Democrats Are Getting Real About the New Anti-Trump Resistance: “The Final Check Is the People”

Tim Walz took the stage, with “I Won’t Back Down,” Tom Petty’s anthem of defiance, blaring over the speakers. “Hello again, Ohioans,” the Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate said, as the crowd greeted him with a standing ovation.

It was a chilly April evening in Lorain, a manufacturing town outside Cleveland whose politics have shifted with the fading fortunes of the industries it once thrived on. The high school auditorium, set to host a drama club production of The Wiz in the coming weeks, was packed, and an overflow crowd gathered in the gym. In all, about 2,000 people turned out for what was billed as a “People’s Town Hall”—a series of events Democrats have been holding across the country in districts where GOP representatives, perhaps acting on the advice of Speaker Mike Johnson, have avoided facing their constituents in person.

“This is the major responsibility of a member of Congress, to be responsive to their constituents,” Walz, who served in the House from 2007 to 2019, told me and a few local reporters beforehand, in the ROTC classroom that was serving as our makeshift media center. “And I said, if they don’t want to do it, I’ll come out.”

These kinds of town halls have been a way for Democrats to highlight Republicans’ reluctance to defend Donald Trump’s destructive agenda, after a number of GOP lawmakers struggled to do so at fiery district events in February. But they have also been forums for voters to vent—especially at Democrats, who had played their own role in the hollowing out of Rust Belt cities like theirs, who had lost two out of the last three elections to a billionaire cosplaying as a populist, and who had struggled in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term to fulfill their role as a true opposition party. “Many of us here…feel left behind and blame not only the Republican Party but also Democrats,” as one resident told Walz, describing the “erosion” of industries that served as the backbone of places like Lorain and had left it a “shell of what it once was.”

What I found here—and what others have sensed elsewhere—is that a movement seems to be building. The anti-Trump public, more demoralized by the opening weeks of his presidency than determined to fight, has begun showing some life. Nowhere was this clearer than in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where I watched Bernie Sanders electrify a crowd of about 3,500 in March on an early stop of his Fighting Oligarchy Tour. “People are really, really concerned about what’s going on in Washington right now,” the senator told me then. Weeks later, the face of that oligarchy, Elon Musk, would be dealt a significant blow there, after voters conclusively elected liberal Susan Crawford to the state supreme court—despite the millions of dollars the billionaire Trump ally poured into the April 1 race on behalf of the conservative candidate. The anger seemed to be turning into action, with large-scale protests erupting in back-to-back weeks against Musk and Trump in cities across the country. Finally, it appeared “the Resistance” of the first Trump era—out of sight in the opening weeks of the second—was coming out of the shadows.

Yet it looks very different this time: The indignation is generalized, trained not just on Trump, but on the creaky political system he exploited and a Democratic establishment that no longer seems capable of meeting the moment. Democrats have “signaled a resignation to the entire thing and…seem to be insufficiently clear on the risk and the threat,” as Leah Greenberg, cofounder of Indivisible, the influential progressive grassroots organization that formed in the wake of Trump’s first election, told me recently. “I think there’s just a lot of episodes over the last few months that have really soured people on whether the Democratic Party has a clear plan and a clear assessment of the danger it’s facing right now.”

The Resistance of 2016 was also buoyed by a sense of hope—that Democrats, “reasonable” Republicans, or maybe Robert Mueller would come to the rescue. By contrast, the protest movement against Trump’s second term is navigating a sense that we all might be helpless in the face of what’s coming. “This DOGE business will get out of control,” as one sign put it at a Tesla Takedown protest I recently attended in Chicago. “It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

I had come to Lorain to see whether someone like Walz might be able to not only channel the movement’s righteous fury, but also convince a shaken public that resistance is not futile, as this rogue president would have it believe. “You’re deeply concerned about your country and you want to do something about it,” he said at the top of the town hall. “It might be a pain in the butt to park and get here and wait in line and come in here and sit in a chair or whatever,” he continued. But “it beats the hell out of doom-scrolling in a fetal position.”

If anybody could rally Democrats out of that dejected posture, perhaps it was “Coach Walz”—who seemed to exude the same jocularity and charisma he had at the beginning of Kamala Harris’s campaign. Part of that was, of course, owing to the venue: “Thank you for doing this in a high school,” the former teacher said. “The only other place I’m more comfortable is my living room.” But more than that, he was no longer in the middle of a run for office, and could speak more freely than he could during last fall’s high-stakes campaign.

