Kamala Harris’ rallying cry to supporters in the 2024 election was simple and straightforward: “We are not going back.”
After voters decided to return President Donald Trump to the White House, Democrats are increasingly acknowledging their path forward can’t simply be a promise to unwind whatever policies Trump puts in place. Society needs to fundamentally change. They just don’t agree on exactly how.
That conversation is happening amid a backdrop of the Democratic Party’s popularity reaching an all-time low dating back to 1990, per an NBC News survey last month. Party leaders from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have all staked out different approaches to dealing with Trump and attempting to chart a path forward. And Democrats are seeking ways to reach new audiences.
Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist working with a handful of potential 2028 contenders, said he still feels it will “take a lot of coaching for Democrats to understand we cannot go back to the old system.”
“That system was broken,” he said. “It didn’t work for most Americans — and we were the ones defending it. People weren’t asking for a return to normal. They wanted change.”
“And sure, Trump made it worse,” he added. “He’s created chaos, jacked up prices, lined his own pockets while everyone else struggles. But here’s the real danger: when we get back in power, the instinct will be to rebuild the old system. Rebuild USAID. Rebuild the broken institutions. Wrong move. If we do that, we’re going to give Republicans a massive opening in 2032 to elect someone way worse than Trump. If we play our cards right, we’ve got a rare shot — maybe a once-in-a-generation shot — to build something better.”
Nellis is far from alone in sounding that alarm. In an episode of the “Flagrant” podcast released this week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, called for Democrats to “revisit … what it is we’re offering, because … it sounds like what we’re offering is just ‘Let’s go back.’”
His response echoed what Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., who was Harris’ running mate in 2024, told reporters at a Democratic Governors Association press briefing in March.
“This is not like running the car out of gas, and you can put gas back in it and it will take off again; this is like running the car out of oil,” Walz said, referring to the Trump administration’s plans to gut parts of the federal bureaucracy.
“I see the opportunity in this,” added Walz, who, like Buttigieg, is viewed as a potential 2028 candidate. Trump “will continue to break these things, but when we rebuild, we can reimagine what those look like and make them better.”
‘Trust in institutions is gone for a lot of people’
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat who is running in a contested primary to succeed Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., is among a younger cohort of Democratic officials pushing for generational change in the party’s leadership. She has said she believes it’s time for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to pass the torch, too.
An NBC News/Stay Tuned poll released Thursday found that 77% of Americans either strongly or somewhat believe that “nothing will change” in the U.S. until a “new generation of leaders” is elected.
McMorrow, 38, recalled graduating from Notre Dame amid the Great Recession and feeling dejected by the existing order when she was unable to land a solid job. She said voters now are experiencing the same disenchantment, and Democrats need to answer for it.
“When I talk to people all across the state, people just don’t believe that success is possible for them anymore,” she said.
“hat we are laying out is that in the rubble that will be left behind by Donald Trump — who is now, between him and Elon Musk, taking a chainsaw to the government — that there will be an opportunity to build something new and acknowledge that trust in institutions is gone for a lot of people,” she added.
McMorrow boils down her platform to “success, safety and sanity,” focusing on affordability of housing and cost-of-living, safe neighborhoods and immigration reform, among other points. But she said Democrats can’t just be focused on passing legislation. Instead, they must work to ensure the programs they pass actually work as intended.
She mentioned currently reading “Abundance,” the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that examines why the U.S. has struggled to advance ambitious projects.
“It should embarrass all of us that we are not building high-speed rail, we’re not finishing these housing projects,” she said, adding that Democrats must “actually deliver on the things that we believe in without putting so many hurdles and disconnected systems in place.”
So far, specifics for a Democratic future are light — and there’s plenty of disagreement. High-profile internal tensions erupted this past week after activist and Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg announced his outside political action committee would spend $20 million on primaries, in part to target “ineffective” Democratic incumbents.
At 25, Hogg is advocating for the party to shift its recruiting strategy to bring younger candidates into solid blue districts and oust largely older candidates. The plan prompted a rebuke from the DNC chair, who said officers should remain neutral.
