Democrats recalibrate their resistance to Trump
12/15/241/2(Seems like Trump's unity message is sinking in)
Democrats are not planning an all-hands resistance to President-elect Trump.
At least not in 2016 style, when lawmakers, activists, volunteers and millions of angry voters mounted a party-wide effort to curb his newfound influence in Washington.
Where so much was once unprecedented, Trump is now familiar. Ahead of January 2025,the lack of a unified Democratic rebuttal to his second term is the latest sign that the party’s just beginning to soul search, trying to figure out what went wrong before banding together to bash the GOP.
“The one thingwe seem to know is the strategy of being an anti-Trump party didn’t workany better than when we became a primarily anti-Bush party,” said Max Burns, a Democratic commentator. “In that transformation, we seem to have become unclear about what our actual pro-Democrat message is.”
“It’s more like Republicans post-1960 than anything,” he said, “where the loss led to a real round of questioning about what our values are and what our strategy is.”
On the one hand, the month-and-a-half postelection period can seem like decades, as D.C.’s political class awaits the unpredictable transition of power.On the other, it’s just a blip in what many expect to be a long undertaking to redefine the Democratic Party beyond Trump’s shadow.
As voters who found sympathies with Trump inch closer toward a home with the GOP, liberals and moderates are in the messy process of figuring out their ideals, how to unite around them and how to message everything to the rest of the country. Results showed it’s not motivating enough to be against the MAGA president-elect, challenging a doctrine party loyalists have clung to over the past eight years.
While some still insist Trump’s reelection remains an existential threat, those voices have become more muted.Democrats’ “save our democracy” rhetoric, a fear-based approach effective in past cycles, tanked this time, and many want a new way of operating after losing significant power.
The 2017 pomp and circumstance of rage solidarity has also died down. Back then, America’s raw political divisions and fear of the unknown prompted thousands to pour into the streets, protesting what they saw as Trump’s misogyny with a “Women’s March” and similar advocacy uprisings.
“It is clear that fighting back against Trump and MAGA will definitely look different this time than it did in 2017 because the circumstances are different,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn PAC.
“But there is energy to organize and push back that we know is there. The key will be understanding that we have to be strategic with how we deploy that energy,” she said.
Indeed,Democrats are slowly unpacking their recent losses with constituencies whom they saw move even further away from their party, questioning if being fully against Trump is the right approach.
“We’re clearly not persuading labor, or Hispanics, or young people the way we used to, because our message is so vague now that it’s hard to grab onto and rally behind,” said Burns. “Voters are angry, and they want populism, and they’ll take a bad version over none at all, so Trump gets to sell his sham populism largely unchallenged.”
Progressives have started to try a new tactic.Some in the Senate and House have expressed a willingness to consider — or, even in some cases, enthusiastically embrace — Trump’s goals and administration picks. It’s different from the tone ahead of his first term, when the sheer shock value of many of his choices burned through any goodwill Democrats may have been willing to offer.
Some on the left are challenging Democrats’ default to reject Republicans just for the sake of party loyalty.
“I think the hypocrisy of opposing an idea you agree with because somebody on the other side also agrees is what is seen as one of the biggest problems with the two-party system right now,” said a former campaign adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
“Seriously, when you talk to actual voters, most … don’t apply an ideological definition to their beliefs,” the former adviser said.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5039827-democratic-party-trump-resistance/amp/