Democrats Need A Battle Plan—And A War Room

They shouldn't "roll over and play dead"—they should understand what their advantages are, and seize them.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

We’re only one month into Donald Trump’s second presidency, but the public already wants someone, or some entity, to check him. Many people are desperate for it.

If you spend any time in online spaces (at least those that haven’t been over-run with MAGA loyalists or Elon Musk fanboys) you’ve surely noticed the clamor for Democrats to think creatively. To find ways to compete with Trump and Musk for attention, and rally the masses to stop him or slow him down.

Maybe they should anoint a “shadow cabinet” to explain to Americans what a benevolent and capable government would be doing today, in contrast to Trump’s wanton destruction. Maybe, as Cheri Jacobus and Mark Cuban recently suggested, they should hire Pete Buttigieg to conduct daily press conferences on Capitol Hill, as a special Democratic communications official.

I’m glad people are trying to think outside the box, and really do not oppose the idea of doing more conventional media.

But I don’t believe anyone can layer more and better spokespeople on top of a weak political strategy, and expect to turn it around. The closest thing Democrats have to a plan right now is to “roll over and play dead,” while Republicans destroy themselves. At best, Democrats in Washington see shallow political reporters make a big deal out of small tactical maneuvers, and reason backwards or circularly: More press conferences, or more cringe-inducing, influencer-style TikTok videos, will yield more stories about how Democrats are retooling to fight Trump, which will make people feel better about Democrats. That approach is never going to work.

If Democrats and progressives writ large are serious about taking on the right’s enormous communication apparatus, which has now fused with a Republican White House, they need to first commit to a resistance strategy that will rally people, then build a communications strategy to complement it, and draw more people in.

Long before Democrats settle on tactics (how to stage press conferences, what kind of things to post on social media) their leaders, starting with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, need to change their mindset about what it means to be an opposition party. Right now those two New Yorkers are “mainly watching” as the Musk/Trump regime “mounts an all-out blitzkrieg on the federal government, the rule of law, and democracy.”

My firm belief is as follows, and it derives from my experience as a congressional leadership staffer, first in the House and then the Senate, the last time Democrats were this badly demoralized: You can’t rally people to your side if you are behaving as a spectator yourself.

It won’t matter what kind of cutting edge communications tactics Democratic leaders in Congress deploy. They’ll be drowned out if they aren’t elements of an all-out resistance.

REID THE SCHUM

Democrats haven’t been in such a rut since early 2005—20 years ago to the day.

John Kerry had just lost to George W. Bush. The Bush campaign won that election in part by smearing Kerry’s record as a veteran and tapping in to national opposition to same-sex marriage. Democrats responded by doing something that seemed very conventional, and, well, very Democratic. They elected Harry Reid, a soft-spoken, uncharismatic moderate from Nevada, to lead the Senate Democratic caucus.

Reid turned out to be much punchier than he looked. He didn’t intend to “roll over and play dead” or stand back and watch as Republicans made themselves unpopular. Instead, he organized a “war room”. Here’s how Roll Call described his plans 20 years ago.

“I will ensure that all Americans — from my rural hometown of Searchlight to the nation’s big cities — know the values and principles for which Democrats stand,” Reid said. “That is why I have formed an aggressive operation with the best talent in the country to spread the word and get the truth out.”

Reid is overhauling the critical area of message delivery, in which many observers say the Democrats have underperformed over the past four years. [...]

In addition to Manley and Singer, Reid expects to hire up to 15 aides for the communications center, including a top Internet staffer and a daily “blogger” to keep pace with that increasingly high-profile corner of the World Wide Web. Tessa Hafen, Reid’s veteran press aide, will become press secretary within the communications center, focusing on issues of local interest to Nevada.

This approach was unheard of at the time—especially on Capitol Hill. The key to it wasn’t just hiring a bunch of people to deploy communication tactics at a greater-than-usual rate. Reid had a mission: “Get the truth out.” Democrats would fight Republicans by actually fighting them; the war room’s job was to contribute to that effort, and then tell the story on every medium available at the time.

