little reason to doubt him. There is nothing in any of the statements that Platner has given in town halls, interviews, or other campaign events to suggest that he’s a bigot either, though he did write some bad stuff about Black people and women on the internet a few years ago. (For what it’s worth, he also said white rural voters were stupid and racist.) When those posts were unearthed, Platner apologized, citing his PTSD and political and cultural ignorance. Still, it’s hard to think of any recent Democratic campaign that could survive having to make so many disclosures.It’s also hard to think of a more lethal, better-orchestrated political hit—or one better designed to showcase the value of Democratic power brokers. There was just one problem: Mills had baggage, too. The DSCC had no idea. Platner knew it the moment she entered the race. “DC’s choice has lost to Susan Collins five times in a row,” Platner posted on social media shortly after the DSCC endorsed Mills. “We can’t afford a sixth.” There were no Reddit posts lurking in Mills’s past, no fascist tattoos hidden on her body. Instead, she had a different problem: She was endorsed by the Democratic elite.In his first town hall since the oppo started raining down, Platner apologized to a full house of 600 in Ogunquit, population 1,577, and then flipped the script: “The machine is turned on because it is scared,” he said. The attacks against him, he argued, were reflective of a party elite that had lost touch with its voters: “If the party was run by the people that were in it, it would be the party you want it to be.”Not so long ago, any one of the scandals Graham Platner faced in mid-October would likely have sunk his campaign. The race is now up for grabs—if for a while his lead was over 30 points, it has since shrunk significantly—but Platner is still in the game. Some recent polls suggest that he has at least a small but stubborn advantage, and multiple surveys have indicated that he may be a more formidable challenger to Collins than Maine’s current governor. That is partly a result of Platner’s charisma and populist platform, but it is also a result of the growing frustration and anger many Democratic voters feel toward their leaders. Donald Trump’s reelection represented the failure of the Democratic establishment, explained Joe Calvello, Platner’s former senior adviser. “People who in 2018 or 2020 were taking their cues from party leaders or elders are like, ‘What the fuck do these people know that I don’t know? They’ve failed time and time again.’” Having watched Democratic power brokers lose two presidential elections to Trump and control of both houses of Congress, many voters no longer trust them on questions of candidate selection or policy. Or anything else, for that matter.And if the support of the establishment previously guaranteed a certain level of fundraising, said Rebecca Katz, a political strategist and a co-founder of Fight, a consulting firm working with Platner, “this cycle, we’re seeing a lot of anti-establishment candidates raising real money off of not being the DC favorite.” Voters are increasingly suspicious of—if not downright hostile to—candidates who have been fêted by a party establishment that keeps getting it wrong. A base that has long made pragmatic, sober decisions appears increasingly attracted to charismatic outsiders who promise to break from the party’s failures of the last decade. They see their party’s leaders as feckless and inept. They are looking to populists who represent a vastly different approach to politics. The Democratic Tea Party is here. There are many ways to describe the drift of American politics over the last two decades, but one is rather simple. The Republican Party has experienced two related revolutions—the Tea Party in 2009 and the rise of Donald Trump in 2016—that resulted in widespread purges and transformed it into the hard-line nativist party it is today. The Tea Party forced out moderate Republicans and anyone who would dare work across the aisle; Trump then pushed out anyone who didn’t show absolute loyalty to him. The Democratic Party dealt with a single revolution—Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy in 2016—that it only temporarily quelled.In 2017, Democrats had good reasons for turning against party leaders. The bosses had just backed a candidate, after all, who had lost a pivotal election to a racist con man. But voters stuck with them. Maybe the stakes were too high. Maybe the excuses for Hillary Clinton’s admittedly fluky loss—Russian interference, an eleventh-hour intervention from FBI Director James Comey, Sanders’s daring to challenge Clinton at all—were compelling. (Though none were as compelling as the fact that the party’s nominee, a divisive figure who was synonymous with a political establishment many voters detested, was arguably the worst imaginable person to run against Trump.) In any case, during Trump’s first term, Democratic voters didn’t rebel against their party’s status quo. They embraced it.The heroes of the first Trump resistance were almost always establishment figures. They were party elders like Nancy Pelosi, who was 78 when she retook the gavel as speaker of the House after Democrats won back the chamber in 2019, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who handed a supermajority to court conservatives when she died at 87 the following year. Many had deep ties to the national security state, such as the former CIA director, John Brennan, and the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper. Some were even Republicans critical of the president, most notably Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman and the daughter of Dick Cheney, and John Bolton, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser. In the 2020 primary, Democratic voters selected Joe Biden, who had served as Obama’s vice president and was first elected to the Senate in 1972. When he was sworn into office in January 2021, he had just turned 78.Between 2017 and 2021, Democratic voters were eager to promote figures who represented a return to the “normal” politics of the pre-Trump era. They trusted these elders in part because doing so aligned with a coherent theory of resisting Trump: Deep down, the country wanted respected, sober-minded, establishment types to make decisions—they would soon grow tired of the chaos and incoherence and unhinged tweets that defined the Trump administration.