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.
what would be sweet is to use mobility data to judge the impact of the inflow into exurban areas, by whichever definition. For inmigrant population flow, Census can tell you the locality of where they came from, by fips or zip. It’s a rough barometer, but you may be able to separate the “place or person” effect by tracking voting patterns of the places new migrants left. Are the exurbs being flooded by people from red counties, blue counties, or a random pattern? What was it like 10 years ago, and how are these people (by locality) voting now?
I’m a little worried, though. As we go from same sex marriage to “values” in general to faith in particular to exurbs, debunking each as we go–it becomes clearer that it may just have been that John Kerry was not a popular guy to more of the people. Nobody said we were a brilliantly deliberative nation.
Setting aside whether or not the Big Exurban Bloc is a myth, let’s look at the other part of the DLC’s picture:
They’re telling us that in order to appeal to white-flight exurbers, we have to ditch the African-Americans, Latinos, and Southeast Asian-Americans.
Is that really what we should be doing?
Oh, and by the way: The DLC has been saying for well over a decade that we must move to the right in order get and keep Corporate America’s campaign money flowing into our coffers.
Guess what? After ten-plus years of following the DLC’s policies, Corporate America, which used to at most give twice as much cash to Republicans as it did to Democrats, now gives TEN TIMES as much to the GOP as to the Democrats. The only reason the Democrats were able to compete at all this cycle was because of the grass-roots small donors — the very people the DLCers can’t stand.
very useful work. thanks, tex.
wonder if one realizes that george orwell is peeking over the edge vis a vis this topic. the framework of the debate is based on defining the unit of measure and the Right is working towards a numbering system of value where they can add 1 and 1 and get 3.
I also think the exurban panic presumes that voting patterns attach themselves to places rather than people. An exurban county is, by definition, fast growing but sparsely populated. It’s likely that the first people who move to such places tend to be conservative, because of their age, occupation, family status, religion, etc. But as the places get large and complex, they become more diverse and more Democratic. Look at the State of California if you want an example.
Also, Gerth calls Bucks County, PA part of a “Main Line.” Wrong. For one thing, the “Main Line” refers to the very tony burbs south and west of Philadelphia in Delaware and Montgomery Counties. Lower Bucks County (a separate unit from Upper Bucks) refers to the more middle class burbs northeast of the city. And neither is truly exurban.
Isn’t a county too large as a unit of analysis? The fact that “exurban” style development projects are built in a county adds a dimension, but it does not wipe out older residential and economic systems which may be long established. I know the area around Dayton Ohio fairly well, and two of the counties with controversy — Green and Warren — both have “Exurban” development economically attached to Dayton (and the massive US Airforce presence at WPAFB) — but as whole counties they have much that is in no way “Exurban” — some towns that are old rust belt — others that are college towns with a particular character.