Trump Has Blazed a Path to Midterm Victories — for Democrats
Time for them to stop trashing each other and get on with the real job.
The least surprising news of the campaign season, Democratic edition, is that one winning House nominee is so young that the incumbent she defeated was already in Congress when she was born, and two nominees for governor bragged in their campaigns about how many times they’d sued Donald Trump. Oh, and a few democratic socialists won primaries in blue areas.
Seriously, the real shocker in this midterm cycle would be business as usual — no voter backlash — in the face of flamboyant ruling-class greed and corruption from Trump & Sons on down, accompanied by Supreme Court outrages and broken promises on everything from prices to war.
There is, I’ll concede, some competition for “least surprising” in the spectacle of Democrats beating up on themselves and each other about age, experience, socialism, and electability. It’s a habit they can’t quit, whether their prospects are bright or they’re on the path to doom. Which is why, in a year that could deliver a blue wave, you get descriptions of Democrats as “still consumed by factional infighting over how to win,” as Politico put it recently, and headlines like this one from data-nerd G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers: “Can Democrats outrun their party’s brand problem? I tested three proposed fixes.”
In happy news for anyone who’d like to see a Democratic Congress slam the brakes on Trump and MAGA, Morris found that yes, Democrats can outrun their party’s brand problem. It’s as simple as the timeless message to kids, from Dumbo to Bluey to Abby and the Pipsqueaks: Be yourself. Or, as Morris summarizes after testing four messages, “the best Democratic candidate is the one who comes across as a real, independent person who cares about their constituents…. Voters don’t really want a moderate or progressive, they want an independent thinker who fights for them.”
And they shouldn’t waste time arguing about whether their party should be moderate, liberal, progressive or democratic socialist. Agonizing over “whether they are coming off as left vs. center left” is pointless, Morris says. “Many voters don’t really know the difference anyway.”
In reality, the party is already a big tent, and it should grow. In a country as diverse as America, it should contain multitudes.
The 2025 elections were proof of concept. As I wrote last September, you could not find more different candidates than moderate Abigail Spanberger (now Virginia governor), democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani (now New York City mayor), and marketing executive Catelin Drey (now an Iowa state senator). They all ran on separate, often contrasting versions of “affordability.”
(A fourth candidate, oyster farmer and combat veteran Graham Platner, took off last year precisely because he was not a standard-issue Democrat and survived a series of scandals to win Maine’s Democratic Senate nomination. But his support from Democratic leaders, voters, and the party collapsed this week after a former girlfriend accused him of sexual assault, and though he denied the allegation, he reportedly was set to exit the race as early as Wednesday.)
Forget about ‘message discipline’
For years, Democrats have envied Republicans’ ability to march in lockstep. But Trump-era lockstep carries political and even physical risk if a candidate or an elected official challenges him or dares to say (correctly) that he lost the 2020 election. And though a little “message discipline” might have been useful when progressives were calling to “defund the police,” it’s not a panacea. In fact, Morris says, uniformity has hurt Democrats for the past half-century. The answer: “They just need to stop being generic.”
That doesn’t mean Democrats need to jettison their ambitions and ideals. There’s broad support across the party — and the country — for expanded health coverage, paid parental leave, affordable housing and childcare, stronger gun safety laws, and restoring legal abortion. Hypothetical candidates did well in Morris’s test by telling voters they support border security, legal immigration, paths to citizenship, and federal spending on social and health programs — plus the ever popular raising taxes on corporations and the rich. They also did well by pitching themselves as mavericks who break with party leaders to deliver for their districts.
Conflicts over shared goals tend to center on how big and how fast to go. But friction often gets worked out, either in campaigns or in Congress, as candidates try to win and officeholders try to get results.
This year shows how progressives and democratic socialists sometimes drop inflammatory positions they know will turn off voters where they’re running. In Colorado, State Rep. Manny Rutinel (age 31) won a June 30 House primary after revising his views on student debt, fracking, healthcare, and meat consumption. (As a Yale Law School student: “Animal agriculture is a horrific, exploitive industry.” Now: ”We need to be supporting [Colorado ranchers and farmers] every step of the way.”) In New York, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier (age 32) ousted Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat last month after deleting “thousands of posts and reposts” on Twitter that criticized Israel and made or supported incendiary calls to abolish police, prisons, borders and deportations.
The past decade shows how Congress can turn rebels into pragmatists (democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is a prominent example) and political opposites into allies on issues like breaking up monopolies and banning stock trades by lawmakers. And then there’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, officially an independent, unofficially a democratic socialist, a two-time presidential candidate, and a longtime mentor to younger progressives.
Sanders chaired the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee when a major scandal broke, involving concealment of such long waits for medical appointments that veterans died waiting to be seen. That’s how a democratic socialist ended up in two volatile rounds of negotiations with conservatives — first the late Sen. John McCain, the former prisoner of war and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, then Rep. Jeff Miller, chair of the House veterans panel, who represented a north Florida area known to some as the Redneck Riviera. “Strange bedfellows” doesn’t do these pairings justice. Even so, they produced a compromise bill in four months, “a split-second by Capitol Hill standards,” I wrote in a case study of the process.
The threat is inertia, not socialism
A dozen years after that deal, democratic socialists look mild compared with the across-the-board extremism of Trump and MAGA. Democrats are evolving, but — and here I’m biased — in a more logical direction intended to reinforce rather than destroy American values. Take me, for instance. I’m still a center leftie concerned about the budget deficit and chaotic governing that unnerves business and harms the economy. But at the same time, and especially since the Supreme Court session that just ended, I’m more than ready for what I’d call a Fight Club agenda: a couple of new states; a larger high court; term limits and a binding ethics code for justices; constraints on presidential power, including pardons; and laws with teeth to outlaw the rampant payoffs, profiteering, and conflicts of interest that Trump has engineered in plain sight for himself, his family, his cronies and their families.
These structural reforms are non-negotiable for me, and I’m not alone. In an NBC poll this year, two issues tied for No. 1 when registered voters were asked the most important issue facing the country. They were “inflation and the cost of living” and “threats to democracy,” each at 26%.
Democrats increasingly are absorbing the idea that these issues are not just equally crucial, but are intertwined in ways that make it easy to talk about both of them. Here’s how Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut did it in a floor speech detailing 500 days of what he called staggering corruption: “Government is supposed to serve us. It is supposed to lower costs, supposed to protect our families, strengthen our schools, make life better for people. But Donald Trump believes that government exists to serve him — to make him richer, to protect his friends, to reward his donors. That is why he doesn’t have time for you.”
On the bright side, and yes, there is one, Trump himself is doing all he can to help Democrats. Nothing says “I don’t care” like the president declaring that “I love the inflation” or dismissing a landmark, bipartisan affordable housing bill as “a yawn.” Democrats of all stripes should find it easy to contrast Trump’s outright indifference to everyday Americans with the TLC he lavishes on himself, his family, and rich people like him.
How will all of this play out in the close House races that will determine if Democrats are in charge of oversight, investigations, and punishment? Or the close Senate races that will decide which party controls votes on judges, justices, and Senate rules? There are many known unknowns, and few comfortingly definitive polls. But the table is set. Trump has done his worst and then some. His job approval ratings reflect that.
Now it’s up to the Democrats. Will they trash each other or focus on voters? That’s a rhetorical question. Let it go, Democrats. It’s time to make the best, most heartfelt, most relatable case you can to the people you want to represent. Your country needs you.
Jill Lawrence is the author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock. Read her work at JillLawrence.com.
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Dems shoot themselves every time Maine every time. Arguing about what type of Democrat - when are they going to actually stand for something outside of “ Not Him”