“It was a reasonable theory to posit that Trumpism was an aberration,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime political strategist and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. “So was cold fusion. They both proved to be wrong.”On February 5, 2025, The New Yorker published an article asking a question that was growing more and more common in the media: “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TRUMP RESISTANCE?” That piece, published two weeks into Trump’s second term, accurately noted the lack of widespread dissent, a sharp contrast to the early days of 2017, when across the country millions showed up to women’s marches, and thousands spontaneously arrived at airports, placards in hand, to protest the “Muslim Ban.”What was going on? Many pundits agreed that the base was shell-shocked. Trump’s reelection was direct proof that the first resistance had failed. The fact that he had just won the popular vote—something he failed to do in 2016—pointed to another, related explanation for Democrats’ quiescence. Eight years ago, liberals could console themselves that Trump had no popular base of support. There was nothing to soften the blow this time. The Democrats may have rolled out the usual slate of celebrity appearances—Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah—but it was Trump who understood the zeitgeist. During his campaign, he embraced influencers and edgy podcasters; after the election, he watched as athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by dancing like him. The party’s long monopoly on popular culture had been shattered. Trump’s strong showing among young men and Latino voters, meanwhile, represented a direct refutation of a favored explanation for his first victory—that it stemmed from an economically anxious, racially resentful white base. It was a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Nearly a decade into his political career, many Democrats still didn’t understand his appeal.There’s an alternate explanation for the languid start of the second Trump resistance, however. The Democratic base was doing what it usually does: taking cues from its leaders. In the lead-up to Trump’s first term, those leaders vowed to fight like hell. In the lead-up to the second, they were pledging to work with the new administration.In late February, James Carville—a fossil who hadn’t managed a successful campaign since 1992—argued in The New York Times that the Democrats’ best approach was to “play dead.” During Trump’s first term, they channeled the pugilistic spirit of their base and fought back. That, Carville argued, was a mistake. Activism had doomed the Democrats. The party’s strong message—that it is the party of health care and high wages—had been “muddied” by its investigations of Russian election interference and its embrace of progressive policies aimed at racial justice and other social issues. Now, some voters weren’t sure what it stood for beyond opposing Trump, while others believed it stood for a smattering of radical policies that certain candidates backed during the 2020 Democratic primaries. Those policies came back to haunt the party in 2024, when they were endlessly recycled in attack ads. Carville had a simple, foolproof way to retake power: Sit back, let Trump destroy the country, then swoop in to pick up the pieces.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, seemed to be listening. Two weeks after Carville published that op-ed, he provided decisive votes to Republicans to continue funding the government. In doing so, he not only caved, he co-signed a check to fund an authoritarian administration. The vote underlined his powerlessness. It also woke up his base. Democrats were furious. “I guess we’ll find out to what extent Schumer is leading the party into irrelevance,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the group Indivisible, told Politico at the time. Many Democrats seemed to agree. They wanted a fight. Schumer and other party leaders wouldn’t give it to them. So they started it themselves.As Trump’s abuses multiplied, direct action became more and more common, especially in response to the fascistic immigration raids that were occurring with growing frequency and violence in American cities. And as the second Trump resistance grew, so did its contrast with the behavior of party leaders. By the time millions took to the streets in June as part of the first No Kings protest, it was undeniable. The Democratic base was angry and ready to fight. Its leaders were still playing dead. Meanwhile, a robust and sophisticated network of professional political operatives, including Katz and Calvello, were determined to rescue the party from itself. Many of them were aligned with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign. Over the last eight years, they had accrued experience and learned from their mistakes. Platner, in other words, didn’t just walk off a dock on the Maine coast and enter a crucial primary. He was recruited, Platner later told The New York Times, by a group of organizers who worried that “there was going to be a bad decision made for this race”—namely that the DSCC would repeat mistakes it had made back in 2020, when it put all its weight behind Sara Gideon, who spent millions only to lose badly.Indeed, Platner’s success thus far owes a lot to Gideon’s failure. Six years ago, the Democratic Senatatorial Campaign Committee cleared the field for her to run against Collins. With the committee’s help, she raised more than $60 million—and lost by nearly 9 points, almost exactly the same margin by which Biden won Maine.“People remember that and are like, ‘Why should I listen to you?’ Calvello said. “They don’t care about the gatekeepers telling them, ‘You can’t elect this guy.’ They want something real, and Graham offers that.”Platner’s recruiters may not have been aware of the scope of his baggage, but they were certainly aware that he is a remarkably deft politician. He endured an October from hell by explaining his mistakes and depicting them as a model for regular people, especially men, who are struggling: He was once an angry and confused young man, but he changed. For those who are inclined to forgive him—and polling suggests many Maine voters are—it’s both a moving story and part of his larger message. If Platner is advocating for a politics that prioritizes people’s dignity and welfare, he’s also channeling rage—about Trump, the state of the U.S. health care system, and an increasingly oligarchic economy—in town halls all over Maine that regularly attract hundreds of guests. Mills, by contrast, is seemingly waiting around for the oppo to do its work.Her strategy may yet prove effective, but one reason it hasn’t so far is that many voters are no longer taking cues about “electability” from party leaders. Instead, they want candidates who are not only loudly speaking out about the abuses of the Trump administration, but also explicitly detailing how they would govern differently.Many of the new wave of candidates are, like Platner, populists and progressives. But not all of them are. Representative Jasmine Crockett, for example, a centrist from Texas whose description of her former colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” made her an instant star, may win the party’s Senate nomination, less for her establishmentarian platform than her pugilistic approach to messaging.The common thread uniting these new Democrats