Can the Democrats rediscover themselves in the age of Trump?

Even on the placid streets of London’s Mayfair, James Carville cannot find peace. “Every five minutes I get stopped and asked about Chuck Schumer,” says the Democratic strategist when I speak to him. “I can’t even enjoy a $30 martini by myself.”

Carville’s party is in dire straits. The humiliation of losing to Donald Trump had not yet worn off when the Donald stormed back to the White House with a vengeance, unleashing the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on the federal government, assembling a cabinet intent on carrying out even his most radical policies – and scaring the few Republican would-be dissenters in Congress into submission.

In the face of a firehose of raw power and impunity, the Democrats have found themselves less powerful and less popular than at any point in recent history.

In the last election, Trump made serious gains in support from almost every voting group coveted by the Democrats. He drew a larger percentage of Latinos than any Republican in history. He doubled his support among black men from 2020. He significantly increased his support among younger voters, and data now shows Gen Z are considerably more conservative than millennials across all demographics. A CNN poll in March found just 29 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic party, a record low in the 33 years since the survey started. A top Clinton advisor told Axios that Democrats are in their deepest hole in nearly 50 years – since Ronald Reagan’s victory.

Out of the White House and in the minority in the Senate and House of Representatives, the party is caught between a furious base desperate for it to do something – anything – and the cold reality that there is little that can be done. That reality has resulted in some tragicomic displays of ineptitude. During the President’s first address to Congress in February, stony-faced Democrats brandished paddles emblazoned with messages of protest such as “MUSK STEALS” and “SAVE MEDICAID.”

“The first commandment of politics is ‘thou shalt not make an ass out of thyself,’” says Carville. The paddles in particular violated that commandment. “It was so counterproductive it was productive in a way. No one is going to do that again.” Tommy Vietor, the former Obama White House official turned Pod Save America host, agrees. “The paddles were stupid and kitschy,” he says. “This is not a moment for being cute.”

‘The party in Washington is divided and defeated and depressed. The party in the country is angry’

Carville has advocated for a different approach than the one demanded by liberal voters. In a somewhat controversial op-ed in the New York Times, he made the case for inaction.

“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.”

Republican control of the government means that Democrats have little leverage until the midterm elections, Carville argues. “All I hear is people saying ‘God damn it, let’s do something,’” he says. “Great! What? Let’s win an election.”

“The most important thing they can do is win,” says Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton advisor. “And they’re not going to win in Congress, because they don’t have the votes. But they can and are winning in special elections. Which is not nothing.”

Carville sees upcoming hurdles for Republicans, which will drag their approval numbers down and boost Democrats in special elections, in which the party does seem to be faring well. He predicted that the debt-ceiling extension, which could come as soon as this summer, will set up a “titanic struggle” for Republicans. And their proposed tax cuts are estimated to cost $4.5 trillion over the next decade, a sum that will make the sweeping cuts made by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency look petty and cruel. The play-dead strategy is unlikely to satisfy voters. “It’s a tale of two parties,” Begala says. “The party in Washington is divided and defeated and depressed. The party in the country is angry, and that anger is giving them energy.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has become the lightning rod for activist rage after he voted for a Republican-authored spending bill to avert a government shutdown in March. The “original sin” of Schumer’s vote, says Vietor, “was they got expectations completely out of whack by suggesting they were ready to shut down the government. But more importantly, there was clearly no strategy. They didn’t know what they wanted to get out of that vote.”

Matt Duss, a former advisor to Bernie Sanders who worked in the Senate caucus led by Schumer, says the current Democratic leadership “could not be less fit for this moment.” He added: “I’ll give [Schumer] credit, he’s an effective leader of his caucus. He knows how to manage and kind of work and maintain consensus within the caucus. [But] he is clearly not a leader with a vision for the future of the country.”

Schumer argued that a shutdown would give Trump and Musk even more power to run roughshod over the federal government, but that reasoning has done little to quiet his critics. Chief among them is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young progressive from Schumer’s home state of New York, who called his surrender to Republicans “a huge slap in the face.”

