Democrats Are Learning How to Fight Donald Trump — Slowly

Cameron Allen is close to the Democratic Party’s ideal voter. A millennial lawyer from Kentucky, Allen was part of the wave of energized younger Democrats who sent Andy Beshear to the governor’s office in 2018 and mobilized behind Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. Allen detests Donald Trump and opposes the Republican Party’s slide into the gutter of authoritarianism. But ask Allen about the Democratic Party and the room temperature drops.

“Being a Democrat is the most depressing thing in the world,” Allen laments in a phone call. “You wake up thinking the people in charge must either not care at all, or they’re so incompetent they don’t know how to adjust for the moment. Last year, we talked so much about this being our big fight against authoritarianism. Instead, it feels like we went right back to normal after November.” 

Allen’s grim view of the Democratic leadership is shared by millions of voters across the country. A Quinnipiac survey published on January 29 revealed a Democratic Party more unpopular than at any time in the poll’s history. By mid-March, those numbers had collapsed even more, after a national NBC News poll found Democrats at their lowest favorability in history. Only about a quarter of registered voters now say they view Democrats in a favorable light. Yikes.

Trump’s popularity has plummeted in recent weeks as the cost of his incoherent policies starts to bite into Americans’ savings. That might tempt some Democrats to mistake Trump’s tanking popularity with a rise in their own support, but nothing could be further from the truth. Democrats can’t take Trump’s momentary unpopularity as an excuse to avoid being the party their voters want them to be.

Democrats have struggled with a credibility crisis, of varying degrees, since it became clear that White House officials had misled the party and the American people about former President Joe Biden’s fitness for a second term. But that alone didn’t slap Democrats with political pariah status. Voters are so frustrated because Democratic leaders — especially Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — seem to lack the fighting spirit this moment demands.

“Swing voters swing because they think both parties have something to offer, and they think Democrats are better at checking corporate power and protecting personal rights than Republicans,” says Evan Roth Smith, a pollster and co-founder of consulting firm Slingshot Strategies. “One of the problems the Democratic Party has is swing voters just don’t see us as the party they need us to be at this moment, so they have no reason to come back.”

Nowhere is that more clear than in the near-supermajority of Democrats and left-leaning independents who say the Democratic Party is too soft on Republicans. That wasn’t always the case: Back in 2017, during Trump’s first term, a CNN poll found that 74 percent of Democrats and Dem leaners wanted Congress to engage in bipartisan cooperation. By March 2025, that number had flipped, with 57 percent of respondents saying Democrats should use any means necessary to stop Trump’s extreme agenda.

A big part of that disconnect boils down to personal political strategies. When Schumer bucked House Democratic leadership (and enraged millions of Democratic voters) to provide the crucial votes for the GOP’s spending bill last month, averting a government shutdown, he acted based on a set of political rules that have guided his senate career since 1998. 

Schumer cherishes his political rules, including a die-hard belief that voters reward the party that acts like “the adult in the room,” a strategy Schumer and Democratic leaders argue paid electoral dividends between 2018 and 2022. But the strategy of bipartisan camaraderie with the right has evaporated in the blaze of Trump’s extralegal kidnappings, ruinous trade wars, and mass firings of federal employees. In a flash, the same strategy that once seemed mature now looks like dangerous appeasement. 

Some Democrats are done waiting on leadership to understand the new political landscape in which we now live. Progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Gov. Tim Walz are barnstorming the nation to sell a brand of populism that borrows liberally from Trump’s throw-the-bums-out rallies. Their message that greedy oligarchs and compromised Republican lawmakers are picking voters’ pockets is clearly resonating: Over 30,000 Coloradans turned out for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s rally on March 22, the largest crowd of either politician’s career. 

That idea clashes with corporate-aligned centrists who believe the party should adapt to last year’s electoral defeat by once again trying to appeal to voters outside the traditional Democratic base — the mythical “persuadable Republican” swing voter that Democrats have spent nearly a generation trying to will into existence. But before Democrats can hope to evangelize to last cycle’s new Trump voters, they’ll need a base that trusts them. That will take time, and attempting to build a 2026 campaign message without solidifying the base will likely end up as a political trainwreck.

There are also those Old Guard Democrats who view anything Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez touch as fatally tainted by “the left,” and dismiss the current surge in populism as a fad. That’s not the case for Rep. Pat Ryan, a 34-year-old New Yorker who made national headlines by focusing populist rhetoric less on broad social issues and more on Americans’ worsening financial future. 

Ryan’s “patriotic populism” eschews traditional left-right ideological concerns to drive home an unapologetically anti-elite message that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place at a MAGA rally. And Ryan isn’t shy about dismissing his party’s fixation on progressive politics. “First and foremost, if you’re using the words ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive,’ you’re missing the whole f***ing point,” Ryan tweeted last November. “It’s not ideological. It’s about who fights for the people vs. who further empowers and enables the elites.”

For Roth Smith, Ryan’s message fits into a landscape of voter rage that some Democratic lawmakers have spent months trying to mainstream. Rep. Al Green’s viral disruption of Trump’s address to Congress last month, over Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, generated immediate headlines and cheers from voters — only to be immediately deflated by Democratic leaders more interested in preserving decorum than in scoring much-needed political points.

“Rep. Al Green did it exactly right by raising concerns about saving Medicaid, but the decorum issue overtook him, so Democrats didn’t get the benefit from that,” Roth Smith says. 

He sees Trump’s current self-inflicted economic crisis as a chance to reset Democrats on a more combative footing: “Schumer needs to exercise power at a moment when the politics are clearly on our side — like right now with the economy. If Schumer’s excuse for the government funding vote was that he wanted to wait for the right political moment to attack, he’ll need to show that by actually going on the attack. That’s what voters want to see.”

Some Democrats are already getting the message — and enjoying huge boosts in national attention and voter approval. On Monday, Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz added 50 names to his list of holds on Trump administration nominees, bringing the total to more than 300. Sen. Cory Booker basked in the positive glow of his record-setting, 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, which didn’t derail any Trump policies but gave weary Democrats an opportunity to rally behind Booker’s striking image of vocal resistance. 

Those efforts might seem performative, but that kind of obstructive performance is exactly the kind of action voters have been clamoring for since last year’s presidential campaign. It’s also a tactic Republicans understand well because they perfected the model. GOP voters have long understood that it feels good to soak your enemies even if those efforts only succeed in delaying inevitable losses. With a party as down-and-out as today’s Democrats, those morale-boosting moments matter just as much to voters as tangible victories.

Despite a bruising loss and the fracturing of the Democratic coalition last year, Democratic leaders still feel they know what voters want better than the voters themselves — so Schumer and others have largely ignored the base’s growing calls to embrace the politics of obstruction and frustration. That approach may feel downright Trumpian to Schumer, but a party in such dire straits with its own voters is in no position to ignore them. 

Marginalized and lectured to by a party that can’t seem to seal the deal, many previously enthusiastic voters are weighing whether supporting the Democratic Party in its current form is akin to rewarding bad behavior. 

Allen, the young Kentuckian who seemed like the Democratic Party’s future just a few years ago, puts it more directly. “I shouldn’t be angrier about the state of our country than the people I elected to protect it,” he tells me. “What kind of system is that?”