The Democrats are not planning any comprehensive resistance to Donald Trump.
At least not in the style of 2016, when lawmakers, activists, volunteers and millions of enraged voters mounted a party-wide effort to curb his newfound influence in Washington.
Where once so much was unprecedented, Trump is now familiar. Before January 2025, the absence of one unified democratic refutation to his second term is the latest sign that the party is just beginning to soul-search and figure out what went wrong before uniting to pummel Republicans.
“We seem to know that the strategy of being an anti-Trump party has worked no better than it did when we became a primarily anti-Bush party,” said Max Burns, a Democratic commentator. “With this change, we seem to have become unclear about what our actual pro-democracy message is.”
“It’s more like post-1960 Republicans than anything else,” he said, “where the loss led to a real round of questioning about our values and our strategy.”
On the one hand, the month and a half after the election can seem like decades as D.C.’s political class awaits the unpredictable transition of power. On the other hand, it’s just a blip in what many expect to be a long effort to redefine the Democratic Party beyond Trump’s shadow.
As voters who have found sympathy for Trump move ever closer to a home with the GOP, liberals and moderates are figuring out their ideals, how to unite around them and communicate it all to the rest of the country. The results showed that opposing the MAGA president-elect and thereby challenging a doctrine that party loyalists have adhered to for the past eight years is not motivating enough.
While some still insist that Trump’s re-election remains an existential threat, those voices have become increasingly still. Democrats’ “save our democracy” rhetoric, a fear-based approach that was effective in previous cycles, has waned this time, with many wanting a modern approach after a significant loss of power.
The pomp and enraged solidarity of 2017 have also subsided. At the time, America’s deep political divisions and fear of the unknown led thousands to pour into the streets and protest what they saw as Trump’s misogyny a “women’s march” and similar advocacy uprisings.
“It’s clear that the fight against Trump and MAGA will definitely look different this time than it did in 2017 because the circumstances are different,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn PAC.
“But there is the energy to organize and push back that we know is there. The key will be understanding that we need to be strategic about how we use this energy,” she said.
In fact, Democrats are slowly making clear their recent losses among constituencies that they see as having drifted even further away from their party, and are questioning whether being completely anti-Trump is the right approach.
“We’re clearly not convincing workers, Hispanics or young people the way we used to because our message is now so vague that it’s difficult to capture and unite behind it,” Burns said. “Voters are angry, and they want populism, and they prefer a bad version to none at all, so Trump can sell his fake populism largely unchallenged.”
Progressives have begun trying a modern tactic. Some in the Senate and House have expressed a willingness to scrutinize — and in some cases even enthusiastically embrace — Trump’s goals and governing decisions. That’s different from the tone before his first term, when the sheer shock value of many of his decisions wiped out any goodwill Democrats were willing to offer.
Some on the left are questioning the Democrats’ default position of rejecting Republicans solely on the grounds of party loyalty.
“I think the hypocrisy of opposing an idea that you agree with because someone on the other side also agrees is seen as one of the biggest problems with the two-party system right now,” said a former campaign adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I -Vt.)
“Seriously, if you talk to real voters, most of them don’t define their faith ideologically,” the former aide said.
Others on Capitol Hill are already targeting potential areas for partnership, hoping to bring the party on common ground, at least in the early days of the party transition. The most notable example is the burgeoning debate over defense spending, an early focus of Trump and progressives, in which high Pentagon spending has been criticized by some prominent members of both parties.
A Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is emerging as a leader and presenting an alternative way to work with pro-Trump members of Congress. He told The Hill that he would welcome “efforts” to work with Republicans where their priorities align, including on the military budget.
“I think it’s very important not to categorize everyone into left and right,” said Hassan Martini, a Democratic strategist and executive director of the group No Dem Left Behind. Instead, he said, his party should “really examine each individual’s comments and actions individually.”
Still, some top Democrats have revived their controversial style against Trump and his current allies to consistently show they do not support the right-wing agenda.
“Trump and congressional Republicans are already signaling that they will overreach, and we will be ready to hold them accountable if they do,” Epting said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was one of the most outspoken figures in the so-called resistance to Trump’s first term, has not changed her stance on his return to Pennsylvania Avenue. She was critical of several of Trump’s Cabinet chiefs, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the possible head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Warren’s role on the Senate Finance Committee means she will be a key figure in Kennedy’s confirmation fight, where she has already made clear she strongly opposes his views on vaccinations and other conspiracy theories.
“Say goodbye to your smile and hello to polio,” the Massachusetts senator said in a recent statement Video clip. “You know, I would laugh if it weren’t so scary.”
The Democrats’ post-election lull has also led many to turn their attention to an election that is more in their area: the race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Lawmakers, strategists and activists believe they can now shape the direction of the DNC differently than it did last cycle, where the pro-Democrat message and massive focus on abortion didn’t work in their favor.
Progressives worry that moderates will seek more of the same kind of centrism that led to Democrats’ defeats, while centrists see too much liberalism as the reason they lost again to Trump.
A leading grassroots group that emerged from Sanders’ 2016 bid, Our Revolution, spread a memo This week, it was pushed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and signed by hundreds of activists and donors who called for left-wing policies at the DNC.
“The Democratic Party needs a major overhaul,” the petition states. It lists four target areas for reform, including “banning dark money in primaries” and “consulting accountability advisors” for the DNC’s future budget, as well as investing more resources in state parties. It also requires officials to “commit to a progressive platform and small-donor democracy.”
“The Democratic Party must return to its roots as a party of the working class and reject the corporate influence and corruption that led to voter loss and election losses for Trump (twice!).”
