3 Things Democrats Could Do That They Aren't (Yet)

Learned helplessness can be unlearned. Especially when you think about ways of organizing an actual opposition.

If you listen to Democratic elected officials and power-brokers, they’re doing everything they can think of to stop the Trump-Musk power-and-money grab. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose been given the responsibility by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) of leading rapid-response messaging for Senate Democrats, told CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere this past weekend, “You pull every lever that you have on things that you disagree on, but I have to say, this idea that to shut the whole place down…” Booker’s voice trailed off at this thought, Dovere writes, then he affirmed he wouldn’t support any kind of government shutdown. “The levers that we have are limited, but at the same time, all of us share the lever of speaking out, of raising popular sentiment.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House minority leader, keeps emphasizing the kitchen table message that internal polls and focus groups tell him is the most effective one, Dovere reports, so instead of telling the public Trump is a dictator-in-formation, or that he is vastly out of step with core American values, at his weekly press conferences Jeffries asks, “How is this lowering costs?” But this is understandable, in a way. Democrats who have been in office for a long time follow polls instead of trying to change them. So while they’ll attack Republicans for threatening to cut Medicaid in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, they’re mostly shy about making a big picture argument about Trump’s fascism.

The third person in a position to articulate a national message for Dems, Ken Martin, the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, just put out a memo emphasizing “Trump’s war on working people.” While the language condemning that war is robust, nowhere in his memo does Martin say anything about how Democrats are supposed to stop it.

It’s as if they’ve never played the political game. Back in early February, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), another veteran of Democratic leadership, told Axios’ Andrew Solender, “We are in the minority, and that makes it difficult for us to respond.” A week later, Solender and his colleague Justin Green reported that senior House Democrats were annoyed by all the calls they were getting from grassroots activists, specifically griping about groups like MoveOn and Indivisible, who were driving calls their way. One Democrat claimed Jeffries was “very frustrated” at their efforts to get the party to be more confrontational, though Jeffries through a spokesperson denied that. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) told Axios, “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively.” (Torres, who is maneuvering to run for Governor, does not hide the fact that he hates progressives and voted for the Laken-Riley Act, which undermines immigrants’ constitutional rights, so it’s not clear that we need more of his kind of non-passivity.)

A big part of the problem is that most national Democrats, who have become highly dependent on corporate money, don’t really like their base very much. Democrats like Jeffries and Schumer tend to show their real steel only when it comes to fending off grassroots pressure. I asked a friend of mine on Capitol Hill who is a senior staffer for a House Democrat for their sense of the mood on the Hill. “Members are in a fetal position,” this person said. “Democrats genuinely are caught flat-footed and once again are reflexively punching to the left.” I asked if Dems were out of sync with the base because after losing in November they went through a post-election evaluation that led them to conclude that “we lost because we didn’t focus enough on the price of eggs,” making them unprepared to handle how radical Trump has been on everything. My friend agreed, adding that most Hill Dems are “white liberal elitists,” unlike their own base.

“The Democratic Party thinks what they need is a winning message without a base,” my friend added. “I don’t even think we know what a Democrat is any more.” And without that clarity, leaders like Jeffries default to warring with the left. “He’s always ready to be aggressive in those moments. It’s when I feel like he does anything with conviction.”

That said, my friend said progressives also needed to do a better job of communicating what they want from their representatives in Washington. While calls from activists were flooding in, “there’s too much noise.” Referring to movement groups like Indivisible and MoveOn, my friend said, “no one from those groups has reached out to me or anyone on my team about a plan.” Nor was it clear what the Congressional Progressive Caucus wanted, they said. Now was the time for these groups to be organizing more closely with House progressives, they added. “Establishment Democrats created this mess. They’re not getting us out.”

Three Ideas for Democrats

There’s nothing else we can do, Democratic leaders claim. We’re in the minority.

Here are three things they can do that they aren’t (yet).

1. Organize

This short clip of Jon Stewart talking to former White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki suggests that, in fact, they aren’t powerless. They have money, lists and tools that they know very well how to use during campaigns; the question is why aren’t they using them now to organize.

