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No one protests more than a Democrat. I’ve watched the ritual a hundred times and lived it. Friends gather in parks with paint and markers. Group chats light up: “where to meet, what’s the route, loop here or there, lunch before or after.” In the first Trump term, if you lived in D.C., protest became background noise. Sit at a café on Massachusetts Avenue and a march would drift by at some point. The metric became volume, how loud you could scream, how much emotion you could muster.
I marched too. I walked the National Mall with friends for Black Lives Matter, chanting until my voice went hoarse. I told myself two things could be true: the police were there to protect our right to be present and the system had failed too many Black families. But then I waited — for the screaming at town halls to make people listen more, for the road blockades to convert attention into persuasion. And somewhere between all the signs and hashtags, things began to blur. One day it was emissions, the next it was health care, then DACA, then women’s rights. The emotional charge stayed high, but the focus was lost.
Meanwhile, we mistook visibility for victory. Year after year, we repainted the same slogans, shifted from one moral emergency to the next and policed one another’s language along the way. We argued over the newest required terms, prosecuted by association and offered little grace for mistakes. We admired the huge crowds in coastal cities and forgot the quiet sidewalks in places that actually decide elections. We celebrated noise and forgot that voting booths don’t measure volume.
In 2025, we’re now seeing where that road has taken us. At a school board meeting in Arlington last week, a protest meant to support trans students went sideways when one activist held up a sign comparing Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to a Jim Crow segregationist. It was grotesque and counterproductive. That one image became the story. Abigail Spanberger, the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, publicly condemned the sign as “racist and abhorrent.” Meanwhile, Earle-Sears got more airtime and sympathy. The intended message was drowned out. No one talked about the policy debate. They talked about the sign. And the kids the protest was supposedly about? Lost in the noise.
This style of politics, what we used to call the movement, isn’t sustainable. And it’s not just anecdotal anymore. Third Way recently published a memo urging Democrats to drop 45 insider terms — things like therapy-speak, hypercorrect labels and academic lingo — that read more like passwords than politics. The authors weren’t trying to spark a censorship debate. They were pointing out the obvious: if your pitch can’t be understood without a glossary, you’re not winning anyone over. You’re just talking to people who already agree with you.
But the Third Way memo does something else that’s even more important. It quietly marks a shift in the party. We’re moving away from a politics centered entirely around emotional purity and moral performance. That doesn’t mean abandoning values. It means recognizing that emotional intensity isn’t the same thing as persuasion. That voters, especially working-class ones, are looking for clarity, stability and dignity — not lectures about their shortcomings. It means realizing that inclusive language is important, but performative inclusivity — adding every possible adjective to a sentence so you don’t get yelled at — doesn’t build coalitions. It makes people afraid to speak.
And the electoral data backs this up. In every one of the 30 states that track party registration, Democrats have lost ground to Republicans — roughly 4.5 million voters net between 2020 and 2024. You can blame maps, turnout or disinformation — but you also have to look inward. Here’s the hard truth: our candidates are often good. Our brand is not. Protest has turned into a kind of performance art. The louder we got, the fewer people felt welcome. Men found podcasts that told them they still had value. Disaffected young people found movements that offered them belonging without requiring a language test. Meanwhile, we just kept offering more outrage — mainly at each other.
The Democratic Party doesn’t need more signs. It needs more grown-ups in the room. It needs fewer people performing fury and more people building policy. It needs less group chat energy and more coalition thinking. People who know that the voter doesn’t want to debate terminology. They want the bus to come on time, their kid to read at grade level and their rent to stay under control.
We can still be the party of justice and fairness and opportunity, but we have to speak human again. We have to stop congratulating ourselves for showing up and start focusing on who’s still not listening. Because the truth is: the crowds are shrinking. The slogans are getting old. And the math that decides elections doesn’t care how cathartic you feel. It cares how many people you actually bring with you. That’s the only thing that counts.
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