The Insurgency Will Continue Until Morale Improves

How Democratic voters began to question, and ultimately lost faith in, their party's establishment: a comprehensive history.

(Photo by Natalie Behring/Getty Images)

You can read what follows as an after-action report on the Graham Platner saga—but that episode is a microcosm of something larger and more profound.

The Democratic Party has lost control of itself more completely than at any time I can remember.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was the precipitating incident. It caused Democratic voters to experience a crisis of confidence in the party’s leadership, which, to rough approximation, hasn’t really turned over in decades. The leaders accelerated the collapse in trust by cowering for months as Trump and the GOP—through largely criminal means—remade the United States government into a right-wing autocracy.

As politics like nature abhors a vacuum, the void filled from the left. This faction (comprising a hodgepodge of politically liberal progressives and more genuinely radical actors) has fielded candidates strategically, in a manner designed to gain power within the Democratic Party, but without taking huge risks in reach states and districts, where losing races would undermine their movement¹.

This has been an opportunistic endeavor, but I don’t use that term in a derogatory sense—at least not entirely. Progressives want more power in, if not control over, the Democratic Party for ideological reasons. The only way to obtain that power is to defeat incumbent Democrats, who in turn select the leadership. If the Democratic base is suddenly fed up with the party machine, it’s fair game in politics to channel that energy toward factional causes or candidates—so long as those candidates credibly promise to wage the fight Democratic voters are actually demanding, and don’t do and say things that make them losers in the eyes of the general electorate.

But that’s not what happened in Maine. It’s not what’s happened in at least a couple other, lower-profile congressional races.

Democrats are thus on the cusp of doing at the congressional level what Republicans did in the Obama-era midterms: win, but suboptimally, losing certain pivotal races for dumb reasons.

Maybe they’ll pull together by November, in Maine and elsewhere, and this comparison will seem foolish in hindsight. We should also note that Republican disarray in the Obama years didn’t exactly turn out to be the death knell of the GOP.

But in either case, all of this chaos and bad blood gives rise to the question of why. What made rank-and-file Democratic voters decide to roll the dice with untested politicians rather than place their trust, once again, in candidates supported by the national party? The backstory here is very long—the length of a magazine feature. But I hope you’ll read the whole thing, in installments if necessary, and then sit with it. I don’t think it’s possible to make sense of the anger coursing through the Democratic electorate without this context.

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We know why the American far right rebelled against the GOP establishment, starting almost two decades ago: Barack Obama won the presidency with an approval rating that hovered around 70 percent, but the lagging 30—a good proxy for the Republican base, and for today’s terminal Trump loyalists—regarded Obama as an interloper. Possibly Muslim, certainly black, and—according to the right-wing influencers of the time—quite likely born in Kenya.

How could Republicans, the party of Real America, lose to this?! And then how could they do it again?!

Without resorting to birther-style calumny, today’s anti-Trump majority asks a strikingly similar question of the Democratic Party: How could you lose, twice, to this manifestly horrible person? In contrast to the Tea Party, though, today’s resistance lacks clear and satisfactory answers. George W. Bush’s presidency ended in a multi-front disaster. His failures, which were the Republican Party’s failures, allowed Democrats to win back-to-back landslides, in 2006 and 2008. Republican leaders responded to these failures not by forging a synthesis between conservative cultural values and rigorous, fact-based governing, but by pretending their failures were about something else entirely. They’d let deficits get too big! They’d grown government when they were meant to shrink it!

They thus remade their party in the image of scoldy plutocrats rather than, say, Actually Compassionate Conservatives™️ and into the void—from the right, but down the escalator—flowed Donald Trump and kleptocracy and fascism.

For the pre-Trump GOP, then, there was a moment—an easily identifiable moment—when the music stopped. Democrats lack an analogous moment. The discrediting of the party leadership isn’t rooted in one obvious failure, but in multiple cumulative ones—pivotal moments, when Democrats could have exhibited what we now call “fight,” but decided otherwise. This is my attempt to weave them all into a single story, because they all stem from the same defect.

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The key inflection points came in 2008, then in 2020-2021, and finally in 2025².

If you were following politics as an outsider during the Bush years, you bore witness to an antidemocratic tide rising on the right. Republican operatives staged a small riot in Florida to stop vote counting in 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a partisan ruling that effectively selected the winner of the election, rather than allow voters the final say. The winner of the popular vote, and—most likely, in a full recount, the Electoral College—ran out of options and was forced to concede. The judicially installed president would go on to cement Republican control of the judiciary for another decade at least. Meanwhile Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, discovered that standing filibuster rules could be abused to create, in effect, a supermajority requirement to pass anything or confirm anyone.