According to OpenSecrets.org (an incredibly valuable public resource that needs your donations!), national Democrats are sitting on a pile of money. The DNC finished out 2024 with $22.1 million in cash on hand. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had $11.4 million. The Senate Majority PAC ended 2024 with $9.2 million in the bank. The DCCC finished with $24.3 million in hand. The House Majority PAC ended 2024 with $5 million.

That’s $72 million in all.

On top of that, at the end of 2024, Democratic House members had $252 million banked in their campaign accounts--compared to $206 million for Republicans. (This includes a handful of people did not return to office in 2025, either because they lost their re-election bids, retired, or won higher office.) On the Senate side, Republicans had more cash than Democrats, $156 million to $121 million.

For arguments sake, if every congressional Democrat took 20% of their campaign war-chest and put it into a national emergency organizing fund, that would garner close to another $75 million.

National Democrats do not lack for cash. Right now, they do not need to be hammering our phones and in-boxes with messages begging for money. Instead, they have more than enough money to run a national organizing campaign! (Which would probably pay for itself if done right.)

And it’s not like they lack the other raw materials needed for a national organizing campaign. Their precious national voter file has every registered voter on it, along with their address and other contact information. Democrats also know how to reach their base by email or text if they want to (after all, what are all those damn requests for money?).

In 2024, millions of grassroots volunteers were mobilized to make tens of millions of calls and texts to targeted voters and to knock on millions of their doors. Right now, we could be reaching out to independent and soft Republican voters—the kind of people who probably voted for Trump because they wanted “change” but who are now open to questioning if cuts to education, health care, scientific research, air safety, and veterans programs (to name just a few) are the kind of change they bargained for. We could be doing this with a focus on states like Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, which just happen to be the home states, respectively, of Senators Dan Sullivan, Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Jon Husted. (This is the essence of Indivisible’s Payback Project.) Or with a focus on the Republican House members in the most purple districts.

—See also “Stop the Texts,” from The Grassroots Connector, February 14, 2025.

2. Hold town hall meetings

Just under half the people who voted in November didn’t vote for Trump. Many of them are looking for leadership right now. They’re also hungry for community. Democratic office-holders at every level can address both of these needs by holding town hall meetings. The value of doing this is obvious: people discover that they aren’t alone. Local media (if it still exists) will amplify the event, and these days everyone can also share clips on their own social media. And most critically, organizers can absorb new people.

What’s going on right now is upsetting at every level, but the one silver lining is that we’re not starting from zero. There is an existing coral reef of local organizing networks in many parts of the country to attach people to; new people (or volunteers returning after a break from their activism) do not necessarily have to build groups from scratch. Town hall meetings are organizing multipliers. (Sadly, my newly elected Congressman George Latimer doesn’t appear to get this; when he was asked a week ago at our local Indivisible meeting—where attendance had quadrupled from a month earlier—to host a town hall meeting, he demurred. People just use those things to “vent” their grievances, he claimed.)

To be fair, some voters will go to Democratic representatives’ town halls and discover that their elected officials still think they have to play by the rules, while the other side does whatever it wants, regardless. Here’s a woman who went to Senator Ron Wyden’s townhall Saturday who is furious that he doesn’t get that. Here’s a man who urged Wyden to get into some “good trouble” who thinks, based on his response, that he’s sadly “an older gentleman out of his league living off past achievements.” Well, one way or another the Democratic party is going to have to re-invent itself, and if these people find each other and link up, the odds of that happening get a little better.

3. Set up a Daily Opposition Briefing

So much is happening, the opposition needs a daily focal point for sharing its version of events, which can go out via YouTube and across every other digital platform. Multiple versions of this idea are apparently circulating, including one that suggests that Democrats stick former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in front of a camera on a daily basis. But I like the version that I first saw articulated a few days ago by Joyce Linehan, a former rock band manager who also worked at chief of policy for Marty Walsh when he was mayor of Boston. Here’s how she describes it:

Consider this an appeal to those of our elected leaders, specifically those in Congress, who recognize these events for what they are. We need you to develop a communications strategy with the utmost urgency…. You should be holding a daily public briefing, at the same time every day. You should appoint or hire a central spokesperson – a press secretary for the Opposition Party. That person should spend 30 to 60 minutes behind a mic every day, explaining what we know, what it means, and what the party, working together, is doing in response.

