Democrats Want to Fight. But How?

Since the Democrats’ loss last November, the party and its allies have spent months in heated debates about their future. Though it appeared at first that some members had little appetite for changing course, Democrats’ own voters may eventually force their hand. A near majority (48 percent) of them want the party to moderate moving forward, even on some issues that have historically been third rails in their coalition.

But moderating on policy or cultural issues doesn’t equal supporting Trump. Indeed, Democrats’ voters are also growing increasingly angry at the administration’s early actions and calling on their leaders to do something—anything—to fight him.

Recent polling has shown that many Democratic voters don’t just oppose Trump’s early moves, but they are also becoming disillusioned with their party’s leadership, which they view as too accommodating to him. Over the past weekend, two different surveys found the Democratic Party’s favorability rating at its lowest point in recent history, and the dour views came not just from Republicans and independents but Democrats, too.

In both polls, there was a notable shift among Democratic voters from eight years ago. Whereas in Trump’s first term, huge majorities said the party should work and compromise with Trump and congressional Republicans where it made sense, that sentiment has now been inverted.

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Notably, those polls were conducted before Senate Democrats walked back their threat to shut down the government over concerns about DOGE, enraging many of their colleagues in the House and likely further frustrating their base. But the story is clear: Democratic voters are itching for a fight against what they view as a destructive agenda from Trump, Elon Musk, and congressional Republicans.

Desiring a fight and effectively putting one up, however, are two very different things, as Democrats discovered during the recent shutdown saga. House Democrats and the party’s base were agitating for the Senate to deny the Republican majority cloture on a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and open.¹ The argument was that by stopping this “CR,” they would make it more difficult for DOGE to operate and thus slow down Musk’s wanton gutting of the federal government.

But as the writer Josh Barro explained, this strategy was bound to backfire by emboldening Trump and Musk even further:²

As you may have noticed, Elon Musk has already been trying to shut down the government—not through a shutdown fight of course, but by simply firing workers and closing agencies, and doing so in violation of laws Congress passed that set out how the government should spend money. That is very upsetting, but it is also an important signal that neither the Trump Administration nor Republicans in Congress would care if a shutdown made it difficult for government agencies to function. What they would care about is that a government shutdown, if Democrats forced one, would unlock more legal power for the president to decide how the government should operate. Trump could declare functions he does care about to be “essential” and keep them going, while furloughing all the employees he’d really like to fire and shutting down all the operations he’d like to permanently terminate, and he could do so with much stronger legal authority than DOGE has been using to do similar things to date.

Unfortunately for Democrats, because they’re the party that believes in a more robust federal government while their opponents believe in substantially curtailing its power, threatening to shut it down isn’t much of a threat at all.

The Democrats’ relative powerlessness throughout this episode was a harsh reminder that life in the minority isn’t fun, a lesson that members of both parties often seem to forget (even in this unstable era of politics wherein majorities routinely change hands). The real battles for power happen in elections, and Democrats’ inability to stave off a Republican trifecta last November brought them to this moment.

Still, no one can or should realistically expect a minority party to just play dead, either. Any healthy democratic society requires a loyal opposition to balance out the majority and work to curb the excesses of the latter.

There is also some political wisdom in picking fights with Trump where they can. After all, it’s not as though Trump is universally beloved or that his early moves are broadly popular; quite the contrary. And as anyone who lived through the Obama years will remember, regularly hitting the president and his congressional majority for the less popular elements of their agenda can reap big rewards for the minority. Though Republicans were unable to stop Obama from passing the Affordable Care Act, they delayed its passage long enough to move public opinion against it, helping them win a special election in deep-blue Massachusetts (and end Democrats’ short-lived super-majority) and also make historic gains in the 2010 midterms. They achieved this not just through legislative tactics but also by tapping into grassroots anger in their party and encouraging their base to show up at Democrats’ town halls to register their complaints, episodes that garnered national media attention.³

If Democrats can coalesce around a thoughtful strategy for opposing Trump on his most controversial moves—at this early stage, this appears to be his tariffs, DOGE (to a slightly lesser extent), and possibly his tax cuts—they might succeed in replicating their GOP predecessors’ success: making Trump and his policies unpopular enough to derail them or, at minimum, reap electoral rewards from them. This requires keeping a concerted focus on those things and not getting sidetracked by other tempting fights, especially those on the cultural front, where they are currently at a clear disadvantage.

The other benefit of mounting an (effective) opposition is that it prevents deflating their base. Though one of Democrats’ longer-term challenges clearly is finding ways to expand their appeal beyond that base, they’ll still need their core voters to stay engaged. If they listen to the more moderate elements of their coalition and move toward the center on the cultural front, showing some reasonable level of resistance to Trump’s overreach might assuage their more left-wing members.

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Ultimately, parties can only exercise the power that voters give them, and last year, the country made clear they weren’t pleased with how Democrats used the power they’d been granted. For frustrated Democrats, there is a path for effective opposition to Trump that might work to stymie some of his agenda and pay electoral dividends as well. But the next best way to prevent Trump or his acolytes from fulfilling a vision that Democrats largely oppose is to simply beat them in elections. “Resistance” will only take them so far, especially if rooted in nothing more than mindless rage. The rest hinges on their desire to reform.

1. In layman’s terms, this means filibustering the bill and forcing Republicans to find a super-majority of 60 votes to pass it (Republicans only control 53 seats).

2. Congressional reporter Gabe Fleisher also wrote an extremely helpful rundown of why a shutdown would only make Trump and Musk’s goals easier to achieve.

3. And this was before the rise of Twitter and other platforms that helped such incidents go viral overnight.