As he spoke of the need for a more “positive, populist” agenda—like the one he has worked to implement in Minnesota—he acknowledged that Republican and Democratic leadership had contributed to the precarity in places like Lorain: “It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA,” noted Walz, who wore a United Auto Workers pin on the lapel of his navy suit. And while Democratic policies do better serve the middle and working classes, he said, his party doesn’t move fast enough or decisively enough: “I believe that when you get power, you should wield it,” Walz said. “You win elections not to bank political capital to win the next election—you win elections to burn political capital to improve lives as quickly as you can.”

But Democrats’ path to power has only gotten narrower in recent elections, as the national party relies on its urban centers of support and focuses its resources on a handful of swing states. Their 2024 defeat demonstrated, in stark terms, how flawed and unsustainable that strategy is: Harris lost every battleground, while Trump made gains in blue strongholds like New York, and among voting blocs that have traditionally favored Democrats. “We can’t expect to win presidential elections [when] we don’t show up places and then every four years we go to the same seven states that we were told [were] the ‘blue wall,’” Walz told the Ohio crowd. “It wasn’t a very good wall.”

It was refreshing to hear such a blunt assessment of the Democrats’ strategic failures—and a reminder that things weren’t always this way. Barack Obama won this state twice. In 2012, he defeated Mitt Romney in Lorain County—once a Democratic stronghold—by more than 15 points. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won it by a 10th of a percentage point. However, Trump has carried it the last two cycles: He beat Joe Biden—who campaigned as a strident “union man”—by more than two points here in 2020, and expanded his support in 2024 to nearly six points. That’s been the story of politics in Lorain, but it’s also the story of Ohio—and America more broadly—over the last decade: Blue to purple to red. Places where Democrats could win or at least compete not so long ago—Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Iowa—have been treated by the national party as lost causes, to the chagrin of local parties. “There’s real opportunity here,” Katie Seewer, press secretary of the Ohio Democratic Party, told me. “Ohio is very much worth investing in.”

New Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin—a Walz ally and fellow Minnesotan—has promised to turn things around and revive Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. “If we’re going to turn red states to purple states to blue states,” Martin told me in December, “you can’t ignore them.” It won’t be easy for them to recapture the territory they’ve ceded to Republicans. It will require the party, which still suffers from abysmal approval ratings, to build political infrastructure in places where you might find a yard sign like the one I saw on a back road a couple hours west of Lorain, that read: “Are you an American or a Democrat?” It also demands that they meaningfully address the disillusionment that has set in over places like Lorain, which a friend of mine in Cleveland described as a “Springsteen song” of a town.

Showing up, as Walz did, may at least be a start. At the bar of the hotel I stayed at—a 1925 restoration whose reopening in 2020, after more than a decade of disrepair, was cast as part of a downtown Lorain “rebirth” that has yet to fully materialize—a local Democrat told me the town hall had been a small taste of hope amid the relentless churn of Trumpian chaos.

But there was still the question of what can be done more immediately, as Trump tramples over the separation of powers, lays waste to institutions, and threatens Americans’ rights and well-being. It was important to position the party for electoral resurgence. But “what is our recourse?” one questioner asked Walz, “what can we do now?”

“The final check,” Walz answered, is “the people.” In other words: the Resistance, which is sometimes better remembered more for its corniness—the safety pins, pink hats, keyboard activism,and political prayer candles—than for its meaningful accomplishments.

But that massive burst of activism spawned a new generation of political leaders, some of whom—like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have been among the handful of Democratic officials who are actually rising to this historic moment. And while that mobilization didn’t completely stop Trump from wreaking havoc in his first term, it surely helped mitigate the damage—forcing elected Democrats to fight, putting pressure on public and private institutions to take stands, and giving Republicans more to fear than a primary challenge from the MAGA right.

Indeed, the power of that backstop has been apparent in its absence: Mobilization and fierce outcry helped save the Affordable Care Act from Trump and his Republican majorities; this time, in a matter of weeks, he and his unelected billionaire ally have bypassed Congress to dismantle entire government agencies. Trump is aided by a far more loyal Republican Party now, of course—but also by the public mandate he was able to claim in the absence of tough, sustained pushback.

That he’s facing some now has been heartening: It’s already taken some of the shine off Musk’s political brand, and perhaps factored into Trump backing down—for now—from some of his economy-rattling tariffs. Perhaps a second Resistance can go even bigger: Seeking not only to restore normalcy and common sense, but also tackle issues places that have long been overlooked by the political establishments.

For now, though, there’s still “a lot of anxiety” about the future, one grandmother told me as we walked out of the Walz town hall into the cold April dusk. Would it all just come down to the public? “I guess it’s just us,” she said. “It’s scary.”