CALEB: Hi. This is Caleb (ph) in Tucker, Georgia, and I’m currently in the shed, working on a crib for my wife and I’s first baby. This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:06 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, February 19, 2025.
CALEB: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I’ll still be sawing, chiseling and sanding away. OK, here’s the show.
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MCCAMMON: I love that. That’s so sweet.
BARBARA SPRUNT, BYLINE: Good for you, man.
MCCAMMON: Hey there, it’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
SPRUNT: I’m Barbara Sprunt. I cover Congress.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Today on the show, Democrats find themselves in the minority after last fall’s elections, and their constituents aren’t happy about what they see as the party’s lack of action in response to policies they disagree with from President Trump. The Democrats’ leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, put it this way recently.
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HAKEEM JEFFRIES: I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America. They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.
MCCAMMON: Barbara, you’ve been reporting on this. How is that attitude going down with many Democratic voters?
SPRUNT: I mean, it may not be going over well, but it is the reality that Democrats face. Elections do have consequences, and the American public voted for a Republican trifecta in government. They control the House, the Senate and the White House. And that stark political reality is, I think, sort, like, dawning on many grassroots supporters of Democrats sort of for the first time, and they’re navigating this sort of next chapter as Democrats have lost a lever of power.
And there certainly is tension here. I mean, Democrats say that their phones are ringing off the hook with people calling their offices. Why can’t you do XYZ? There was a rally recently in response to the furlough of a lot of employees of USAID. A lot of Democratic lawmakers were there sort of talking how terrible this is, and they were interrupted by chants of the people in the crowd saying, like, what are you going to do about it? Do your job. And the reality is there’s a huge disconnect because their job is very limited. There’s very few things that they can do to thwart the will of the majority.
MCCAMMON: So certainly, Democrats are up against these limitations you just described, but there are some Democrats, even some of Jeffries’ colleagues, who would like to see a different tone here. I mean, what are they saying that they are doing?
SPRUNT: There’s definitely, like, debate about the messaging strategy, going forward. And the tape that we heard of Leader Jeffries is from earlier this month. I think House Democrats have tried to sort of sharpen their strategy. They have a new task force out that’s sort of aimed at a new messaging strategy, particularly around the sort of legal efforts that are being fronted in various spaces. But yeah, I mean, like, some Democrats say there’s not a big upside to talking about what you can’t do. Others, like Vermont congresswoman Becca Balint, who I spoke with – she’s a member of the Progressive Caucus, and she told me, like, you know, we should probably educate the public a little bit.
BECCA BALINT: It’s clear, from talking to my constituents and people who interact with my office, it hasn’t really totally sunk in that Republicans are in charge of the House, the Senate and the White House, so we don’t get to control what bills come up on the floor.
SPRUNT: Yeah, I mean, the minority party can sometimes, particularly in the Senate, slow things down procedurally, but it can’t, like, change the math and the makeup of the structure of power that is faced right now by Democrats on Capitol Hill.
MCCAMMON: I mean, that said, the Republican majority in the House, though, is very narrow – just three seats. Domenico, we’ve reported before about how disunified the Republican conference tends to be. Isn’t there some room here for Democrats to maneuver?
MONTANARO: Well, life in the minority stinks. I mean, there’s (laughter) no other way to really put it. I mean, it’s hard to really have a lot that you can do, especially procedurally. You know, there is the Senate filibuster for legislation, you know, where they’ll need 60 votes to get something passed, and Democrats can certainly stand on that, as Mitch McConnell did when he was Republican leader. But there’s going to be a lot of things, like those Trump tax cuts, that Republicans are probably going to be able to pass by tying it to the budget. They’ll only need 51 votes, so – and they certainly have that.
So there’s not a lot that Democrats can do procedurally, even when it comes to these nominees. You know, Democrats actually changed the rules some years ago, during President Obama’s term. Because Republicans were standing in the way of a lot of Obama’s nominees, they got rid of the filibuster for those cabinet appointees, so now you only need 51 votes. So beyond, you know, talkathons or trying to sort of slow things down a little bit with some procedural maneuvers, there’s not a lot they can do to really stand in the way.
This is really going to be about messaging. This is going to be about how Democrats are able to take what Trump has been doing, what Elon Musk has been doing, and trying to sell that to the American people as a problem. One of the things we’ve started to hear from some Democrats – like Hakeem Jeffries there after he mentioned that what-leverage-do-we-have point – is about the cost of living and saying that Trump’s not focused on the cost of living ’cause Democrats are trying to reach out more beyond just their base ’cause certainly a lot of the people in their base are upset about what they see as a breaking of democratic norms, about things like constitutional crises.
It didn’t work as a message during the election, and it’s really difficult because most people don’t know or care what the federal government really does. It certainly affects the Washington, D.C., area very directly, but the consequences across the country may take longer to be felt or – you know, if at all.
SPRUNT: There’s also something to be said for – like, you know, there’s a lot of opposition to what the Trump administration is doing, obviously, among Democrats and grassroots supporters in and outside of the beltway. But it is, like, exactly what the President talked about doing in his campaign.
And so Democrats navigating that space in their messaging is going to be really interesting to watch. And I think part of that comes to Elon Musk, who you mentioned earlier. Like, you know, there – Democrats have already tried to sort of play with some messaging, you know, calling him President Musk and sort of saying things like, you know, people voted for Trump’s policies. They didn’t vote for this guy to do a remaking, slash-and-burn kind of style, of the federal government.
