How Democrats Can Survive the Next Four Years

Beyond all resistance all the time.

Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as one of its new vice chairs. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters:

We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.

Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”

Yet the simple recognition that they lost in November for a reason still seems inadmissible in the party’s deliberations about how to deal with Trump 2.0. Instead, they give every indication of doubling down on their least popular policy agenda items and the resist-everything-all-the-time strategy that yielded disastrous results for them last time.

Unless Democrats acknowledge that much of what Trump says and does is not only popular but also, here and there, good policy, they can never recover. They should seek compromise on issues where Trump holds the policy and political high ground, reserving hard opposition for the areas where voters are least likely to agree with him—such as blanket tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which are neither justified nor popular.

The party should heed the acerbic advice of the great Democratic congressman Barney Frank: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.”

In other words, if it feels good, don’t do it.

With that advice in mind, here are four rules of the road to help Democrats navigate the next four years.

1. Avoid the name-calling

Let’s start with something easy: Don’t drop the F-bomb. Democrats must resist the urge to characterize Trump or his policies as “fascist”—as Kamala Harris did in the home stretch of the presidential race. Why? For a start, it’s not true. Trump may have authoritarian tendencies. But—if the term is to retain any meaning—that is very different from being a fascist. A cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century history should make that clear. (If you have any further doubts, please consult Richard Evans’ three-volume history of the Third Reich.)

If Trump is a fascist then all that he does must be part of his heinous fascist plot, and all of it must be resisted all the time. California House Democrat Robert Garcia demonstrated this approach last week when he ruled out any compromise: “I think the idea that we’re talking about holding hands with Donald Trump and extremist Republicans and like, kumbaya, I think is a huge mistake. We know what he’s going to do. We should oppose that and be very vocal and tough and push back.” The F-bomb has another political disadvantage: It disparages everyone who voted for Trump by implication.

It is my sad duty to remind the gathering legions of anti-fascist fighters: it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time. “Trump, Trump, Trump, fascist, fascist, fascist, Trump, Trump, Trump, racist, racist, racist” has repeatedly failed to stem the populist tide—most recently just a few months ago in the Harris campaign. This time is not different.

The path to durable victory is what it was before: convincing voters you are a moderate and reasonable alternative to Trump.

2. Moderate—starting with immigration

That moderation should start with a decisive issue in the last election: immigration. Voters want a secure border and an end to runaway illegal immigration. They believe Democrats don’t. In his first days in office, Trump tightened border security with a series of executive orders; his administration has started to implement deportations targeted at criminal immigrants; and he signed the Laken Riley Act, which is named after the Georgia nursing student murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra in 2024. (It provides for the detention and possible deportation of illegal immigrants charged with certain crimes, as Ibarra was. In a chemically pure example of what is wrong with the Democrats, Joe Biden apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as illegal rather than the approved undocumented.)

So far, Democrats have done little to address voters’ suspicions that they don’t take border security seriously. The Laken Riley Act passed the House and the Senate with the support of only a handful of Democrats. They have offered close to no support for Trump’s executive orders tightening up border security and ongoing deportation actions. An honorable exception is Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who not only voted for the law but attended the Act’s signing ceremony. He has said it is “common sense” that violent illegals “all need to go.”

The party could twin a serious, unapologetic commitment to border security with opposition to inhumane treatment of detainees, excessive deportation (e.g., of the Dreamers), and unpopular steps like eliminating birthright citizenship. But that would require meeting Trump halfway—something most Democrats still refuse to do.

3. Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI

It’s a similar story with DEI and affirmative action. In a series of executive orders, Trump has set about dismantling DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of fringey “right-wing ideology”. In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

4. Embrace energy abundance

Democrats also need to show more pragmatism on energy. Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: Environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response where Trump’s energy plans go off the rails. For example, pausing wind but not other energy projects makes no sense from an “all-of-the-above,” energy abundance perspective. And just gutting the energy provisions of the IRA wholesale is neither wise nor necessary. Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath note:

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar, and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.

But Congress should maintain federal incentives for promising less-mature technologies, such as nuclear and geothermal energy and natural-gas plants with carbon capture. Doing so would rebuild the bipartisan consensus for energy innovation that prevailed in congressional politics for decades.

That would be a worthy goal for Democrats to promote. And in the end it might do more for emissions reduction than a quixotic attempt to defend renewables and EV subsidies to the death.

More generally, Democrats don’t need to—and shouldn’t—ignore climate change. But a winning message must be embedded in, and subordinate to, voters’ overriding priorities: energy abundance and prosperity. Polling clearly shows that this is the mainstream view—but among Democrats it is still, at best, a niche position.

What’s true of immigration, DEI, and energy is true in many other areas. The trick is knowing when to say “okay” to Trump, and when to say “no.” Democrats sometimes seem to understand this. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview, “Trump will screw up,” urging his colleagues to be patient. Even Jeffries seems to appreciate the point of this, at least in theory. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” he said last week. By Monday, though, he sounded a lot less restrained, unveiling his plans to push back against “far-right extremism that is being relentlessly unleashed on the American people.”

Amid all the denial that dominated the contest for DNC chair, there was a breath of realism from Adam Frisch, a Democratic former Congressional candidate in a rural Colorado district who over-performed the top of the ticket but still lost his 2024 race. “Twenty big cities, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard—that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party,” he told The Wall Street Journal recently.

If Democrats want to rebuild their shattered party, they have no choice but to exercise restraint and choose their fights with Trump wisely. The alternative is four years of garment-rending, continued isolation on a few islands in Blue America—and, in 2029, a fresh batch of candidates for DNC chair blaming the latest electoral disaster on racism and misogyny.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.