These developments, no less than the Iraq war, formed a backdrop for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Democratic candidates made ambitious promises in that race, and were thus pressed by a subset of activists and liberal intellectuals to articulate a so-called “theory of change.”

John Edwards appealed to their passions, promising he’d overcome GOP obstruction by rallying the public in red states. Under enough pressure from their own constituents, Republicans would have no choice but to legislate in good faith.

Obama appealed to their better angels, by insisting he’d win with such a mandate, in such a cooperative spirit, with so much public support, that partisan obstruction would simply melt away like ice in the sun.

Hillary Clinton, who’d been the frontrunner for most of the race, appealed to their minds. She scolded her rivals for pandering to voters with the procedural equivalent of what we today, in the policy context, call “slopulism.”³ Republicans would be obstructive, and her job would just be to grind her way through it, slowly and methodically.

It can’t go without saying that Clinton’s appeal was the only credible one. By 2008, and really well before that, American politics had become polarized enough to know that sending a Democratic president on the hustings to Texas or Kentucky or Georgia to pressure Republican senators to support a new health-care program would increase Republican opposition to the program. It was also clear by 2008 that McConnell was more calculating and ruthless than Obama was beloved and persuasive.

But Clinton’s realism wasn’t terribly satisfying. What was striking to those of us on the outside was that none of these candidates, and no one else in the race, would even gesture at the most straightforward theory of change: that in a democracy, majorities should govern. In 2008 it was too early to foresee that a corrupt Republican judicial putsch would eventually necessitate farther-reaching democratic reforms. But the legislative crisis was already upon us. If Democrats won the election, and grew their congressional majorities, they should be prepared to change the Senate rules and simply legislate their plans into existence. With Republican cooperation if offered, but on a partisan basis if necessary.

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The skeptical activists were predictably vindicated. Obama’s first two years in office were marked by an enormous step-change in procedural obstruction. How much more could Obama have accomplished without the filibuster? How much more quickly would we have recovered from the Great Recession if Obama and his majorities could have scaled up stimulus as needed to hasten a return to trend? How much less receptive would progressives have been to Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in a climate of full employment? Would Sanders have even run for president?

In fairness to Obama and Clinton and Edwards, they could at least claim to be buffeted on all sides. Filibuster reform was, at the time, a new and radical idea. For every Democratic senator who might have been receptive to the idea there were perhaps 10 who’d dismiss it out of hand. For every activist who worried that the filibuster would be Obama’s undoing, there was another who worried about what would happen when Republicans returned to power. What would a Republican trifecta mean for reproductive rights, and organized labor, and civil liberties?

But wherever we stand on the big strategic questions of the moment, we should be honest with ourselves about this much: the biggest impediment to democratic reform has been elite reluctance, mostly arising from the center. Sure, legislating freely with a trifecta sounds fun, but it would also empower the party’s progressive wing. For years and years, through frustration and indignity, reformers made only incremental progress toward advancing this theory of change, in large part because “the establishment” didn’t want the center of power in Democratic politics to shift 10 votes to the left.

The leftists making a run for it today would cite this as a smoking gun: This just proves our point! The establishment serves donor and corporate interests, and its hostility to democratic reform was, and is, entirely an artifact of legal corruption. So we must defeat the oligarchy and its handmaids in Congress before we can talk about reform of any kind.

There is a kernel of truth to this critique, but only a kernel; the reality is much more nuanced, and the concluding inference—that progressives must take over the Democratic Party to make democracy reform possible—is false. It wasn’t just the establishment that opposed filibuster reform back then. It was also the aforementioned activists contemplating a national abortion ban and other horrors. It was also Bernie Sanders.

The more accurate distillation is that the Democratic professional class had been overtaken by a cargo cult of temporarily embarrassed mathematicians, lazy theorists, and self-interested consultants (some with big-money corporate clients) who applied to filibuster abolition the same analysis they apply to everything else: If the pivotal vote is the 50th senator rather than the 60th, policy in Democratic governments will shift to the left. If policy shifts to the left the “median voter” will notice, and become less inclined to support Democrats.

Obama and his advisers found utility in the fact that the Senate rules required him to get senators from Nebraska, Louisiana, and Arkansas to sign off on legislation, because if the pivotal member represented Colorado or Virginia, and was reasonably pliable, Democrats might “overreach” and doom themselves in subsequent elections.

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This represented an enormous failure of imagination.

