The Democrats are furious. And they want leaders to get mad too.
“I hope you’re mad,” a member told Vice President Gil Cisneros, a California Democrat, at the recent City Hall. At an event in Minnesota featuring a panel of Democratic attorney generals, activists expressed similar sentiments: blasphem “angry, human.”
The anger that shakes the party is slow to build slowly, and is a powerful present boring that is now passing through voters and pulling Americans, fearing that the country is falling into authoritarianism. Democrats have little power to exercise Washington because they don’t have a leader to lead them – rushing to exploit their sudden rage.
At rally, city halls and protests, voters have vented the rage of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s full-front attacks on federal agencies, believing progressive activists are the embers of populist backlash against the president.
Last week, tens of thousands of left-leaning voters gathered at the Fighting Oligarchy rally, hosted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Congressional Democrats spoke to crowds at a House District event held by Republicans who are advised not to hold city hall meetings in this climate. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly joined the Tesla Takedown movement and offloaded the electric vehicle after its release with Musk.
Despite the rage trend, Democrats still don’t have a clear strategy to stand up against Trump and chainsaw-wielding musks. Their popularity is the crater, and they remain divided into policy and messaging.
Deep complaints among Democrats wonder if they are on the crisis of their own Tea Party style grassroots rebellion.
“What if we didn’t smoke?” Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive titktok star, said this week in a campaign video launching a bid for a safe, democratic Illinois home represented by long-term sales representative Jan Schakowsky.
“This is not a referendum on Shakowski,” Abugazare said in an interview. “We need to try something different. I’m tired of waiting for someone to do something. There’s no perfect mythical candidate coming out of woodworking to save us.”
There is an almost universal agreement that the parties need to reset after the election. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic leader of the biggest Blue State, said his party’s brand has become “toxic.”
“People don’t think we’re bothered,” he said.
Recent polls reflect the tough situation. According to a Kinnipiac University poll last month, only 40% of Democrats approved the way Congressional leaders handled their jobs compared to 49% who disapprove. The survey marked what university voting analyst Tim Malloy called “a calm slap in Congress’s historic Democrats,” weeks before Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer offered a vote to pass the Republican-drafted government fundraising bill, directing a fierce setback and calling for new leaders.
A survey released this week by data from Progressive Voting Companies for Progress showed that 70% of Democrat voters gave the party’s response to Trump below the “C” grade, while 21% assigned a failed grade.
The majority of respondents expressed their desire for new leadership in the party, with 69% agreeing that older leaders should retire and torches should be handed over to the next generation. “What if we had come out strong and burned a philosophical gun?” Abugazare said.
Stephen W. Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University and author of American Wrath, said anger could be a powerful electoral force.
“Angry voters are loyal voters,” he said, but there’s a Democrat risk if they fail to match their base’s rage, “they take the risk of turning them on to voters.”
The progressive group leads a campaign where Schumer demands aside demand, as leader, despite Schumer remaining rebellious. The left-wing group is also stepping up efforts to challenge the incumbent of the Democratic Party in next year’s midterm elections.
“Frankly, what’s pretty confusing right now is that Democrats stick their heads into the sand and don’t respond directly to the moment we’re in,” Ingisible co-founder Ezra Levin said in an organized call this week.
Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, who studied Tea Party, said the conservative movement was a false blueprint for Democrats.
“The Tea Party has gone to the GOP, the Democrats can’t. If so, it’s going to leave them to a minority position for 40 years,” she said. Skocpol, who also studied anti-Trump resistance that emerged in response to the 2016 election, said her research showed that engagement at the state and local levels helped save Affordable Care Acts in the 2018 Congressional mid-term elections and change the tide of Democrats. It’s a better model, she argued, and could begin with upcoming special elections in Wisconsin and Florida on Tuesday.
An upset victory by Democrat James Malone for the Pennsylvania Senator in the district, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump in November, provided the party with a beacon of hope. Democrat Sen. Vincent Hughes said Malone’s victory was a “chaotic referendum that Washington Republicans brought to our state,” adding that “voting is getting tired of.”