is that they are fighters. Their campaigns may pull in Trump voters, as Platner’s is attempting to do, but not by way of carefully tailored moderation or left-bashing. Instead, they are guided by a willingness to dispense with focus-grouped messaging and conventional wisdom, a healthy skepticism of consultants and other Brahmins of “electability,” and a knack for getting and keeping attention, both online and in real life.These outsider candidates are building alliances with figures and organizations that were previously aligned with the party’s mainstream. When Platner needed an outlet to address his Nazi tattoo, for instance, he chose Pod Save America—a podcast hosted by former Obama staffers. Once dyed-in-the-wool members of the Democratic Party, they are now emblematic of a new cohort of influential figures who are at once aligned with the Democratic Party and increasingly critical of its leadership. The group includes New York Times Opinion writer Ezra Klein; liberal wine mom and podcaster Jennifer Welch; Tim Miller of The Bulwark, an outlet founded by Never Trump Republicans that caters to moderates; and more outwardly progressive figures like the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan. Its members don’t have much in common beyond a shared intuition that the people running the party don’t know what they’re doing. (Unsurprisingly, one thing they also share is a sense of betrayal at the party’s decision to back a deeply unpopular 81-year-old’s doomed reelection campaign until the last possible moment.) Their emergence owes a great deal to a larger fracturing in organized politics and mass media over the last decade. Just as political parties have lost much of the top-down control they had throughout much of the twentieth century, traditional news organizations have also lost much of the influence and power they once had. They have been replaced by more ideologically diverse outlets—or in some cases, individual commentators—that are less beholden to access to power brokers, official statements, and elite-driven narratives. The result is a political landscape where outsiders can flourish. Indeed, in many cases, it’s one where outsiders are preferred, given the pervasive distrust of organized political parties and mass media. This shift has been less pronounced in Democratic-leaning circles than in Republican ones, which have been dominated by outsiders since the rise of the Tea Party nearly 17 years ago. But it is still apparent—as the rise of outsider candidates and outlets in the wake of Trump’s reelection in 2024 suggests. The new schism in the Democratic Party is best understood less as an ideological battle than a battle over political approach. The fight is between the politicians, interest groups, and party operators who want to play it safe—the complacent Democrats, let’s call them—and the insurgent Democrats who want to hold a lawless administration accountable and take bolder stands on policy. The emergent quasi-alliance supporting them is channeling not only the base’s anger at the current administration, but its frustration at its own leaders. What unites them is a larger sense that the establishment’s approach to politics in the Trump era has failed. But what should replace it?In November, Zohran Mamdani, a charismatic, 34-year-old self-described democratic socialist, won New York City’s mayoral election after running a campaign laser-focused on a big theme, the affordability crisis, and the concrete policies he would advance to help fight it: free buses, a rent freeze for two million tenants, and a pilot program for city-owned grocery stores were three of many. If Mamdani was exciting, he was also divisive. Relentlessly attacked by the right for his socialist views and his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, he was hardly embraced by his party’s mainstream, even after he defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary. When voters cast their ballots, he had only just been endorsed by the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, who represents a district in Brooklyn. Neither of New York’s two Democratic senators, including the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer—another Brooklynite—endorsed him. He won anyway, beating Cuomo, then running as an independent, a second time.For all of the excitement and attention surrounding Mamdani, many in the party’s mainstream rolled their eyes following his victory. After all, the establishment wing had won big, too. In Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, Democrats romped to victory by margins that exceeded Mamdani’s. Rumors of the party’s demise were exaggerated, it seemed. Then, one week later, Schumer caved again, ending a government shutdown that had dragged on for weeks without garnering any concessions from the administration. The base, which had cheered on the shutdown as a sign that the party’s leaders were finally attacking, was furious. The establishment was back where it was in the spring.The most straightforward takeaway from November’s elections is that the party’s base wants a fight and will respond to any candidate who brings it. Their anger does not appear to be so profound that, as happened with the Tea Party, they will embrace any bomb-thrower who promises to burn it all down. Democratic voters still care more about stopping Trump than anything else. Stevens said he hopes Democrats will embrace the fact that the likes of both Mamdani and Josh Shapiro, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania, can win: “It’s so absurd that the party is losing its mind over a guy who’s talking about maybe five city-owned grocery stores and we’re nationalizing Intel.” In the short term, the result will almost certainly be midterm elections in which both mainstream and outsider candidates win—and lose. We can look forward to a bigger tent and an even bigger argument over the direction of the party.Can this new generation of insurgent anti-establishment Democrats win voters over? As primary season slowly kicks into gear, their approach will be tested in Senate primaries like Michigan’s, where the establishment-backed Haley Stevens is facing off against two progressive challengers, and in contested primaries in dozens of House districts. Platner, of course, may very well lose in the primary or the general—and a loss in either race will seemingly vindicate the Democratic power brokers who have set out to destroy him. But he has already demonstrated their weakness. He has been speaking for months about the sky-high cost of health care and the stagnant growth of wages, yes, but also about a craven political establishment with outdated ideas that shuts out newcomers to protect its own. It’s a message that he has consistently delivered to hundreds of people, before and after the raft of scandals that threatened to prematurely end his campaign. Can you say the same about Janet Mills or any other establishment Democrat?