In their schema, ideological polarization mostly represented a threat to Democratic electoral prospects: A plurality of the country identified as conservative. A similarly sized chunk identified as moderate. But only a small one identified as liberal or progressive. Ergo, if the Democratic Party ceded more power to its liberal wing, it would lose the center. They thus embraced multiple means of keeping that wing of the party in check—including anti-democratic ones like the filibuster.

But the bigger threat polarization posed, even in foresight, wasn’t to Democrats. It was to democracy. Remember, a large number of Republican voters held a positive view of Obama at the outset of his presidency, but 30 percent of the country viewed him as a usurper on the basis of nothing. Lies. Conspiracy theories. Skin color. Thirty percent of the country, when clustered into one party, is a majority of that party.

We didn’t quite have the language for it at the time, because we couldn’t predict how easily and totally the right would embrace strongman politics. But if a majority of the Republican base was unapologetically, antidemocratically right wing—if it could not abide a popularly elected liberal on the basis of collective fever dreams—it would mechanically gravitate toward, or simply produce, Republican politicians who’d agree with their premise: that liberal rule is per se illegitimate.

In light of those incentives, the proper response—almost as a matter of game theory—was to radicalize for democracy. Sometimes Democrats would advance liberal policy, sometimes they’d advance moderate policy, sometimes they’d support Republican policy. But they would take an uncompromising view on the democratic nature of our system. Majorities win, winners govern, losers concede—but they live to fight another day.

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Between 2008 and 2020, Democrats made plenty of tactical mistakes that didn’t help. Many were rooted in unearned certainty that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump, and then in the belief that Trump was a passing storm. The Obama administration knew quite a lot about the nature of the Trump campaign’s cooperation with Russian election subversion, but chose to sit on it, because Mitch McConnell threatened to throw a hissy fit. Clinton clearly understood the threat Trump posed—just go review their debates—but her campaign was, in most ways, the same old statistician-driven moneyball operation she would have mounted against Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Nancy Pelosi abjured fighting Trump through proper oversight.

Some of these errors were symptomatic of the problem I’m describing here⁴. And they were definitely important. But they were, again, tactical. They didn’t really implicate the architecture of politics. Trump lost the 2020 election notwithstanding Pelosi’s soft touch opposition.

The next pivotal error, or family of errors, began in 2020. Joe Biden entered that cycle’s presidential primary palpably diminished to everyone who’d followed his career⁵. But influential centrists—and, eventually, establishment Democrats—concluded it’d be dumb to rally behind anyone else. Biden was the most moderate candidate in the field. He polled perhaps one-percent better than other candidates in the head-to-head with Trump—a name-recognition effect his supporters imbued with immense significance: Science dictates that he’s the safest bet.

They didn’t lose the bet, but they set the country on course for catastrophe. A man of his age and moderate temperament was reasonably well suited to win one election, but terribly adapted to defeating Trump and his movement for all time. And it mostly follows that the party’s incumbents, so relieved to run with Biden at the top of the ticket, were similarly maladapted.

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In an undisclosed location, hiding from a violent mob on January 6, 2021, a small number of well-adapted House Democrats began drafting articles of impeachment, in the hope of passing them immediately following the certification of the election.

The leadership rebuffed them. Pelosi adjourned the House. Democratic senators were largely relieved or indifferent. Speaking for the center, Joe Manchin urged the House not to act. “There’s no rush to do this impeachment now.”

Even Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, a liberal-minded senator and avid filibuster reformer, wanted to move on as if nothing had happened. Asked, “What is the argument that the President… should not be impeached and removed from office in the next two weeks?” Merkley responded, “I think we need to put all of our energy into the transition, and preparing to take on the issues facing America. To take these critical few weeks and spend them on a President who is going to be removed on January 20th would be a disservice to our nation.” (A day later, amid mass outcry, he largely reversed himself.)

House Democrats did, belatedly, impeach Trump, a week after the initial shock of the insurrection had worn off. The Senate did not convene his trial until almost a month later. By then most Republicans had closed ranks around Trump. And as before, Democrats’ instinct was to preemptively yield to their assumptions about what Republicans would and would not do. There was no point in extending the trial; in forcing more evidence loose; in doing literally everything within their power to protect the country from the risk that Trump would re-constitute his movement and mount a comeback.

Senator Chris Coons summed it up infamously: “The jury is ready to vote,” he told the House impeachment managers. “People want to get home for Valentine‘s Day.”

Coons wasn’t just speaking for incumbent Senate Democrats. As a senator from Delaware, and a fixture of Delaware politics, he was Biden’s dear friend, surrogate, and closest ally on Capitol Hill.

