Democrats are struggling with which direction to take their party amid President Trump’s turbulent return to office.
Noting the hard-right turn of the country, some operatives say the party swung too far left, alienating moderates and handing Republicans firepower. But others say the progressive movement is where the energy is and where it will continue to be in the future.
“Part of the reason we are where we are is because our party became almost too big tent and we sort of lost our way,” said one Democratic strategist. “No one really knows what we are right now.”
At the same time, more centrists say they don’t recognize the Democratic Party anymore and don’t identify with it. The standard operating framework is no longer working and Democrats are having a hard time transitioning. “Our party is gone,” said another prominent operative. “That’s why Republicans ate our lunch.”
One case in point: A bizarre video featuring House Democrats that showed a handful of congresswomen pretend-boxing in a video game-style mashup that read “Choose Your Fighter.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) self-identified as a “trekkie,” while House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) is “not into hair dye,” some of the bullet point descriptors read. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), meanwhile, listed herself as “too sweet.”
Progressives are certainly looking for more attention and are trying to use the party’s identity crisis in a way that benefits them. Ocasio-Cortez and others in the House Progressive Caucus are using attention-grabbing tactics, while in the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone national, tearing through red states and warning his party to wake up.
“Democrats have been playing dead for too many years,” Sanders said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I don’t think you play dead. I think you stand up for the working class of this country.”
Sanders’s message has been amplified by younger leaders on Capitol Hill, but it’s unclear to what end. A recent briefing on Trump’s agenda showed just a few liberal lawmakers gathering to oppose all that could happen under Republican control. If their goal is to make noise, it sometimes works. But others on the left feel disappointed with congressional leadership. Those figures have turned their focus outside.
“Sometimes we will be for things that seem progressive,” said Jamal Simmons, who served as former Vice President Harris’s communications director. “Sometimes we will be for things that seem conservative. But they should be common sense.”
One unlikely force in Democratic politics, business mogul Mark Cuban, who flirted with running for president in 2020 and whose name has been bandied about by Democrats hoping for an “outsider,” has offered his own theory about the party in freefall.
Cuban, ironically, is one billionaire who gets the spirit of the left.
“It’s not about the party,” Cuban told The Hill. “It’s about leadership.” He said Democrats have to be “proactive, in volume” and pointed to recent rallies and protests that have garnered public attention. “Those are incredibly valuable,” he said. “We’ve seen how town hall videos have gone viral and have forced right-leaning media to respond.”
“There has to be nonstop offerings and they have to be presented not with a politician standing in front of a lectern or podium,” Cuban added.
It’s a big ask to rebuild and rebrand ahead of the midterms, and for now, a priority seems to be reworking Democrats’ elections playbook. Many operatives would rather focus on something they can control than just beat the drum about the president.
“We have to look at the way we run campaigns,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has worked closely with Sanders. “The problem we have in the industrial complex of Democratic candidates is they keep recycling the same consultants that got us into the position we’re in.”
Earlier this week, Rocha took to X to criticize the fact that a group of moderate Democrats who gathered for a retreat to sketch their party’s comeback and did not include Black or Latino consultants, “and no one WITHOUT a college degree.” He used the hashtag #WhyWeLose in the post that had nearly 5,000 likes.
“We haven’t had a new group of consultants move into the power structure of the party for a long time,” Rocha told The Hill. “Nothing really changes from the left or the moderate when you have the same group of well-intentioned white consultants with double Master’s degrees figuring out the solution.”
Even those talks, however, are scattered. Some centrists are okay with the current strategist class that parade out each cycle, and many have been booked on cable news following their team’s defeat. Veteran hands like James Carville and David Axelrod have been widely mocked for their less-than-accurate takes.
Others would rather look beyond the establishment and consider an outsider’s perspective.
“The right frame is an insider-or-outsider frame, not left, right or indifferent,” said Democratic strategist Anthony Coley. “What the country wants now are folks that will disrupt the status quo. And they’re not concerned with the labels.”
On policy, Democrats are beginning to come together around at least one major issue likely to drive future campaign discourse. There’s a growing desire to move towards economic populism, a relatively new concept within Democratic circles that some are warming up to.
While Sanders has built his career around the concept, others like Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) seem newly amenable to it if it can break Democrats of their misguided thinking around what motivates voters.
Some allies say that while their styles differ, they’re steering the conversation in the right direction.
“Where people are not sure where to turn, they’re going to turn to and listen to the folks that really believe in what they’re talking about,” said Our Revolution’s director of campaigns Paco Fabian, who works to elect progressive candidates.
“Every politician at some point or another is going to piss off or alienate a certain part of the electorate,” he said.