Instead of Pandering, Democrats Should Try Changing Voters’ Minds
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

Instead of Pandering, Democrats Should Try Changing Voters’ Minds

Early last year, polls and media commentary suggested that crime would be the defining issue of the New York City mayoral race. Then, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign started to take off. By the end of the race, the news organizations that conduct exit polls asked voters to choose the top issue animating their votes among these five choices: crime, cost of living, health care, immigration, and transportation. Mamdani had literally changed the language of the election, with pollsters asking about his framing (“cost of living”) instead of the usual terms, “jobs” and “the economy.” He had also changed voters’ priorities: A whopping 55 percent said cost of living was the most important issue, compared to only 22 percent who said crime.And on Election Day in the Big Apple last November, nearly 40 percent of the city’s registered voters between ages 18 and 29 cast ballots, a massive increase from the 11 percent in 2021, according to Gothamist.Mamdani didn’t win by looking at polls and then campaigning according to them. A 34-year-old socialist who had previously tweeted “#DefundTheNYPD” probably could not have won an election about who is toughest on crime against incumbent ex-cop Eric Adams and a pro-police Democrat like Andrew Cuomo. Instead, Mamdani, through his relentless focus on the costs of rent, groceries, and childcare, primed regular voters to judge the candidates on their affordability policies instead of their anti-crime ones and energized young, liberal voters who might have otherwise stayed home.New York is a unique place, but Democrats across the country need to do what Mamdani did: create a more liberal electorate. American politics today is driven by ideology in a way that wasn’t true in the past. There used to be self-described conservative Democrats in Congress, particularly from the South, sent to Capitol Hill by constituents who were stalwart Democrats but wary of greater civil rights for Black Americans and other more liberal values. On the flip side, there were Republican politicians in the Northeast who were more liberal on some issues than their Southern Democratic counterparts.But over the last few decades, American politics has become more ideologically polarized. Democratic politicians and voters are to the left of Republicans on nearly every issue. People of color with conservative policy views are increasingly backing Republicans, while white college graduates are trending Democratic because of their more liberal social values.A more ideological electorate doesn’t doom Democrats. Only about a third of Americans or a little more describe themselves as conservatives, so Republicans can’t dominate politics just with those voters. At the same time, even fewer (about 25 percent) call themselves liberals. And while Americans have more left-leaning stands on many issues, such as raising the minimum wage, they often also agree with conservative concerns about bloated and inefficient government.Today’s Democrats, more than past iterations of the party, are defending an ideology and worldview—multicultural social democracy. Equal rights and economic opportunity for all; power in the hands of the people, not billionaires and corporations. So they need to spread that gospel to more Americans.Democrats can win in this environment, particularly when Republicans take power and push the GOP’s unpopular agenda. But often, voters quickly turn on Democrats when they’re in charge. For Democrats to consistently win elections and prevent the continued rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the United States, ultimately they must get more Americans to consider themselves liberal, hold liberal stands on issues, prioritize liberal values like equality over conservative ones like self-reliance, and make sure those with liberal mindsets vote in every election at every level of government.Today’s Democrats, more than past iterations of the party, are defending an ideology and worldview—multicultural social democracy. Equal rights and economic opportunity for all; power in the hands of the people, not billionaires and corporations. So they need to spread that gospel to more Americans. And yes, it can be done. Here are five ways how.1. Use Their Bully PulpitsMost people have loosely held, fickle views on policy issues. That gives politicians two superpowers. First, when elected officials take positions, voters often mindlessly adopt them, particularly if the official is from their political party. And second, even when politicians aren’t moving people to their exact stances, they can redirect the attention of voters, media, and members of the opposite party to their preferred topics. For example, Republicans are focused more on affordability now because of how Mamdani’s campaign made that issue top of mind for voters and journalists.The new mayor aside, Democrats are vastly underutilizing their ability to direct Americans toward liberal values, positions, and topics. This must change.I don’t know whether Republicans have read the social science on the malleability of the electorate, but they sure act as if they have. Donald Trump has moved GOP voters to be more skeptical of immigration and efforts to address the effects of racism. And changing the Republican Party inevitably changes the country overall. Trumpist ideas have been widely adopted in the 23 states dominated by Republicans. I never imagined 10 years ago that pollsters would be asking Americans about critical race theory—never mind finding that a big bloc of Americans oppose teaching it. But Trump and his allies have made diversity, equity, and inclusion, concepts widely supported a few years ago, so controversial that numerous institutions have backed away from them. “Republicans make it their business to reshape voters’ realities,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal political strategist.In contrast, many Democratic Party strategists and politicians seem to think that voters have firm, largely unchanging views. So the party’s main strategy is conducting polls to see what voters like—and, as noted above, often doing so reactively and unimaginatively—and then positioning itself as close as possible to a hypothetical “median voter.”