Though emotions are high, and some people are lashing out at you, most of us understand that you don’t have all the answers. That’s OK. We just need to know that you are working on it. Every day. Together. And we want you to know that we are here, gathering our people and our strength, ready to act, to take care of each other, and to support your efforts to save our democracy.

I worked at Boston City Hall, as part of Mayor Walsh’s team, during the deadly COVID pandemic. Every day, he would hold a press briefing, where he laid out the facts and took questions. In this case, it was the number of deaths, hospitalizations, meals served, testing sites, etc. It was clear, concise information that served to give people news they needed to get through the day, and to provide some level of direction and even comfort.

The information was compiled, and because we know for a variety of reasons we can’t always rely on media to tell the whole story, every senior leader in City Hall was asked to distribute it to their networks via email and social media.

In my case, hundreds of emails were sent every day to educational institutions, non-profits, arts organizations, community activists, and more. This is the model you should be following. I know you have the ability to communicate with us, because I have had multiple daily solicitations for small-dollar campaign contributions. Use those databases for this now.

Unfortunately, national Democrats aren’t capable of doing this. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a pecking order problem inside today’s Democratic party. (Actually, there are two pecking order problems.) The people at the top of the congressional pecking order – “Leaders” Schumer and Jeffries – aren’t in those positions because they are gifted communicators. (They’re skilled fundraisers and poll-readers.) But they won’t anoint someone else to this kind of central role. And even if they did tap someone like Buttigieg, the other problem arises. If he succeeds in the role, he gains an advantage in the 2028 presidential sweepstakes. Which means that everyone else who wants to run in 2028 will be rooting for him to fail—and sticking knives in as subtly as they can.

If we’re going to get a Daily Opposition Briefing, it will only be if movement groups build it. Stay tuned.

—Semi-related: Detailed vote tallies for the DNC elections earlier this month have been released by Michael Kapp, a committee member.

Cartoon by Zez Vaz of Portugal

Civil Society Starts to Rise

—Several dozen leading professional associations (led by the American Psychological Association) have signed onto a joint statement under the banner of the United Science Alliance, asserting their commitment to champion scientific integrity, safeguard academic freedom, include diverse perspectives and protect the ability of experts to pursue their research with autonomy and integrity.

—The 50501 phenomenon (50 states, 50 protests, 1 day) has legs, as yesterday’s Presidents Day protests show. “No Kings” is a pretty good slogan, if you ask me. Ten thousand people were out at NYC’s Union Square. On Reddit, the 50501’s page now has 125,000 members, triple what it was a week ago.

—Want to support federal workers? Say hello to the Federal Unionists Network, which is doing a national day of action tomorrow.

Jews Against Ethnic Cleansing

Last week, more than 350 rabbis and a smattering of famous “Jewish creatives” signed onto a simple open letter that appeared in the New York Times as a full-page ad. It read “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing.” The initiative marks the first time since October 7 that I can recall when progressive Zionists and progressive anti-Zionists have stood together, a promising development in what has been a hyper-polarized arena. If you don’t spend your waking moments immersed in this topic, you can be forgiven for not noticing this, of course. But it is not a small thing to get people like Gabor Mate and Naomi Klein on the same page with Rabbi Sharon Brous and Rabbi Toba Spitzer, for example.

Since Thursday, more than 3000 people (including yours truly) have added their names to the call, including more faith leaders like Rabbi Steve Gutow, the former CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, Idit Klein at Keshet (which fights for LGBTQ+ equality) and Jewish progressive leaders like Leah Greenberg of Indivisible. The two largest Jewish denominations, the Conservative and Reform movements, have each made their own statements condemning Trump’s Gaza plan as, respectively, “anathema to Jewish values and international human rights law” and “neither an acceptable strategy nor moral action.”

ICYMI

—Feeling overwhelmed? My friend Andrew Boyd has the answer. (Though I have to admit I took this approach for many years, when I decided that I didn’t really need to know the ins-and-outs of the Panama Canal treaty debate. Look how that turned out!)

End Times

Too Soon, New Yorker!