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.
I’m not sure that “most people” are that extreme. For sure, those that are appear pretty scary and I don’t think any amount of persuasion is going to change them. However the people in the mountain states or the Midwest that voted Republican in the last two elections (or longer-really since 1994) are beginning to redirect their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Eight years of Bush didn’t help them much.
The question is will they be pulled further to the right by McCain/Palin or will they return to the more moderate stance they have historically had. Someone has to connect with them like the Governor of Montana did.
The problem is, don’t you think, that compared with most voters, she is not that extreme? Since her speech, Obama’s lead has been destroyed…with ONE speech! and she will give hundreds more in the next 60 days.
We need less extreme people voting, but folks, it’s time to face facts..most people like the right wing extremism of the nominees.
I agree that it needs to be driven home that Palin’s views are extreme and are particularly extreme on issues that are important to women. Here is something that could be polished up and drive the point home.
“Didn’t Sarah Palin and her family look great at the RNC, especially so as she delivered her speech on Wednesday? But she really didn’t say much about issues, in particular issues that are important to women. One has to look toward John McCain to see what his ticket really thinks about issues essential to women. When asked what he thought about pro-choice, his response was that he “favored a constitutional amendment” making abortions illegal in the United States. One has to assume that he wouldn’t have picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, if she didn’t feel the same way. Look at what John McCain has said. That’s what you can expect if McCain/Palin are elected.”
Pushing back on mockery
This mockery worked very well against Kerry-Edwards in 2004, who never used it effectively against Bush and Cheney. Reagan used it against Carter successfully too.
I think the Dems have to hit back – not necessarily Obama or his campaign, but ads need to do some of this, and surrogates too. It is hard and dicey to push back with mockery, because of McCain’s vet/POW status, and because it could be seen as sexism against Palin.
On Gov. Palin
(1) Don’t mention Palin’s name without the adjective “extremist”. She is farther right than George Bush and Dick Cheney. She’s a Dick Cheney masquerading in lipstick and heels. She may be a better shot with a gun, but her policies are more off the mark. ‘Extremist’ captures her accurately and avoids patronizing her. Look at her positions on abortion, humans having no affect on global warming, & stem-cell research.
(2) At best, Palin is the biggest flipflopper in the race. At worst she has misrepresented herself. Examples: Bridge to nowhere, Chomping at the trough of congressional pork, troopergate.
(3) Oh, and the sum total of Palin’s international experience before she applied for a passport in 2006 is she’d been to Canada. (She subsequently visited US troops in three countries, Iraq, Kuwait and Germany). That’s worse than George Bush, and look where he got us on foreign policy.
On Sen. McCain
(4) Can we mock McCain and Palin both as blind agents of big oil? They don’t need to deal with lobbyists – they are the lobbyists for big oil! The new McCain-Palin ticket is like the Exxon-Mobil merger. Americans will be paying for the hundreds of millions that will go into the pockets of oil companies and their executives – just like Cheney and Bush. Are we going to let this country, and its decisions about foreign policy, have 4 more years of being driven by the handservants of oil companies? That’s worked great for the public/
(5) ‘Country First’?!?!? What about rich people’s pockets first?! That’s what this last 8 years have brought. We have numbers on this!!! McCain and his Bush economic policies (not to mention countless homes) promise the continuation of this.
(6) How abot mocking McCain for ‘not getting’ that his economic policies are the same as Bush’s? Does he not get the very phrase he used to describe his education policy (‘civil rights issue of our time’ – Bush in 2002; ‘civil rights issue of this century’ – McCain on Sept 4) was used by GW Bush early in his presidency? Have his advisers not pointed this out?
(7) Republicans have been poor stewards of the lives of American troops. Where is the outrage over the most important cost to America of this bungled war in Iraq? It is McCain and his party who pushed it. Surely we can name three or five servicemen/women who died due to the failure to fund adequate armor for Humvees? Yes we know and remember the victims of 9/11. But Afghanistan is where we should have pressed our military power, not the distraction in Iraq.
You can’t lose what you never had, and McCain never really had complete control of the Republican Party. His recognition of this political fact is evident in his acquiescence to the Christianist veto of his preferred running mates — Ridge and Lieberman — and his acceptance of the religious right’s candidate.