The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.
Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.
Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.
It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.
Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.
So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”
Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.
At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).
From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.
We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:
“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.
“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”
On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:
“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.
“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”
While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.
to whoever played devils advocate on NJ,
This is the Bush feint into blue territory. Remember the California feint in 2000? That’s what these stories are.
As for McGreevy, he’s such a local politician that not even any New Jersyites link him with the national party. I mean he was just an obscure state legislator before 2001. Besides which, governors can;t really do much for their national party. Republican gov. Ernie Fletcher is very unpopular in KY, but Bush will still win there. Ditto on NJ.
I agree that this is all going to come down to turnout. I have another question, though.
Again this morning, Zogby shows Bush ahead 48/44. The explanation is that more Republicans are voting for Bush than Dems are voting Kerry (by a pretty large margin, I think; 14% of Dems are polling for Bush, 5% Repubs for Kerry). I’m just finding this sort of odd, and wonder if you have any idea of what gives with this.
Addy
Mark –
I have the same take on all this as you do.
I just read the Big FIVE-OH a few days ago, about the maximum for the incumbent between the last poll and the election day numbers, and I think it is completely valid that that last poll % is his election day %, too.
I have been saying for several weeks (months, really) that if Bush is not leading by MORE than five in a state he is toast. My reason has to do with the massive turnout that is coming – and will blow the pollsters out of the water. The 200 election was boring, boring, boring, and the turnout of 50.8% reflects that. I can’t see the turnout being less that 56% (I am expecting 60%), and I also cannot see how Bush can get more than a 20% share of the increase in vote totals. I have so far only heard of a 1 million increase in GOP voters.
Anybody else that has better figures on that?
SO many people stayed home in 2000 because they were bored or because they bought into the Rove lie that Bush was the same as Gore anyway, so what difference does it make?
The rest of the increase will go to Kerry, who did not bore us – even though the press seems to think he does. Hatred for Bush is rampant, and I don’t think the media and pollsters have a clue.
Mark,
Just to play devil’s advocate — someone I know suggested that NJ might be a lot tighter than expected this year due to a backlash against the Dems from the McGreevey scandal.
According to these two news stories just out, Kerry appears to be surging in Florida. After several weeks of being behind by 3-5 points, two polls out Friday show he is tied in one and 4 points AHEAD in the other. Here are the links:
http://www.bocaratonnews.com/index.php?src=news&category=Local%20News&prid=9844
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36823-2004Oct15.html
Difference of 4 with MOE +/-3? I don’t think you
really needed to actually explain the difference, did
you?
Although I tend to buy your argument about weighting
by party, I don’t see how you can just reweight the
way you do in all your posts here. If party ID is correlated
with other demographic categories, then won’t
merely reweighting make the other demographics wrong,
given that the samples have *already* been reweighted
to fix those demographics?
For example, if men are more likely to be GOP, then
reweighting a survey with too many GOP would also
make the survey too female. That doesn’t seem like
an improvement to me. Obviously, including
party ID as part of the reweighting matrix (where the
relationship between party ID and age/sex/income
is taken into account) is reasonable, but that’s not
what you’ve done here (unless you have all this
data, which I didn’t think was so easily obtainable).
i agree about not being concerned about tracking poll changes. although i think of zogby as being one of the best pollsters, i don’t think things change that fast unless something big happens. just a few days ago kerry was up by 3 or 4 in zogby’s poll.
Based on what I’ve seen in all the polling thus far, I believe we are looking at an electoral landslide for Kerry on Nov. 2.
First of all, incumbents do not win re-election with approval ratings in the 40s, with 56% of voters consistently saying the country is on the “wrong track” and when they are presiding over a wobbly, if not failing, domestic and foreign policy (see Jimmy Carter).
Second, numerous pollsters including Ruy have said that within the last 3 weeks of a campaign, the only number that counts is not the spread but the INCUMBENT’s percentage. In all of the polls taken over the last week, Bush is at between 44% and 48%, meaning that is almost certain to be the MAXIMUM he will get of the popular vote. Not a good sign for the president.
Third, and perhaps most important, I am convinced that Democrats and Kerry voters are being DRAMATICALLY undersampled in every one of these polls. The most clear evidence of this are the state polls in New Jersey that show Bush within 5 points or less. Now, Gore won New Jersey by 15 POINTS in 2000, and there are actually more registered Dems there now. And nothing in the dynamic of New Jersey has changed to explain a 10-point swing from 2000 (I don’t buy the ‘terrorism has touched them’ argument because that is not showing up in the NYC polls). The only plausible explanation is that a substantial number of Democrats and Kerry voters are not being reached by the pollsters in New Jersey — and that trend obviously would hold true in every other state. Therefore I would wager that any state in which Bush is not at least 5 points ahead on Election Day he will lose.