“Pollingism,” as Shenker-Osorio has critically dubbed this approach, has some advantages. It’s low-risk. It appeals to moderate voters. It’s partly why Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections. But Democratic poll-chasing, combined with Trumpian radicalism, has not resulted in GOP defeats. Instead, elections have remained close while Trump pushes public opinion and discourse rightward on many issues.Democratic politicians urgently need to adopt the GOP view of public opinion—that it’s movable, and it’s their job to move it.They can learn from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of the party’s progressive economics bloc. Billionaires and big tech companies used to be venerated. Then, that bloc started pointing out the damage they were doing to the country. Their leadership has totally reshaped American economic discourse. Voters are increasingly skeptical of big businesses and concerned about income inequality. Pollsters, including those at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, now ask if billionaires are good for society, and only a tiny fraction of Americans say they are. Centrist politicians have been pushed leftward, with Joe Biden warning of oligarchy in one of his final speeches as president. Trump at times has hinted that he supports greater taxes on the rich. He never follows through, but his rhetoric suggests the president also sees rising antipathy for the super-wealthy.One lesson from all of that is Democrats should be more populist on economic issues. Yes, sure. But the bigger lesson is that there are liberal arguments on every issue that will resonate with voters if Democrats make them repeatedly, forcefully, and compellingly. Diverting some police funding to social services, letting in more immigrants for humanitarian and economic reasons, and allowing transgender students to play sports are much easier to defend than opposing diversity and equity, as Trump has successfully done.Democrats spent much of last year ignoring Trump’s lawless deportations on the theory that voters like his immigration’s positions more than theirs. But when Democrats started contesting him on that issue—most notably Senator Chris Van Hollen going to El Salvador to demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—polls showed a huge dip in support for Trump’s immigration policies. Lauren Goldstein, a pollster at Change Research, said Democratic politicians need to “embrace the power that you have to make the things you think should matter matter, because you have the ability to do that.”I am not calling for Democrats in purple states to take unpopular positions on the eve of elections. But the average Democratic member of Congress is in a safe seat. They have the freedom to take strong stances and try to move the public toward them.Just as critically, Democratic politicians must stop publicly stating that the party is out of touch with average Americans and using Republican-lite messages, such as when Pete Buttigieg late last year claimed (falsely) that the party had in recent years “defined everything by identity.” Those tactics might help individual politicians woo centrist voters. But the cumulative effect of so many Democratic pols bashing the party is further spreading anti-Democratic talking points, helping Republicans.2. Align With MovementsDemocratic officials alone probably can’t move the public left as much as we need. After all, they have a bunch of other tasks: providing services to constituents; voting on current legislation; campaigning for reelection; and of course raising money. That’s why left-leaning movements and groups are so essential. They can operate on a longer time horizon than politicians, advancing goals that take years or even decades. They can also push ideas that may not be popular now but tilt the national conversation in a more progressive direction. A Democratic Party that moves the electorate leftward will be one that smartly leverages activism.There are countless recent examples of movements’ value to the party. It was easier for Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012 after LGBTQ activists had spent years convincing Americans to view same-sex unions much more favorably. The Movement for Black Lives created a deeper understanding of racial inequality in America, allowing Biden to adopt a more racially conscious agenda than prior Democratic presidents had. In both 2017 and 2025, the mass protests led by Indivisible and other groups played a critical role in driving down Trump’s approval ratings. “Democrats win by being who they are and believing in something. Movements help anchor that belief,” said Deva Woodly, a Brown University political scientist and author of two books on social movements.Considering the obvious usefulness of movements, it’s unfortunate that they face so much resistance from center-left voices in the party these days. Immediately after the 2024 election, strategists were blasting progressive groups for allegedly forcing Kamala Harris to adopt positions that doomed her. Last year saw the creation of more center-left organizations that constantly attack liberal groups.That’s bad analysis. The 2024 results had much more to do with Joe Biden’s age and worldwide anti-incumbent sentiment than any stance Democrats took in response to groups. More importantly, it’s terrible long-term strategy. You’ll almost never hear Republican leaders attacking right-wing groups. They realize that a strong conservative movement ultimately helps them.Instead of distancing themselves from liberal groups, Democrats should affirm the value of the left-leaning groups and movements publicly. Democratic politicians are constantly praising one another, as if liberal goals are achieved by elected officials alone. In reality, Indivisible has opposed Trump far more effectively than the 47 Senate Democrats. When party officials acknowledge that help, it makes the groups stronger, which ultimately redounds to the party’s benefit. The party must also collaborate more with left-leaning groups. Ideally, groups and movements would be intertwined with Democratic politicians in the legislative process. Groups that play a real role behind the scenes will be more enthusiastic in backing the final product, even if it doesn’t reflect all of their goals.