All year, top Democrats have shown a striking awareness of one of their biggest problems.
The party, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told NPR this month, needs to show how it will “shake up the status quo.”
“Embrace change,” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan urged on “The Daily Show” in May. “The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo.’”
“We have become the party of the status quo, when we’re not,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told NBC News in March.
As they try to repair their political brand before the midterm elections, Democrats are rushing to redefine themselves as Washington disrupters, eager to challenge a government that many Americans believe has failed to improve their lives.
For years, Democratic leaders have cast their party as a firewall against the threats to American democracy they argue are posed by President Trump and his political movement. With their fierce opposition to Mr. Trump, Democrats became the party of institutional preservation, championing political norms, expertise and the role of the federal government.
But with Republicans now in control of Washington, many Democratic politicians are trying to revamp their image with promises to upend existing power structures, whether they are the Trump administration, Congress or even their own party orthodoxy. It is a message for an electorate that barely trusts government, politicians or Washington to accomplish any change at all.
“I took on the powerful and corrupt Democrats,” Mayor Paige Cognetti of Scranton, a Democrat running for a swing House seat in northeast Pennsylvania, said in a video announcing her run that was widely praised across her party. “We can stand tall against a Washington that takes advantage of working people.”
Combating a ‘Corrupt System’
But changing the party’s image won’t be easy for Democrats.
For much of the past year, they have fiercely opposed efforts by the Trump administration to drastically cut the size of the federal government. They have protested the shuttering of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, defended federal workers and backed lawsuits filed by federal unions and advocacy groups.
Democrats know that those actions have affected how voters view their party. In the spring, congressional lawmakers were briefed in private meetings on polling by Navigator Research, a progressive public opinion firm, showing that a majority of voters described Democrats as focused on “preserving the way government works,” while only 20 percent said the same of Republicans, according to slides of the presentation given to The New York Times.
The challenge Democrats face is how to simultaneously defend government institutions that Mr. Trump is trying to gut while also offering a forward-looking message that resonates with voters who believe politics and democracy are broken.
“We have to embrace the need for change and reform. At the same time, I’m not interested in throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” said Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat chosen by his party’s House campaign arm to recruit candidates. “We end programs that aren’t working, we reform agencies that are not delivering, and then we preserve those that are.”
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California who is trying to position himself as a leader of his party, said Democrats needed to do more than simply oppose Mr. Trump to restore the trust and support of voters.
“We can’t start with just, ‘We want to return to normalcy,’” he said. “What we need is a vision for change and holding elites accountable that is consistent with our values and our Constitution, and that we have a positive vision of building things up, not just a negative vision of tearing things down.”
What that vision is, exactly, remains unclear. Deep divisions on policy issues including taxes and the role of money in politics are already dividing the party in increasingly contentious primary races across the country.
Government-Critical Veterans of Government
Many Democratic candidates believe they will connect with voters better if they start by acknowledging that government — including their own party — has not always worked. The problem is that many of those candidates have been part of state and federal government for years.
In Minnesota, both Democrats competing for the state’s open Senate seat have cast themselves as independent-minded fighters eager to upend the status quo.
Representative Angie Craig, a four-term centrist Democrat from Minnesota, points to her successful challenge of Representative David Scott, 80, a Democrat from Georgia with far more seniority in the House, to become the ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee.
“In a party that seems obsessed with seniority, I’m willing to get out of line and challenge the status quo,” she said as she announced her Senate bid.
At the same time, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who won election to the Minnesota House a decade ago, is positioning herself as a progressive fighter who is “serious about taking on the status quo.”
“Will we send Washington the same old people and the same old solutions — or will we be bolder and fight harder and get more done?” she asked at a campaign event at a Minneapolis brewery this fall.
Those messages are meant to resonate with voters who are not only disenchanted with government but also deeply pessimistic about its ability to accomplish much of anything at all.
Just 33 percent of American voters say they believe the country is capable of overcoming its deep divisions, according to a poll this fall from The Times and Siena University.
That represented a remarkable decline from September 2020, when Americans were divided over the coronavirus pandemic and grappling with questions about racial inequality, but a majority of voters still said the country could solve its political problems.
Burn It Down, or Build It Back Up?
In some ways, the anti-establishment energy within the Democratic Party is reminiscent of the Tea Party movement, in which conservative activists channeled outrage over bank bailouts and right-wing animosity toward President Barack Obama into a wave of 2010 midterm victories.
But while the Tea Party wanted to sharply limit, if not eliminate, the federal government, the current Democratic candidates see the solution as improving government, said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist.
“The Tea Party was against the status quo and for replacing it with nihilism,” he argued. “These candidates are against the status quo and for replacing it with something better.”
But targeted and calculated governmental change isn’t exactly easy to explain — or fit on a campaign bumper sticker.
Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and transportation secretary under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has acknowledged as much.
“It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education, but I actually think it’s also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024,” he told NPR this summer. “It’s also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were. We should be unsentimental about the things that don’t work. We should be fearless in defending the things that do work.”
Some strategists say embracing a “sweep the bums out” feeling matters more than exact policy prescriptions or plans for various government agencies.
“It’s important to be anti-status-quo right now because people hate politics. They hate politicians. They hate both parties,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who worked on Mr. Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign. “Anyone who’s part of it has to go.”
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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