MONTANARO: Yeah, I think a lot of this is really going to land in the courts, right? I mean, I think that this is the one area that can actually stop what the executive branch is doing and is going to be the sort of final say on the limits that Trump is testing to see whether or not what he does in how he’s firing people in the federal workforce or, you know, not wanting to continue congressionally-approved funding – if any of that is constitutional or legal, it’s going to be settled in the courts.
And we know that there’s a 6-3 conservative majority at the Supreme Court, so Trump is happy to test as much of this as possible, and we’ll see where the court decides to actually stop him. But politically, it’s going to be decided at the ballot box and whether or not a lot of the things that Trump winds up doing seems to go too far with people or if people like what he’s doing.
MCCAMMON: OK, it’s time for a quick break. We’ll have more in just a moment.
And we’re back. You know, one thing that I find interesting when thinking about all of this is Republicans, when they’re in the minority – they’ve gotten really good at holding things up – you might say being a bit more obstructionist. They’re willing to use the powers of the minority in ways that Democrats don’t seem to be willing to do. Domenico, do you get the sense that Democrats might be thinking about that differently now?
MONTANARO: I don’t think that’s wholly accurate, to be fair to Democrats here, because I don’t think the Democrats have the same powers that Republicans did have, and I think the Democrats tried to go through the Congress way more than Trump is trying to go through Congress. You know, Trump has done everything so far by executive order, by executive actions. You know, a lot of this is reshaping the federal government. He certainly – he’s in charge of the executive branch. Some of that, like we said, is going to be determined by the courts and whether or not it’s legal.
Like we said earlier, they’ve sort of been a bit more hobbled about the kind of legislative maneuvers that they can use, you know, especially when it comes to cabinet appointees or judges. You know, Democrats got rid of that because of how much obstructionism that Republicans used in trying to get judges or cabinet appointees through.
So I do think that there needs to be a little bit of education that goes on about what actually Democrats are able to do. They certainly could do more in being unified on their message or protesting or gathering people to understand, you know, how to fight back. That’s hard to do when you don’t have one particular person who everyone looks at as the leader of the party.
MCCAMMON: But do they have a different philosophy, to some extent, about that?
MONTANARO: I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I think that if they could do it, they would do it. I think that they’re generally – I mean, it’s very broad strokes – but a bit more opposed to some of those procedural maneuvers. But Republicans would say that’s not the case when you look back on somebody like Harry Reid, the former, you know, Senate Democratic leader, who was able to procedurally spar pretty well and hold his own with Mitch McConnell.
There isn’t a Harry Reid anymore, really. I mean, Chuck Schumer is more of a messaging guy, and Reid was much more of a procedural guy. And, you know, there’s a lot of Democrats trying to figure out who is going to be the person that can really lead them beyond this Trump administration.
SPRUNT: Yeah, there’s this big question mark about, like, who is the resistance figure here. And as you were saying, Domenico, you know, like, so far, it doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Hakeem Jeffries, leader of the House Democrats, is still sort of, I think, finding footing on best messaging practices going forward.
I think an interesting thing that we can all look for in March is when the joint address, when the President addresses a joint session of Congress. There’s always a Democratic response to that, and who they pick to give that response, I think, is going to be really telling about the type of messaging that they’re looking to sort of sharpen, going forward. Who the messenger is going to be there, I think, is going to be really telling.
MCCAMMON: So looking out a bit more broadly, I mean, Trump won the election, Republicans took the Senate, they kept the House, and yet a lot of people don’t vote in elections. Trump has never had an approval rating above 50%. One would think there’s some room for Democrats to make inroads here, but Domenico, is that the case given the way the country’s political structures work?
MONTANARO: Sure. I don’t know that the structures have anything to do with whether or not Democrats can take back the House in 2026, you know? I think that maybe a little bit of the issue Democrats have had certainly has been redistricting and gerrymandering, where the country sort of tips a little bit more toward Republicans because of how gerrymandered so many Republican seats are. Democrats do it too but not as much as Republicans have in multiple states.
MCCAMMON: Well, and the advantage in the Senate.
MONTANARO: Right, and the thing is, Republicans are unlikely to lose the Senate because of the majority that they have now. The real ballgame is going to be the House, and it’s only a three-seat majority, as you pointed out earlier. And a president generally does lose seats in their midterm elections. So I think that’s where Democrats are probably going to be most focused and likely to have the best ability to win, based on the issues in those districts and seeing what the Trump administration does.
I mean, it’s hard to believe this is, you know, only the first – we’re still within the first month – right? – of the administration, so, you know, there’s going to be a whole lot more that winds up happening. Whether it’s popular or not is going to be a huge reason why Democrats win or don’t win.
SPRUNT: Yeah, and I think, like, you know, for all this conversation about, like, what is the messaging and who is the messenger from Democrats, you know, a couple members I spoke with were like, you know, we could get a little grace. It has been a couple weeks, and there is a fire hose of information and action coming from Pennsylvania Avenue.
I think it is going to take time for Democrats to sort of solidify a message. And a lot of that depends on what happens with the courts and also, like, what continued actions Trump takes by executive order, what happens with this budget reconciliation – which is a topic for another day, but that is also underway this week. And yeah, it’s a long road ahead for Democrats.
MCCAMMON: All right, we’re going to leave it there for today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
SPRUNT: I’m Barbara Sprunt. I cover Congress.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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