“Having them [groups] inside of the tent, feeling like they are listened to, and helping to shape things ends up being a real service to the party,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs who has written extensively about progressive groups. He added that if groups feel included, “They’re going to spend more time saying, ‘We need to win [upcoming elections] because our priorities become law when we win.’”Democrats do some of this already. But what I’m calling for is a partywide understanding that movements, groups, and elected officials are in a collective project to build support for liberal policies and values. That’s how the right operates. Christian conservatives, anti-tax groups, congressional Republicans, GOP governors, the Trump administration, and Fox News are embedded in a broader movement (Make America Great Again) that is led by Trump but still carried on when he was out of office from 2021 to 2024.What about when groups take stands that might hurt Democrats politically? The evidence that “defund the police” and other left-wing rhetoric damaged the party is weak, considering that many progressive ideas emerged from 2017 to 2020, when Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress. That said, it’s true that groups sometimes push ideas that aren’t popular in swing districts. Managing this tension actually isn’t complicated though. Candidates, particularly during election time, should run on their own proposals and carefully distance themselves from more controversial ideas of groups, without undermining broader movements. Mamdani and, yes, Trump, have figured this out. During the presidential election, Trump repeatedly stated that Project 2025 was not his own campaign platform, while at the same time not attacking the ideas in that document or not pledging that he wouldn’t implement them as president. Last year, Mamdani remained aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America while stating he would not push its most left-wing ideas as mayor.3. Work the Refs—and Seed New OnesEven if Democratic politicians and left-leaning groups actively try to shape public opinion, they will fail if their ideas are presented to voters in super-negative ways. The Democratic Party has to actively change the media environment if it wants liberal values and ideas to thrive.How? First, Democratic officials need to critique the mainstream media more. The decades-long Republican attack on news organizations as being biased against the GOP has worked. In my stints at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and NBC News, I saw constant efforts to rebut this accusation. The result was biased coverage—against Democrats. The radical, anti-democratic tendencies of the Republican Party are under-covered, while mistakes by Democratic politicians are exaggerated. Yes, a growing number of Americans don’t get their news from traditional organizations. But the political narratives and stories you see on social media often originate in mainstream media, so their fear of offending Republicans really matters.“Unless the left is able to ... convince those folks within elite journalism to not only look over their rightward shoulder but to look over their leftward shoulder as well, then I think we’re in trouble, because it’s mainstream legacy media that sets the overall agenda for politics,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama journalism professor and author of a recent book on conservative criticism of the media.Some Democratic politicians criticize individual stories, but there is not a partywide critique. That’s a missed opportunity. Democratic officials should use the phrases “false equivalence” and “both sides-ing” often, so that Americans remember that mainstream news is being framed to make Democrats seem as bad as Trump. They should also remind voters that pro-Trump bias often comes from outlets’ owners, who want to curry favor with the president for their financial benefit. “Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post” and “David Ellison’s CBS News” should be regularly coming from the mouths of Democratic politicians. The media should be as worried about annoying the left as it is the right.Pointing out the flaws of the mainstream media will help with another critical project for Democrats: getting more Americans to consume progressive news outlets (in addition to mainstream ones). The right has spent decades not only attacking the mainstream media but creating alternative outlets and encouraging conservatives to get their news from them. The result is a huge partisan imbalance in media viewership. About the same number of Democrats say they regularly get news from outlets like NPR and The New York Times as say they get news from left-leaning MS NOW, while Fox is far and away the leading political news source for Republicans. So Republican voters are receiving and then sharing anti-liberal talking points every day—as are the Democrats who only get their news from places like the Times.Democratic voters have likely heard the narrative that the media is biased toward the left. But in reality, outlets such as The Guardian, Zeteo, The American Prospect, Democracy Now!, and The New Republic are very distinct from the Times and CNN. While still grounded in facts and evidence, these news organizations openly promote liberal values and cover the Republican Party frankly. Prominent Democratic politicians should publicly announce the liberal outlets they like and tweet their articles, helping to expand their audiences. Even if swing voters and Republicans aren’t directly reading news from these progressive outlets, their coverage will reach them if more liberals are sharing it.