Biden wanted to pull the plug, too, and not just on the impeachment business. He didn’t want Trump to become the main character of his presidency, or for his presidency to be remembered for partisan rancor. He snuffed out a fledgling advocacy shop called the Trump Accountability Project. The White House started referring to Trump as “the former guy.” Biden wanted to be remembered the way other great modern presidents are remembered—for changing laws⁶.

That, in his mind, made Merrick Garland—a chief circuit court judge—doubly, triply, maybe even quadruply suited to the role of attorney general. Garland was an eminence of the clubby, bipartisan appellate-law bar, whose members (the liberal ones, at least) prize prudence and perceptions of reasonableness over decisive action and swift justice.

Nominating Garland would make soft amends for the way Republicans mistreated him when Obama nominated Garland to be a Supreme Court justice. That’s one. If Garland were to vacate his seat, Biden would be able to replace him with a younger judge. That’s two. Garland’s long judicial career might even carry weight with his friends on the Supreme Court, where Biden’s laws and executive actions would invariably come under GOP challenge. That’s three. But four—and most importantly—Garland would not pursue Trump with the zeal of a freedom fighter.

At the outset of the transition, the top political reporters at NBC News wrote Biden had “told advisers that he doesn’t want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor”—specifically of Trump’s tax crimes, and abuses of the pardon power. One adviser told them Biden "just wants to move on."

Subsequent reporting by two of the best-sourced Justice Department reporters in the country would confirm it: They let him go.

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The establishment motive for preserving the filibuster—the impulse to marginalize the left—became clearer than ever around the same time, when the two right-most Senate Democrats, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, formed a firewall in its defense. Their explicit purpose was to keep power rooted in the center. It may be the case that there was nothing Biden and Schumer could have done to prevail on them. And even if those two had changed their minds, it might have simply shaken loose wider opposition: Manchin and Sinema were, according to many sources, heat shields for several other members.

But, again, they did not really try. The priority was roads and bridges (most of which would not be built in Biden’s term), health-insurance subsidies (which would expire shortly after it), and industrial policy (benefiting workers in red America who remained in thrall to Trump).

Democracy protection would have to wait. There would be hearings. There would be speeches. But the architecture would not change. The official Democratic political response to decades of legislative nullification, the theft of the Supreme Court, and a failed coup would be nothing.

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This left Democrats unable to respond when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—when they still held congressional majorities. The court’s right-wing majority was thus free to make its allegiances clear—by granting presidents (but specifically Trump) wide-ranging legal immunity for criminal abuse of power, and by accelerating the right-wing attack on the pillars of multiracial democracy.

Shaken as many of us were, though, by the mounting toll of Democratic passivity, these choices were not the load-bearing bricks. Many of the rank and file Democratic voters who now demand change still had faith (or at least grudging trust) that the establishment knew what it was doing. Obama won twice. Hillary Clinton lost because our system—the one in need of reform—doesn’t always allow majorities to win, let alone govern. But she was the people’s choice. And Democrats bounced back quickly. They won the 2018 midterms in a landslide, reclaimed the White House decisively in 2020, and fought the 2022 midterms to a draw.

But they lost to Trump outright in 2024. They’d given the country full employment, lower inequality, rising wages, but lacked the confidence—the fight—to declare it morning in America. Work left to do, but oh what a mistake it would be to re-empower the party that keeps leaving the country in ruin. Their democracy appeals fell flat—but of course they did! If democracy was under such urgent threat, why did Democrats keep deprioritizing its protection?

To add insult to injury, they continued deprioritizing it. After Trump won, they had a lot to say about the price of beef and eggs. But they were less interested in creating a unified front against autocracy. It is true that they opposed Trump’s nominees more vigorously than any minority has ever opposed a president’s nominees. Yet no other president has required all of his nominees to propound lies about the results of an election as a condition of federal service. The correct number of Democratic votes for these nominees was and remains zero.

And then, when their votes were needed to fund the government, when the question before them was, “Should we pass an enabling act—should we provide months of budget authority to a president shredding the constitution, including the provisions governing the budget?” their response was “yes.”

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Things have gotten better—a little bit better—in the months since that betrayal.

But this is why Democratic incumbents and establishment candidates are endangered.

Most Democratic primary voters can not recite this history chapter and verse. Some were children when it began. But we all have experience with unwanted conflict. Most people aren’t political junkies, but everyone’s had a high school bully or a bad neighbor or an abusive boss or romantic partner. We all know what it’s like to be in a bind or crisis and then reason or fight our way out of it. If you’re physically strong you might fight with your fists; if you have a lot of friends, you build a posse; if the law is on your side, you hire a lawyer. Nobody puts their finger in the wind and performs high-mindedness, expecting the masses to rally to their side organically.

