Will The Anti-Trump Grassroots Rally Back To Democrats?

At least the Tea Party had the Freedom Caucus...

(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Why are Democrats so unpopular, and does it matter? (As in: Does it suggest they may not be able to capitalize on the large and growing backlash to Donald Trump next November?)

I’ve been asked versions of this two-in-one question perhaps a dozen times over the past six months, including at least twice since the Wall Street Journal found 63 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of the party.

So I gather it’s on many people’s minds.

My answer to the first question—why so unpopular?—contains two components; one long-running, and one acute.

The long-running answer is that over the past decade, if not longer, the Democratic Party niche in American life has become a no-man’s land for enthusiasm. This debility is partly of their own making, partly a consequence of the poor-but-idiosyncratic decisions of individuals, and partly attributable to bad luck.

An important contributing factor was that, as political media became ubiquitous, Democrats made the fateful decision to retreat. To be as invisible and inoffensive as possible. To Do The Work, and let The Work speak for itself—ideally in the pages of the New York Times. As the right invested billions of dollars in propaganda machinery, Democrats and their donors responded with basically nothing. Progressive money went to issue campaigns. Right-wing money went to crushing Democratic power nodes and repeating one message as loudly as possible: Democrats are slimy, perverted losers (who hate white people).

In other realms, though, Democrats are on the receiving end of bad incentives. My friend

David Roberts

captured the dynamic well in this prescient thread. Republicans smear Democrats to degrade them and signal tribal loyalty. Leftists air contempt for Democrats to “demonstrate the moral and ideological purity that are the price of membership.” Progressives do it to discourage compromise. Centrists to burnish their political independence. Mainstream media, to avoid bad-faith accusations of bias. Add it all up and there’s no major institution or faction in U.S. public life that generates enthusiasm for Democrats in an organic or transactional way.

But that alone can’t explain 33 percent favorability, or why only eight percent of survey-takers view the party “very favorably.” Notwithstanding all the blah, half the country is liberal, half the country votes for Democrats. The acute accelerant is the party leadership’s limp response to the abuses of the Trump presidency. Democrats are at a low ebb, because tons of their voters have lost faith.

This brings us to question two: Does it matter?

By one read, it’s not so important. It might even carry positive implications. If, say, 50 million voters hate Donald Trump with such a fire that they’ll tell pollsters Democrats need to fight him harder, that could be a bullish indicator for the midterms. Mostt people will vote for a check on Trump even if it’s a weak one. That’s the point

G. Elliott Morris

and

Mary Radcliffe

drove home in their analysis of the Journal poll.

And recent history matches this assessment. Republicans were catastrophically unpopular when George W. Bush gave way to Barack Obama, for many of the same reasons Democrats can’t find a friend today. They were defeated, culturally out of step, and associated with a president most people viewed as a failure. Amid this malaise, their core voters descended into paranoia over the specter of dark-skinned usurpers seizing America. They wanted leaders who fought, and distrusted the ones in charge.

Those leaders nevertheless oversaw a midterm landslide that would alter the landscape of U.S. politics for a generation or more.

Something analogous could happen again. I hope it does. But certain differences are worth considering.

BOEHNER V. CAUCUS

The main one is that by 2010, the far right had established more control over the Republican Party than any dissident faction has over the Democratic Party today.

Republican activist voters may not have thought highly of John Boehner, but they had friends in high places, and Boehner feared them.

Boehner was still speaker when Republicans shut down the government in a futile 2013 effort to “defund Obamacare.” That wasn’t his idea, though. It was Ted Cruz’s idea. Boehner thought it was idiotic—but he was only nominally in charge. Cruz, from an entirely different chamber, whipped up enough House GOP support for a shutdown that Boehner relented, reasoning he’d otherwise be deposed mid-Congress.

Rightists wielded their power over the GOP leadership in certain stupid, quixotic ways—in this case, Republicans reopened government after a couple weeks, having accomplished nothing. But that’s really just to say they had power. And for all their hubris, it’s worked out pretty well for them.

Dissident Democrats lack similar power, and are divided among themselves. The Democratic grassroots want accountability for Trump, or at least for him to encounter resistance. But there isn’t a real beachhead for them in the House. There’s the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, several other identitarian caucuses, various policy caucuses, and the New Democrat squishes. But there’s no Congressional Democracy Caucus¹. No caucus for procedural hardball. No caucus for brawlers.

DON’T MURRAY, BE SCRAPPY

Consider the internal wrangling this year over who should be the top Democrat on the House oversight committee.

In 2023 and 2024 the top oversight Democrat was Jamie Raskin—a model member—and he took Alexandria Ocasio Cortez under his wing as a lieutenant and mentee. When he graduated to the Judiciary Committee, the Dem machine whipped to block AOC from ascending to the top oversight seat in favor of Gerry Connolly, a spirited but 74-year-old man who has since died of cancer.

When the vacancy arose again with Connolly’s death, the party had another opportunity to elevate a young, hungry member. And it did. Two under-50 Democrats sought the position: Robert Garcia and Jasmine Crockett. Crockett lost badly.

I don’t dredge this up to suggest the wrong person won. I could argue it both ways. Crockett would probably have drawn more attention to Democratic accountability efforts in general; Garcia may be less prone to rhetorical misfires that blow back on the party as a whole. But consider this anecdote from a recent, lengthy profile of Crockett that ran in the Atlantic.

Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”

The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”

There may have been good reasons for elected Democrats to choose Garcia over Crockett, but this isn’t one of them. If you want to know why so many people who protest kings also hold the Democratic Party in contempt, I believe it’s stuff like this. Too many Democrats run scared from righteous truths, because they lack confidence in their ability to win easy arguments. They’d rather allow evil to flourish unchecked than get even slightly crosswise with the median voters in their districts. And leadership has their backs.

This week, Patty Murray and Susan Collins, the top Senate Democratic and Republican appropriators, patted themselves on the back for passing a full complement of government funding bills out of committee. Murray would go on to lament one thing: “This bill does not…unfortunately…fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” she said. “As everyone knows, Republicans rescinded bipartisan funding we provided for CPB in the first ever partisan rescissions package.”

What actually happened is that Republicans made a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, lied about it, reneged, and defunded public broadcasting unilaterally. In other instances, the Trump administration has predictably withheld appropriated funds in violation of federal impoundment law, leaving Democrats without recourse. Yet Senate Democrats seemingly intend to look past that double-cross, without even really trying to close the rescission loophole, or erect obstacles to impoundment, freeing Republicans to double-cross them once again.

Plenty of elected Democrats find this outrageous—but the leadership doesn’t have their backs.

The anti-Trump grassroots, tired of taking it in the teeth, thus have no one in their corner with the power to stop this. They aren’t asking Democrats to demand something quixotic, like Cruz’s crusade to defund Obamacare, just that their elected leaders stop presenting their backs for stabbing. They’re asking Democrats not to sanction Trump’s lawlessness with their votes. To instead use their power to block any legislation Trump will not enforce reciprocally.

Can Elizabeth Warren round up 40 other Democrats to block this sucker’s deal? I suppose it’s possible; I hope she pulls it off.

But if she can’t, the grassroots will find they once again lack any outlet to exert influence. The Tea Party had the Freedom Caucus, what does No Kings have? As long as elected Democrats are deaf to their demands, there’s at least some reason to doubt the history of 2010 will repeat itself.

1. Note to self: There should be a Congressional Democracy Caucus.