Part of the challenges Democrats face is leading the resistance without a clear leader.
An open-ended CNN poll asked to name a Democratic leader. They feel that they are the “best reflection” of the party. 10% of respondents followed Ocasio-Cortez, followed by Kamala Harris with 8% with Sanders, while 30% did not provide names.
“There’s no one there,” one respondent told pollers. “That’s the problem.”
Much lower on the list, or completely missing, was most frequently cited as a potential presidential candidate in 2028.
Sarah Longwell, the publisher of Bluwark and a well-known anti-Trump Republican poller who spoke to House Democrats at a closed door retreat in Virginia earlier this month, said she was disillusioned with the state of opposition leaders.
“No one knows what time it is. No one looks ready to meet at this moment,” she told Phoenix audiences during live taping of the podcast on the next level.
Among some exceptions, the conservative host was his attempt to dismantle the Department of Education and the threat of reducing social security and Medicaid and Medicare as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez actively mobilized overflow crowds against the Trump administration’s massive firing of federal workers.
I predict that Americans will continue to show d and speak up, Trump’s popularity will eventually be very low, Republicans start to “figure out ways to offload him,” and Democrats “stop acting like someone who is scared of their shadows.”
As their excited basic searchers for fighter jets, the party is still looking for answers. There is extensive agreement on the diagnosis. The party must rebuild its trust with the working class and reclaim its cohort of young, Latino and Asian voters who fled Trump in 2024.
Post-election analysis by voters found that David Scholl had a sharp swing from Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump. In other words, they chose candidates who promised to close the exact same door they walked into the country. Perhaps most worrying to the party, it was a sharp turn to Trump among young people, especially men.
The growth of the Democratic faction supports the economic message of populists to recapture these voters.
At Capitol Hill this week, an ideologically mixed House Democrat group called on the party to embrace the “spirit of the patriotic economic populism warfare.”
“Democrats need to wake up and stop protecting elites and establishment,” said Chris Delugio, representing the competitive Pennsylvania district, in a speech on the floor.
“This embrace of economic patriotism may sound different and sound depending on where you are in this country and who the messengers are,” he continued. “But we agree that the spinless Democrat era must end.”
The speech coincided with the mood of the party’s fight since Trump’s reelection. But the party’s identity crisis runs deeper than it spans ideology, policy and messaging.
Nearly 80% of Democrats hope that the party will take a more fighting approach to the president, including 50% who want the party to be “more” combative, according to new data from Republican pollster Patrick Rafini. Democrats also found that they were twice as likely to say they wanted the party to move towards the political center (42%) rather than the political left.
According to Ruffini, the path forward is what he calls “battle-centricism.” He is a candidate who will take over Trump and his administration but holds a moderate position on important social and economic issues.
Matt Bennett, founder of the third way of think tank on the left of the center, strongly agrees that parties need to be rebranded, especially in their approach to working-class voters. However, he is not convinced that billionaire-centric criticism, defended by leftist populists like Sanders, is the right approach.
“It’s not clear that the country that selected the billionaire, the wealthiest man on the planet, is demanding that we fight the Olihead,” he said. “They are very angry with both Trump and Elon, not because they are wealthy, but because they are destroyers who are destroying the American Republic.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re taking the backseat in the fight against Trump,” he added.
One lesson that many Democrats have drawn from their 2024 defeat was that Trump opposed it wasn’t enough. But showing his willingness to fight him might be enough to start a conversation with the voters who ousted them in November.
“I think there are many opportunities to intervene in fresh leadership and some fresh ideas and be bold and under attack,” said Rebecca Cook, a Democrat who runs to get the opportunity to free Republican leader Derrick Van Olden in the politically competitive Wisconsin home district. “I think we’re playing a little too much defense. I think it’s important as a Democrat to not be held back a little more.”
Rachel Leangan contributed to this report