“Rather than position the voices of people in power as central figures in our reporting, we take a deeper look at the experiences of marginalized people, center them in our reporting and hold power to account,” said Lara Witt, editor in chief of Prism.Finally, there are “news deserts” across the country, particularly in rural areas, lacking news outlets and full-time journalists. The Democratic Party should fill them. There’s a precedent here: Newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often founded by and associated with political parties. The various committees and super PACs run by Democrats raise hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle, so the party can afford this. And it would have much greater value than more TV ads.You might argue that no one in rural Kentucky will read a newspaper owned by the Democratic Party. Wrong. I’m very liberal but read the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, papers controlled by the conservative Murdoch family, because the articles are interesting. Similarly, these Democratic Party–owned papers should not be running House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s speeches on their home pages (no one would read them), but instead breaking news in local communities that conservatives wouldn’t want to miss.These outlets would almost certainly help the Democrats in rural areas, because straightforward coverage of even school board meetings would show the radicalism of today’s Republicans. And papers funded by the Democratic Party can and should have left-leaning op-eds and editorials that espouse liberal values, although the main emphasis should be on news gathering.4. Become a More Civic PartyPolitical psychology research shows that many people first align with a group and then adjust their political views accordingly. So they don’t join a conservative church because they are against abortion and LGBTQ rights, but rather they join the church and then adopt those stands to fit into their new social environment. The troubling version of this for Democrats is that perhaps the party has lost ground among white voters without college degrees and Black voters of all education levels not because of some ideological shift among those groups, but because of declining membership in unions and Black churches, two parts of American society that have long been tied to the Democratic Party.Democrats can’t ignore this social part of politics. They should instead build a more civic-minded, community-rooted party where liberal values are spread in people’s day-to-day lives. The decline in bowling leagues and other group-based activities and organizations that political scientist Robert Putnam chronicled in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, is much more pronounced now. The pews are empty, and so are the union halls. There is growing evidence of a loneliness crisis. Modern American society promotes (largely unintentionally) individualism, hypercompetitiveness, a scarcity mindset—essentially, that you are not your brother’s keeper nor he yours, and that the companies you work for shouldn’t care about you. Those are conservative values and more in line with today’s Republican Party. The Democratic worldview requires citizens to have a strong sense of the common good, that they should enthusiastically pay taxes for public schools and libraries even if they use neither.To combat this individualistic mindset, Democrats ultimately need more Americans in groups, connecting with one another, ideally in person. I don’t care which kinds of groups: churches, alumni associations, pickleball leagues, DSA chapters, Rotary Clubs, unions. (Yes, even the local Republican Party, if its members are so inclined.) We need to (re)build a real collective society, where people belong to and feel beholden to causes beyond themselves.“The Democratic Party … where it succeeds is in a place where there is a public, Trump works in a place where there’s no public,” said Pete Davis, a left-leaning writer and civic activist and co-founder of the Democracy Policy Network, which works on pro-democracy policies at the state level.Some of those groups will overtly push people toward more progressive worldviews. Labor unions are skeptical of big business and billionaires. Unitarian Universalist congregations are very much in favor of immigration and LGBTQ rights. I’m particularly optimistic about the increased organizing on the left to create debtors and tenants’ unions. That develops new identities (debtor, tenant) among working-class people that point them to progressive beliefs and voting on those beliefs.Democratic politicians should be actively promoting the idea that a good Democrat isn’t watching MS NOW all day but instead engaged in groups and civic life in their community. Obama releases his favorite books, movies, and songs each year. But people often read, watch TV, and listen to music alone. I wish he instead listed his favorite community groups.In addition, the party itself can become a civic organization. Political parties in the nineteenth century used to host, well, parties. (Really festivals and barbecues.) Even in the twentieth century, local parties often operated as clubs where people hung out. But today, most Democrats have almost no connection to the party beyond voting and maybe giving money.Imagine if the local Democratic parties in all 435 congressional districts were regularly hosting barbecues, concerts, book clubs, soccer games, and other activities that were drawing in people of all ages. That would build stronger ties among existing Democrats. More importantly, it’s easy to imagine that some independents would participate in Democratic Party events for the social aspect. They’d gradually learn that most Democrats aren’t overeducated scolds, and eventually many would adopt liberal positions and become Democratic voters in part to fit in with their new friends.“Building local party infrastructure … can put Democrats back on the map in a lot of places where they haven’t really been a serious force,” said Samuel Bagg, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina.5. Get More Young People VotingAnother crucial step for Democrats in creating a more liberal electorate is getting more Americans under age 45 to consistently vote. The young don’t need to be moved left; they need to be moved from the political sidelines.As the surprising shift right by Latinos over the last decade has shown, we should not assume that demographic characteristics alone dictate how people vote. But millennial and Gen Z Americans are a huge opportunity for Democrats. They are more likely to describe themselves as liberal than their older counterparts. They hate Trump. They hold more liberal views on immigration, abortion, race, and transgender rights than their elders. They are more supportive of Medicare for All and universal childcare. They are much less religious than older Americans, a factor that pulls many people of color to the political right. “Young voters remain the most progressive segment of the electorate,” said Adam Bonica, a Stanford University professor and elections expert.The problem for Democrats is that voter turnout among younger people consistently lags