I worked for that team after Democrats reclaimed the Senate, and I think Democrats would benefit from a modernized version today—if they’re willing to put up the underlying fight.

Our model had a team leader (Reid’s chief of staff Susan McCue) but the approach was distributed. We called it “multichannel” years before the modern digital media took shape. She hired sharp progressive staffers with connections to influential new-media stars, but she also understood that they wouldn’t be able to tell inspiring stories about Democrats if we weren’t doing anything inspiring.

That’s what made the pieces fall into place. We did plenty of conventional communication, like churning out press releases with rapid-response quotes, and fanning our opposition research on White House officials and Republican senators out to reporters. We did the kinds of daily (or almost daily) press conferences that today’s anti-Trump movement wants to see. We booked prominent Democratic senators on national and local television week-in, week-out, and made sure to foster relationships with high-profile new-media progressives. There weren’t really podcasts or social-media stars back then, but Reid gave us the latitude to create content and share it with reporters and bloggers (the original “influencers”) so that the Democratic narrative would seep into the national discourse, even if it didn’t seem to be coming from elected Democrats. Sound familiar?

Reid was an actual boxer, and didn’t fear partisan conflict, and that set the tone for us, in a way I fear is lacking in today’s Democratic leadership. The war room fought back relentlessly against the Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress, because Reid supported the team and approved of its tactics. We weren’t waiting for permission from focus groups, we were following his lead.

That’s not to say the war room stopped Bush in his tracks. He was able, among other things, to confirm two Supreme Court nominees. But Democrats killed his plan to privatize Social Security, and by 2006, we were on the front foot, running as a confident opposition against the Republican “culture of corruption” and the weapons of mass destruction lies Bush told to sell the war in Iraq.

DEMOCRATS, UNFETTER’D

Can Schumer and his Democratic caucus pull off something similar today? I am confident that Democrats today will vote in unison against Republican plans to cut and privatize popular programs like Medicaid. House Democrats did just that this past week, and I suspect Senate Democrats will follow suit. But there’s more to opposition, and moving messages, than voting against unpopular legislation.

If Democrats want to frame mass perception of the second Trump presidency, they need to first decide that they truly oppose him in their bones, and then act like it. That will be very hard to pull off if the Senate Democratic leader chants "We will win! We will win! We won't rest! We won't rest!" at a protest in the afternoon, only for his members to vote to confirm an election denier to a cabinet post in the evening.

So my plea to Democratic leaders in Congress right now is to start with high principles—harness your raw anger over Trump wiping his ass with the Constitution and only then think about which tactics to use. When Democrats appoint Cory Booker to tutor members about how often to tweet, it isn’t just embarrassing—like watching a team of grandpas struggle with a newfangled contraption. It also puts the cart before the horse. What are you going to post about if you lack the confidence to oppose Trump, and why would anyone share it anyhow?

Democrats need a plan that speaks to mass outrage bubbling over today, not to John Fetterman’s re-election needs four years from now. Instead of organizing daily press conferences for the sake of having press conferences, or posting selfie-style videos to TikTok (because that’s where the kids hang out) Schumer and his lieutenants need a real resistance strategy—no fig leaves, no half-hearted gestures that everyone can see through—and then they need to get excited about it.

If they do, the staffers who might work for a new war room, and their natural allies throughout the culture, will find their footing naturally. The machine will click into gear. Trump won’t be able to drown out Democrats, because Democrats won’t be responding by committee—they’ll be fighting like they mean it. Voters will hear Democratic messaging for the first time in a decade, and they’ll find it persuasive. Americans root for people who stand up for themselves, whether they do it in a newsletter, at a press conference, through an influencer, or on social media. But they won’t root for a pushover, just because he happens to be on TikTok.