Contra my Politix cohost Matt Yglesias, this is why Democratic primary voters believe incumbent Democrats and the “establishment” don’t fight. It is not because they want Democrats to repeat Green Day chants or be generally more “expressive.” It’s because those Democrats don’t take uncompromising stands, then deploy their power maximally, even when the most important things in the world are on the line.

This is why Democratic voters are sniffing out fresh blood, and, in some cases, finding candidates who have no business serving in Congress: If one faction promises to fight the oligarchy, and the other promises to win by inching closer to common ground with Trump, which one is the primary electorate going to side with?

It’s also why I regret that I, and people who assess the problem the same way, didn’t do a better, more organized job steering primary voters toward candidates who could espouse credible theories of power, rather than ones who use the word “fight” as window dressing for whatever factional ulterior motives they have in mind.

The problem now is that it’s basically too late. There is no going back in time, and there are few procedural levers within reach that would help the dread establishment regain the trust of voters before the election.

But if Democrats wanted to signal that they get it, I could think of a few gestures that might help:

• They could remove Schumer from the leadership and replace him with someone like Chris Van Hollen⁷ now.

• They could lay out strict conditions for their votes on the next federal budget now.

• They could embrace what you might call caravan-style politics—named in honor of the GOP’s established practice of creating lurid spectacle before elections. The world is currently struggling to contain the worst Ebola emergency in history, in large part because Trump and Elon Musk gutted U.S. capacity to address global health crises. Republicans including then-citizen-celebrity Donald Trump won the 2014 midterms in large part by blaming Obama for a far-off Ebola outbreak. Why can’t Democrats return the favor?

• Same screwworm; same measles; same cyclosporiasis. Democrats never invested in partisan media (a topic for another day) but they could send creators to the epicenters of these crises to create reams of scare content.

• They could cut AIPAC loose altogether, and promise that the next Democratic government will reassess its relationships with Trump-aligned regimes the world over—including Israel’s.

• Trump has lost a war, and now lost a ceasefire, but somehow is not the subject of constant ridicule. And because the press is more afraid of Republicans than of Democrats, it insists on reporting that the ceasefire has been “tested” rather than “failed.” Democrats could change that! They could demand Trump’s resignation over this debacle. They could assert that the failure of this war is not clear to the public because the mainstream media has a pro-Trump bias. And when Republicans laugh, as they invariably would, Democrats could say it again.

• Just for fun, they could start and fan a Musk birther craze, and promise to investigate his citizenship pursuant to Congress’s valid legislative purpose in overseeing the government’s solicitousness toward South African nationals.

More generally, they could act like you or I would act when we’re beset on all sides in our own lives. The things that Dems find frustrating about the unfairness of the political system? Yes, sure, bore through them like hard boards. But make clear that they are intolerable, and that underlying impediments will be removed. Tell the public things will get better—but that it’ll first require unwinding the right-wing autocracy and building a better, stabler democracy than we had before.

Or don’t! Or continue along the trajectory of the past two decades. Maybe it will all work out. Maybe a combination of luck and Republican failure will save the country without Democrats ever having to fight the way their voters wish they would. But that is a recipe for more Graham Platners. The insurgency will continue until morale improves.

1. As of this writing, the closest thing to an exception is the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, a state Donald Trump has won twice in three elections.

2. The story arguably begins with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore or even (arguably) with the Gingrich revolution. It is ultimately a story of Democrats failing to respond with proper force to a right-wing rebellion against democracy. But for our purposes, we’ll begin in 2008—ahead of the first election that gave Democrats the power to really act in proportion to the threat.

3. Hillary Clinton famously (and accurately) mocked Obama’s theory during a February 2008 campaign event in Rhode Island: “I could stand up here and say let's just get everybody together, let's get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect. Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be.”

4. I know from professional experience how hostile Democratic Party operatives were to critics of the leadership.

5. If you’re still watching old debate videos, pull up the 2012 vice presidential debate between Biden and Paul Ryan.

6. It seemingly never occurred to him that our greatest president is remembered not for signing laws that affected the ways and means of our economic and social systems, but for saving the union and rebirthing freedom.

7. Van Hollen is a long-serving member of the establishment, but has demonstrated convincingly that he’s tired of what he called “wimpy” Democrats, and Abdul El-Sayed has endorsed him for Senate Dem leader.