“What we’re trying to do here is make sure that we’re holding ourselves accountable and letting people know that if there’s somebody who’s failing to meet the moment in this moment of crisis that our country is in,” then there will be efforts to supplant them, Hogg said in an interview.
In his vision, in addition to changing the messengers, the party would center its efforts in finding paths where those of any age could still feel as if they can pursue the American dream, with lower costs for health care, elder care, child care, education and housing. He also noted fighting corruption and enhancing public safety while combating gun violence. Both McMorrow and Nellis highlighted many of the same issue areas Hogg did.
‘The moment is here to build what comes next’
On Thursday, the DNC announced it was changing its strategy and ramping up investments in every state party, including giving extra funds to Democratic parties in red states. It’s a shift from the longtime focus on swing states.
“I’m done with Democrats myopically focusing on just a few battleground states every few years, we are not simply a presidential campaign committee,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said on Thursday. “The DNC is now the primary hub for building out a permanent political organizing movement across every part of the country. I’ve always said there’s no such thing as a perpetual red state or a perpetual blue state. And my job is to prove that to be true.”
And while many in the party talk about the opportunity to build new systems and structures if Democrats take back presidential and congressional power after Trump, the broad disagreements that have plagued the party for years still abound.
As the Trump administration has moved to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government and U.S. institutions, some, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, have blasted the move, while others like Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., have grown more vocal in opposition to certain DEI programs.
Even whether the party should focus on finding common ground on policy or finding a common leader is dividing Democrats.
In a recent interview, Newsom dismissed concerns about whether Democrats could unite around one candidate in 2028, telling NBC News, “I’m not worried about [whether] we will find a great candidate. But what do we stand for? What are we about? What are we going to fight for?”
But at a Nevada rally in March, Ocasio-Cortez called on the rank-and-file in her party to “choose and vote for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class.”
One argument still haunting the party is about whether it needs to shift away from campaigning on moral and social issues in favor of sticking to an economic message.
Newsom, on an episode of his podcast — a platform where he has hosted Trump-allied activists Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and drawn Democratic criticism — said he believed former President Joe Biden had “frustration” with this in 2024, telling the former U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, “He was talking about an economic message, he was talking about his worker-centered industrial policy, but it wasn’t necessarily breaking through because … of the bathroom debates, the pronoun debates and all these other debates.”
Similarly, Buttigieg told the “Flagrant” hosts Democrats must “do a much better job, especially with the finger-wagging that you’re talking about … You get the sense of moral conviction, and you’re so sure of it, that you start to think it makes it OK to be an a–hole.”
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., is going further, urging the party to change the public’s “weak and woke” perception of it and “f—ing retake the flag” with patriotic appeals, as Politico reported.
But Walz, during a town hall in Texas, said in 2024, advocated a different approach, saying it was a mistake that Democrats let Republicans define issues like DEI and the term “woke.”
Democrats, he said, “weren’t bold enough to stand up and say: ‘You’re damn right we’re proud of these policies.’”
The party’s progressive wing, meanwhile, sees new opportunities here, too, especially at a time when Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are touring the country and drawing huge crowds at their “Fight Oligarchy”-branded rallies.
“We are entering moments that we have never experienced before,” Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., told constituents at a town hall in Pittsburgh last week. “The country as we know it may never exist the way that it had. And the reality is that the way that the country had existed was never its best form anyway.”
“The moment is here to build what comes next. My argument is that we should be fighting harder than they are to be the author of what is next,” she said of progressives. “Because if we are not the ones who build it, then they are building it, but it’s getting built one way or another.”
Emilia Rowland, a progressive strategist, said Democrats need to better deal with the consequences of rapid tech advancement that is continuing to reshape society and further concentrate power as the government and other institutions struggle to keep up. She added that Democrats need to rethink how they communicate, too.
“The biggest thing that I’ve been really thinking about is the risk calculation between what’s the risk of doing something versus the risk of not doing anything or not showing that we’re fighting for something,” she said, adding, “People don’t want to protect status quo institutions when they’re not serving them. Right now, people are mad at the institutions because of Trump. That’s not going to change when Trump’s out.”
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