Many Democrats are celebrating the Supreme Court special election victory in Wisconsin and Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking filibuster denouncing Trump. Booker’s call to action was certainly a welcome contrast to Gavin Newsom going on a podcast with trained MAGA figures Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. The New York Times declared that the Democratic Party now has a pulse after a few months of relative silence and even messages of cooperation.
I am glad that the Democrats are showing some resolve against the Trump administration: It is better than nothing. But they had a “pulse” in the 2024 election, too. The left’s prevailing strategy leading up to November was to preach the evils and incompetence of Trump, often talking more about him than their own policy plans. Though cathartic, this was a bad strategy. If politicians tell me they are anti-Trump, that tells me nothing about what they want for the country or what policies they believe in. Without the left presenting ideas of their own, public discourse centers around Trump as a person, which is exactly what he wants. Trump’s policy hurts the people who vote for him, and with any other candidate, this would be an obstacle. But the sheer emphasis on his personality displaces the issues and turns elections into popularity contests. The MAGA movement is clearly good at winning those.
To be specific, Trump is good at winning elections when he is running against an incumbent Democrat. If the opposite party is in power, he can take the average voter’s suffering and whip up fears surrounding it. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 when a Democrat was in power and lost in 2020 when he was in power. I do not think this is an accident. When Trump sits in the Oval Office, who can he blame? If you follow the White House Instagram page, you will see many photos, tweets and AI images bragging about all the people he is deporting and how tough he is on our closest allies. His team is trying to frame him as a man of action by touting everything he does. But when these policies start wreaking havoc on people’s lives, Trump can not weasel off responsibility for the same actions he has bragged about.
This is not to say that the Democrats need to simply sit back, relax and wait for all the voters to run back to them. Part of the reason that Trump has such support is that many people feel that the Democratic Party is utterly blind to their struggles. If segments of voters believe the Democrats are not receptive to their needs, they are not going to vote blue, even if red acts like a dictator and puts us into a recession. The opposition needs to make major changes in their image and policy if they want to be a good alternative.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have had some terrible strategies when it comes to swing voters. During election season, the Party tried to redeem itself by moving toward the center and distancing itself from overly liberal rhetoric. You could point to Democratic candidates bragging that they own guns or their promises not to ban fracking. I am thinking of an ad from Poughkeepsie’s Congressman Pat Ryan from the election season that said, “Pat Ryan is a different kind of Democrat!” It showed him jogging in an army shirt, shaking hands with police and reading bedtime stories to his kids. While it did not seem to stop him from winning, it did play into the exact same myths that Republicans have about Democrats. That is, the myth that “normal” Democrats are unmasculine, avoid the military and have no family values. These statements are stereotypes. But the fact that Pat Ryan had to separate himself from the stereotypes displays that Republicans already control many of the narratives. The Democrats are often too busy fighting a label that was imposed from the outside, and in doing so, they reinforce the label. Additionally, this strategy alienates the more progressive voters while failing to bring in new ones.
If the Democrats want success with voters who may be dissatisfied with the Republicans, they need to create an identity based on what they stand for, rather than what they reject. They rejected Trump as a person in 2024 without always defining what they would do instead. That only fueled the partisan divide, allowing GOP narratives to gain more ground. They also tried to reject the labels and aesthetics of “wokeness,” again not focusing on issues like the economy. That Pat Ryan ad, God bless him, told me little about what he planned to do, only that he enjoyed running. I enjoy running too, but nobody is electing me for Congress. The American people deserve more than political theatre.
It is not enough to act tough against Trump or against “wokeness.” The solution is something more challenging than that. It is to create a platform that satisfies working-class interests, not just working-class aesthetics. This means reducing corporate influence in politics, protecting institutions that people rely on and defending the freedoms of women and immigrants. Democrats are already trying to do these things, but they need to inform their voters about how their economic and political plans will help their constituents.
As the Republicans continue their barrage of changes to the government, it is encouraging to see that Democrats are fighting back and making noise. Good leaders do not seek trouble, but do not back down from it either. Moving forward, I hope that they can use that fighting spirit to establish a political identity that will outlast Trump and his influence.