way behind older ones. In 2024, 60 percent of voting-eligible Americans ages 25 to 44 cast ballots. Among those 65 and older, 75 percent voted.How can Democrats get more young people voting? Three ways. First and most importantly, they need policies that excite young people. Polls and interviews show younger people are deeply worried about achieving the American dream of a steady job and owning their home, as well as the potential disruption to their careers because of artificial intelligence. Democrats need to have credible ideas to address these challenges.Mamdani showed the way. His proposals, such as universal, publicly funded childcare for kids from six weeks up to age five, were much more aggressive than the Democrats’ usual barrage of complicated tax credits and incremental programs. Democrats nationally need to do the same, pushing Medicare for All and other transformative proposals that might strike financially secure boomers as too disruptive but would make younger people take notice.Second, the party must embrace politicians whom younger people like. Many Democratic politicians treat Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders as people that the party should be ashamed of. They certainly don’t want any member of that trio to define the party to voters. But a party synonymous with Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is never going to juice turnout among younger Americans. A party tightly associated with Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and others with passionate followings among younger Americans might.The Democrats’ 2028 ticket must include a person who really excites younger voters. Yes, a few swing voters might be turned off by having a young progressive on the ticket. But the bigger risk is having an uninspiring ticket that results in low youth turnout. “If the Democratic Party both nominates a compelling presidential candidate that young people trust, and builds the party around their vision in a way that is credibly populist and against an establishment-dominated status quo, I could see a new Democratic Party brand arise that young people would attach themselves to,” said Jake Grumbach, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s public policy school who writes often about voting patterns among young voters.Third, Democrats must get better at short-form video. Democratic politicians are experimenting with new ways to reach voters, from interviews with recently created outlets like MeidasTouch to hosting their own podcasts. Good. But much of that content is boring, super-partisan, and long. Younger people in particular get their news via clips on TikTok.The way that many in New York (and nationally) first learned of Mamdani was when he released a video right after the 2024 election in which he interviewed people on the street who had either voted for Trump or not voted at all. That video went viral because of how unusual it was. A politician was not talking but listening. It was not partisan; Mamdani was letting people point out the shortcomings of his own party. It was less than three minutes long. From there, Mamdani kept putting out memorable content about himself. Younger people I talked to who lived far from New York could recall some of his videos in striking detail.Viral video alone isn’t going to save the Democratic Party. But Democrats aren’t going to get their ideas in front of younger Americans, never mind connect with them, if they don’t realize that in 2026 Instagram and TikTok are equal in importance to MS NOW and the Times as political platforms.Against FatalismBased on the large number and broad scale of the ideas I’ve offered here, you might think that I see the Democratic Party in dire straits. I don’t. As the Democrats’ very strong results in the 2025 elections showed, American voters are perpetually dissatisfied and seem to punish whichever party is in power. With Trump in the Oval Office and deeply unpopular, the Democrats in my view would be the favorites to win the House, presidency, and perhaps even the Senate in the next three years even if the party didn’t change a single tactic.But because today’s Republican Party is so radical, we can’t afford to have the pendulum shift back against Democrats in the near future. Democrats need to win several elections in a row, to either force the Republican Party to normalize or to ensure that a pro-democracy party remains in charge. And for that to happen, ultimately, we need a new American electorate, one that affirmatively votes against authoritarian white identity politics and votes for multicultural social democracy. And creating that kind of electorate requires trying a multitude of tactics and strategies, both in the short and long-term.When Democrats and liberals have tried to lead the electorate toward more progressive ideas, they’ve often succeeded. That’s how we got the New Deal, the civil rights victories of the 1960s, numerous advances for women and LGBTQ Americans in the next few decades after that, and more. What I’m calling for most is a rejection of fatalism. Any time they lose a presidential election, party leaders and strategists conclude the American electorate is irreparably center-right, and Democrats must take heed. Senate Democrats didn’t unify to strongly oppose most of Trump’s Cabinet nominees early last year. It felt as if the party was trying to apologize to voters for being too liberal and anti-Trump in the past. But when Democrats and liberals have tried to lead the electorate toward more progressive ideas, they’ve often succeeded. That’s how we got the New Deal, the civil rights victories of the 1960s, numerous advances for women and LGBTQ Americans in the next few decades after that, the election of a Black president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and a return to populist economic policies in the Biden years.America’s voters have accepted a much fuller, deeper democracy than the Founders initially designed. And while the Republican Party was the one that ended slavery, in the last several decades, it’s been the Democrats who have been remaking the American electorate into one that demands equality, justice, and freedom. The Democrats must stop vacillating between pollingism and conviction and accept that the best version of their party is one that leads people toward more liberal views.

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