To hear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tell it, despite the fact that the party just brutally lost an election and have failed to elucidate a strategy for winning back the voters they’ve recently lost to Trumpism, the Democrats actually have the Republicans right where they want them. As Semafor’s Burgess Everett recently reported, Schumer has urged everyone to just chill out and wait. “Trump will screw up,” he said, adding that Trump’s decision to release a bunch of violent insurrectionists on an unsuspecting public is actually “the best thing that’s ever happened,” which is certainly news to me. “I didn’t know he’d screw up so soon,” Schumer said, adding, “This is going to be a pattern.”
As I’ve written before, the Democrats’ enduring theory of political change is that Republicans will cock things up enough to get the public back on their side—despite the numerical paucity of bona fide, persuadable swing voters out there in the hinterlands. In the narrow sense, however, it’s probably true that backlash is the spark that will end Trumpism. But for Democrats to wait for it is political malpractice for two key reasons: First, they’re not entirely locked out of parliamentary maneuvering. More importantly, whether locked out of power or not, every elected Democrat still has constituents—citizens who depend on their elected officials for material support during these trying times. Telling these people that they’re on their own would be downright criminal.
Democrats haven’t treated their constituents decently of late. By all accounts, phones on Capitol Hill have been constantly a-jangle with calls from voters prompted by “Call your congressperson” campaigns from Democratic Party–affiliated organizations such as MoveOn and Indivisible, and tensions are mounting. This week, Axios reported that Democratic members are “pissed” at the organizations for sending so many angry callers their way, on the grounds that they are “barking up the wrong tree given their limited power as the minority party in Congress.”
But as Indivisible’s co-founder Leah Greenberg takes pains to point out, the idea that Democrats have no parliamentary levers at their disposal isn’t actually true. “Our supporters are asking Democrats to demand specific red lines are met before they offer their vote to House Republicans on the budget, when Republicans inevitably fail to pass a bill on their own,” said Greenberg, citing the fact that tight margins within the fractious GOP House caucus make it all but certain that Speaker Mike Johnson will need Democratic votes to keep things running. That means a parliamentary fight might, indeed, be in the offing.
Should Republicans fail to get must-pass budget measures enacted with their majorities, Democrats should be prepared to let Johnson know that the cost of their votes is subject to inflation. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent, “It is the Republican majority’s responsibility to gather the votes necessary for them to pass their agenda.” Short of that, she says, “any concession necessary for the Democratic Party to assist them … must be incredibly substantial.”
This is all correct, and it’s going to be very disappointing if Democrats do what I expect them to do: give up their leverage to lend blank-check support to the GOP because they think that adhering to norms of comity and bipartisanship will earn them plaudits from the public and open doors to further rapprochement with the GOP. This is loser talk: The angry voters won’t be mollified, the Republican cooperation won’t come, and Democrats will lose still more political ground. It’s absurd to think that this path leads to fewer phone calls—unless, of course, the message they want to send to their base is to just give up.
But even if a surprisingly different Democratic Party shows up on that day, they need to understand that they still have constituents who need help in the meantime, and adopting a “wait for the GOP to screw up” footing is the worst possible response for this moment. Think logically: At the other end of every Trump screw-up is a hurt person. Trump’s mistakes cost people their lives and livelihoods.
Moreover, it’s important for Democrats to remember that when this Trump administration functions as intended, it will feature an administrative state bent to the task of implementing Trump’s designs for vengeance on his political enemies, and the tools now under the control of he and Elon Musk can facilitate the granular immiseration of Democratic voters. In a preview of coming attractions, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander awoke on Wednesday to discover that the Trump administration had clawed back $80 million in FEMA funding that had already cleared. This is the plan: To effectively immiserate blue states and make it as hard as possible for Democrats to govern the places where majorities want them in office.
Democrats thus cannot simply sit back and watch as the full force of Trump’s authoritarian project falls on the heads of their constituents. And while their parliamentary options are limited, they still have some resources to bring to bear on this problem. They have their own deep-pocketed donors. They have nongovernmental expertise on which they can call. They have a small universe of nonprofits and support organizations that can work on the local and community level. Democrats need to marshal and deploy this capital to help keep people informed, keep them safe, and keep them a couple steps ahead of the Trump administration’s depredations. (Which they can do, considering the GOP wrote all their plans down.)
And while I hate to beat a dead horse, I must reiterate that Democrats really need to start playing the media game according to the rules the industry has set—and which their opponents have so agreeably mastered—instead of waiting for some period of media reformation that will never occur as long as so many incompetents, deadbeats, and goons are running the show. Democrats need to be aggressively launching counter-narratives, starting conflicts, and flooding the zone with the same fervor and volume as the GOP. There should be daily, coordinated P.R. attacks on the Trump administration. (Representative Robert Garcia’s “dick pic” stunt during Wednesday’s “DOGE Committee” meeting was an example of a perfectly executed play in a media environment where crass conflict is required to gain purchase in the attention economy.)
The recent air disaster at National Airport provides an illustrative example of where Democrats might have done more. Not long after news broke of the crash, eagle-eyed social media users pulled a January 22 press release from Democratic members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee criticizing Trump for his “dangerous freeze of air traffic control hiring.” What should have followed hard on the heels of the crash was a concerted effort among Democrats to brandish that prescient press release and hang it on Trump.
Now, I’d bet I know why Democrats didn’t do this: To their mind, it would have been a cynical cheap shot. So they held back, and the next day the Trump administration chalked the crash up to diversity hiring, and that’s the topic the media spent the day dishing on, to the detriment of a wider universe of people than died in the original catastrophe. Lesson learned: The first cheap shot wins, so govern yourself accordingly and take them. Stop fretting about getting scolded by the punditocracy’s various schoolmarms for being rude and uncivil! Their approval will only lose you elections. Instead, welcome their disdain.
As Josh Marshall recently wrote, “Fundamentally this is a battle of public opinion.” Democrats need to treat those constituent phone calls as the front lines of this fight. This is where you provide information about Trump’s disastrous governance, where you disseminate information about what ordinary citizens can do and who can help them do it, where you outline your playbook for fighting back (remember, Project 2025 was written and published before Republicans won anything), where you vow that you’ll never surrender the fight, and where you help a scared nation feel less alone. If you provide people with information, resources, and specific political commitments, they will organize and act—and add vital grease to the wheels of that longed-for political comeback. What lies on the other end of those phone calls isn’t a burden, it’s an opportunity. Grow up, get over yourselves, and get back in the game.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
The post The Democrats Have More Power Than They Realize. Here’s How to Use It. appeared first on New Republic.