Sources say that at the Democrats’ annual policy retreat in Virginia, members privately urged Ocasio-Cortez to run against Schumer in a primary when he’s up for re-election in 2028. “There’s a lot of frustration with [Schumer], and there was a lot of support at the Democratic retreat for AOC to run,” Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive who represents Silicon Valley, says. “I do think we’re going to see a generational change.”

Ocasio-Cortez has brushed off questions about such a challenge, but at the time of writing she is on a barnstorming speaking tour with Senator Sanders, who represents Vermont, throughout the country, where thousands have assembled to hear them decry the new American oligarchy.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have a potent message. “There are 13 billionaires in Trump’s government,” Begala says. “OK, that’s 13 more than Biden and 12 more than Obama. Democrats need to say, ‘this is what happens when you have government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.’”

Such rhetoric fits perfectly with what Sanders has been saying for decades. It resonates now more than ever because more and more Democrats feel that neoliberalism has failed. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s “stop the oligarchy” rallies have been attracting tens of thousands. The Sanders camp says the crowds are bigger and more enthusiastic than the ones he drew in his last presidential campaign. Traditional media may maintain a skeptical view of Sanders, yet he is, like Trump, enormously popular online. His response to Trump’s address to Congress was viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube, ten times more than the official Democratic response to the speech delivered by moderate Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

Khanna, an increasingly influential figure, sees on-the-ground campaigning as a way to right the Democratic ship and energize voters. He’s taken his own message of “economic patriotism” on the road, holding town halls in red districts across the country to contrast his vision with what he says are Trump’s dangerous attacks on the economy, courts, universities and other institutions. “We have to be on the offense in winning the public argument,” he says. “The President has crashed consumer confidence. He’s spiked inflation, he’s putting a chokehold on the economy. The more we can make that argument and Trump’s numbers go down on the economy, the more courage [Trump’s Republican] opponents will find. So I totally reject this idea of passivity.”

He thinks Democrats have fallen into a trap, set by Trump and Musk, of styling themselves as the protectors of American institutions at a time when trust in those institutions has vanished. “People in this country are fed up with the old guard,” he says. “They are fed up with the status quo. They feel the country has let them down.”

Among liberals, Musk has become the vector of the new Democratic anger. Party operators see his unpopularity among Americans as an area in which they can regain ground. “There was this narrative that Elon was Trump’s heat shield and he was doing all these hard things for him,” Vietor says. “I think that’s wrong. I think Musk was bringing attention to what would otherwise be mundane budgetary stories and giving them a ton of attention. And he is deeply unpopular.” According to Begala, internal polling in Wisconsin, where the Democrat-backed candidate won a crucial Supreme Court race this spring, found Musk had a 97 percent disapproval rating among Democrats. “I talked to Carville and he and I have been doing this together for 40 years on five continents. Neither of us has ever seen anyone who got to 97 negative among an important subgroup,” he said.

As Musk dumped millions into the race in a bid to elect a conservative justice in Wisconsin, Begala said Democrats should make the case that the White House’s so-called First Buddy and his cuts to the federal government through DoGE are harming ordinary Americans who did not vote for him. That apparently proved to be an effective message. Musk’s $25 million effort in the state failed decisively, sparking calls from some House Republicans (anonymously, of course) for him to get out of the way.

In conversations with Democratic strategists, commentators and lawmakers, one name comes up frequently when discussing who can lead the Democrats out of the wilderness: Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who regularly appears on podcasts that reach younger audiences to warn against the threat of Trumpism and the virtues of liberal democracy. “I don’t think parties really matter right now to voters,” Cuban says. “Look at the special elections. Dems have won the last several in heavy Republican territories.” What matters, he argues, is “what candidates and leaders do to reduce people’s perceived stress points.” Trump, Cuban says, “did a great job making those who are working in low-wage jobs feel like he reduced the competition for those jobs with his border and deportation programs.”

The good news for Democrats, Cuban suggests, is that “everything he has done since the inauguration has increased the stress of most Americans,” whether it’s DoGE cutting too close to the bone, gutting federal grants or tariff threats, which combine to have a “debilitating impact on a significant number of Americans” – including Trump voters.

