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.
A lot of Democrats I’ve talked to are really worried about what the Republicans are going to uncork before the election. But I haven’t felt any sense of panic about the Swiftboat-style attacks from the Obama campaign, which is heartening. Each McCain attack (notably the pathetic “celebrity” ads) has been met with a strong and sometimes stinging response, and while voters may not have digested all the policy nuances of each clash, I think they’re registering that Obama isn’t going to flinch. He’s managed to continue projecting a seriousness about policy, an avoidance of character-driven negativity, and a willingness to fight back when necessary.
I think, too, that the Republicans might have been overly optimistic about the Swiftboating possibilities of this race. Given all the excitement about Obama, I think they thought a few hits on his character would induce the kind of Obama-fatigue stories that the media sometimes embraces at a certain point in the campaign. But although there has been a sort of hero glow about the campaign, I think his style of speaking has helped to dissipated that so that hero-worship couldn’t take root (at least, not as a media or campaign meme. No hero-worship, no sudden fall from grace based on sudden “revelations.”
I agree that ulitmately these ugly, mean-spirited, juvenile and bigoted* attacks are more likely to damage McCain than Obama, and will even go so far as to predict that long before November we’ll be talking about how McCain and his supporters Swift Boated themselves.
2008 is not 2004, and Obama is not Kerry. One reason – perhaps the primary one – that the Swift Boat attacks damaged Kerry is that they were a much bigger part of the campaign because there was relatively little there there. This is particularly true compared to this year’s campaign – it’s already safe to predict that if Obama loses, the post mortems won’t point to a single smear that doomed him (unless it turns out that he’s the father of Rielle’s baby – I assume Mickey Kaus is on the case so we’ll find out soon enough, or better yet, on October 30th). In addition, people looking for substantive reasons to vote for Obama (or against him) will find plenty, in stark contrast to 2004 where the main substantive issue was that one guy was Bush and the other wasn’t. Non-Bushness was a sufficient reason for me, the other members of Kerry Haters For Kerry (motto – “vote for him before you vote against him”) and a huge number of people to vote for him, but Bushness got even more votes.
That’s not to say that the smears are irrelevant, or that they will be easy to deal with. But, the biggest difficulty in dealing with the smears won’t be refuting them, it will be refuting them without giving them wider circulation than they’d have otherwise, without seeming oversensitive or thin-skinned, and without giving McCain an opening to say that Obama’s playing the race card. Also, the best response to any smear or pack of smears won’t be something Obama says, but rather what decent, fair-minded people say to themselves when they hear the smears. And the best way to get people to say to themselves “this attack is ugly, mean-spirited, juvenile and bigoted” is for Obama to state clearly and forthrightly who he is, what he stands for, and what he’ll do if given the keys to the White House.
That’s what he’s been doing, of course, and while the results have been too slow in coming for many commentators who wonder why Obama hasn’t already sewn up 80% of the electorate, the game is barely underway. If Obama is able to present a consistent message that undermines the smears before they’re made, and if McCain continues to flail about desperately looking for any grounds for attack, no matter how baseless, and continues to change policy positions based on which way he thinks the wind is blowing (or what he thinks will play well with the ugly, etc. “Base”), Obama will be getting his mail at 1600 Penn. Ave. come January.
*When I say “bigoted” I’m not referring to bigotry against black folks, because that would be playing the race card, and would overlook the fact that conservatives are the best friends African-Americans have ever had (at least according to conservatives). Instead, I mean bigotry against the liberal “Other.” Such bigotry is morally and intellectually wrong (and indeed explains a lot about why the conservative movement has sunk so low), but since it does not include nearly as much lynching and injustice and oppression as bigotry against black folks did (and to a lesser extent, still does), the charge is not as freighted, and can therefore be made in polite company.