Anyone have any thoughts on these observations?
I’ve long thought that the Dems had benefitted from not having a someone run on their fringe, unlike Republicans, who have been losing votes to the Libertarians and other right-wing fringe parties for years. The Dems will just have to get used to dealing with a crankish fringe siphoning off the occasional percentage point on their left.
At this point, anybody who is actually going to cast a vote for Nader is someone who, absent Nader, probably wouldn’t vote for Kerry anyway – they’d vote for some other third party (what’s Peace & Freedom doing this year?), write in “Donald Duck”, or just not vote at all (and sneer about how “all those parties are owned by the same corporate fascists, maaaaan.”) Those votes aren’t really “lost” to the Democrats. The Dems should just plow forward and concentrate on registering and getting the votes of people in critical battleground areas.
That doesn’t mean the Dems should make it easy for Nader – they should work to stymie his candidacy at every level, if only to hone their election law skills. Hell, they could try a bit of old Clinton-style triangulation and run against Nader and his crazier ideas, to burnish their moderate appeal.
This issue is up my alley, because I am a progressive and not a DLC Democrat at all. Many people I know supported Nader in 2000 — but somehow managed in NY to support Hillary against Lazio. (Kind of odd to be FOR a Clinton Democrat in NY against an honorable Republican, but not nationally against a self-evident turkey. I supported both Democrats, because, when the chips are down, the national Republican Party has NOTHING to offer positively either in Congress or the White House, while the Democrats are at least the lesser of two evils — on many issues no different but other significantly so.)
On Nader — He’s polling around 1%, and Andrew Kohut says his numbers are going down and down steadily. In swing states it should even be lower. But in one region — the upper midwest (Iowa, Minn, and Wisc) he appears to have a substantial base, more likely to tip a state there all other things being equal than anywhere else. A concerted effort by the Michael Moore progressives for Kerry in that region, figuring out where the pockets of Nader voters are and with 527’s buying up media time in those less than superpricey markets with progressive voices like Chomsky should be able to make a real dent right in that area. A strategic approach to the problem would be helpful.
Nader’s alliance with sleazy corporate Republicans in the election (openly) should be flaunted in front of these voters, then have trusted progressives who support Kerry make the case for Kerry Edwards to the Left RATHER THAN wasting the time and concern of the candidates themselves.
—————
For some voters, really getting down to brass tacks about unemployment and the strategic deficit as a lever against future Social Security, as well as the draft should win over both mainstream AND progressive voters. These are areas that gain broader support in BOTH directions at the mass level rather than sacrificing the swing voters to win progressives.
————-
I’m much more concerned about the fallout from the ‘nuisance’ article — which is what it was. I even read a poster at this site whose views I highly respect praising the picture of Kerry in the article.
Its distortions were crafted to be subtle, but they were distortions and not merely differences of interpretation. And they were systematic and deliberate, which is probably why Kerry was (by the reporter’s own account) so suspicious of him. He was clearly fishing for materiel to use against Kerry and has done the job. Kerry MUST respond more effectively, both to the distorted article and then the second layer of distortion from the Dick Morrises of the world.
It is a case of highbrow demagogy — more dangerous as you can’t always recognize it, but having spent 15 years of my life in and around Harvard and Berkeley (degrees from each) I do know how to smell it a mile off. Slicker than the SwiftBoat smear but no less slimy.
If Nader gets 1-2% of the vote, how many of those people would vote for Kerry even if Nader didn’t exist? If Nader voters are otherwise non-voters (or Socialist Worker Party voters), it doesn’t matter.
Frankly, I’m not worried about the Zogby numbers. There’s no reason why Bush’s numbers ought to have gone up, plus he’s still under 50%. If he can’t break 50 in at least a few polls, he’s in trouble, since late deciders always go for the challenging party.
As for Nader, I can’t see him getting much more than 1.5%, maybe not even that much. He was polling 4% in 2000 and only got 2.7%, and it’s reasonable to expect that some of his supporters will defect when they see that there’s a real possibility of Bush remaining president. Almost half of Nader’s 2000 supporters defected at the last minute, so why not again?
What do you think the odds are that those polled purposefully lie about what their party preference is? If it is known ahead of time that the pollster weights the survey based on party preference, I can tip the survey in favor of Bush if I state that I am a Democrat but am voting for Bush. The converse is also true. Is there any scuttlebutt out there that operatives are encouraging their followers to misstate their party affiliation when polled?
Okay, I did freak out at Zogby today, but I’m chilled now…