If Democrats can figure out how to speak out on this issue – and Cuban thinks they have failed so far – they will continue to win special elections and run up the score in the midterms, winning back the House of Representatives. The party should resist parading old leaders such as Schumer and instead flood the zone with cases of real people harmed by the current administration. “Let their stories stand on their own as evidence of ‘Republicans don’t care,’” he said.

Flooding the zone won’t be easy. If Trump’s 2024 romp to victory proved anything, it’s that for the first time in decades, Democrats have lost the culture. The decimation of the centralized media ecosystem means younger voters are getting the bulk of their information from YouTube and social media, platforms which are dominated by the right. Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump the day before the election, is the leader of a galaxy of commentators who promote pro-Trump messages on a variety of subjects, from public health to immigration.

Democrats, it is very clear, have no earthly idea how to win the culture back. “We need to change the conversation,” announced California Governor Gavin Newsom in February, as he launched his new podcast. So far, This is Gavin Newsom has held friendly interviews with influential MAGA figures including Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. But it’s fair to say he hasn’t yet emerged as the “Joe Rogan of the left” for whom liberals have been pining.

If we are to take Newsom at his word, his show is an effort to bridge the widening divide between the right and left in America; to hash out the political and cultural disagreements that seem so intractable. A cynic (and almost everyone falls into that category when it comes to Newsom) would say the podcast is a naked effort to pave a moderate’s route to the presidency in 2028.

The early reviews have not been good. The New Yorker described it as “ill-fated and embarrassing.” A Los Angeles Times op-ed forecast Newsom’s “political death.” A poll taken after the launch of the podcast found his favorability among liberals had plunged from 46 percent to 30 percent. And it appears to have done little to woo conservatives, who described him in a focus group as “fake,” “pandering” and “a liar.”

Yet Newsom has at least figured out that the Democratic party is seen by many Americans as out of touch and censorious. The hysterical days of 2020 set the party on a radical path that led to its demise in 2024. The Trump campaign reveled in promoting past videos of then-Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing unpopular positions such as taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgeries for prisoners. Harris ended up running a more moderate campaign than she had in the previous election, but she was never able to outrun the perception that she cared more about identity politics than making Americans’ lives better.

“The Democratic party lost voters that make less than $50,000 a year,” Begala says. “That’s an existential crisis. Because if we’re not a party of middle-class, working-class strivers, we don’t deserve to exist.”

For Begala, it is the “preachy, sanctimonious, bitter, judgmental left” – which he calls “the woke white left” – that drove voters away. Vietor agrees: “You can’t just denigrate a whole group of voters and be like, ‘Oh, these Barstool bros, they’re so terrible.’ And then refuse to communicate with them and then tell them why you have better ideas. That was a huge mistake.”

“We need to be creative in how we capture people’s imaginations,” says Khanna. “Trump did these kinds of appearances, when he went to serve people in McDonald’s, when he drove a garbage truck. He understood the theatrics of capturing people’s imaginations so they would hear policy.” The party’s veteran strategists are more optimistic than its voters, who feel hopeless in the face of an unending deluge of headlines forecasting the death of the Democrats and the end of democracy.

“There’s so much effing talent lining up,” says Begala. “So in that sense, I’m very bullish. But the Democrats gotta get their act together. They’ve got to win back the blue-collar middle class. They have to take on the woke, white left, these cultural elitists who are killing us. They’re driving down our vote with black men, with Hispanic men, with young men.”

“I am a big proponent of the big-personality theory of politics,” adds Carville. “I think people develop political identities or political allegiances based on who they perceive to be aspirational personalities. Democrats have not had an inspirational presidential candidate since 2012. I think odds-on we’re going to get one for 2028.”

For now, Democrats have to enjoy the little wins. The chaos that ensued after senior Trump officials accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, to a groupchat where they discussed a military strike on Yemen served as a brief respite from what has otherwise been the steady march of a well-oiled MAGA machine. “They really do just look like a bunch of hapless idiots,” says Vietor. “I’m enjoying every second of it.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.