Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
One-hundred days into the Trump administration and the left flank of the Democratic Party delivered a message to its politicians: Do something or risk a tea-party-like revolt from within your own ranks.
Last week, Justice Democrats, the left-wing outfit that helped power Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset primary-election victory in 2018, announced its first endorsement of this election cycle, getting behind Michigan House of Representatives member Donavan McKinney in his challenge to Shri Thanedar, a first-term congressman from the Detroit suburbs. This followed David Hogg, the outspoken gun-control advocate and the new vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, announcing his own plan to raise upwards of $20 million to unseat what he terms as “ineffective” Democratic incumbents, a decision that was endorsed by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Democratic power broker. (The DNC is considering various measures to remove Hogg from his position.) Meanwhile, across the country, a record number of well-financed progressives are gearing up to take on Democratic incumbents who have been in office for decades.
“Voters are starting to understand that a lot of Democratic officeholders just fucking suck and are not up to the challenge of taking on Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” says Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats. “Voters want to see a fight, but instead they have politicians who barely show up.”
Democratic pollsters and strategists say that the feeling among the party’s primary electorate is markedly different than it was eight years ago. Then, there was an outpouring of rage at the new Trump administration, and a number of new groups sprang out to formulate a #Resistance to the White House. Party leaders rushed to tap into that newfound energy, and by the midterms Democrats took 41 seats in the House and two senior members of the caucus were defeated by left-wing challengers. The Squad, a group of four young left women of color in Congress, was born. Soon, the Democratic presidential primary — a contest in which the nearly two-dozen candidates attempted to out-progressive one another — kicked off.
Today, Democratic activists say that the anger and outrage toward Trump is still there on the streets but that their politicians have been slow to respond. Even as Trump does exactly what many liberals feared he would back then by acting like a dictator, the response in even the most fervent left-leaning precincts has been far more muted.
“People are hungry for a sense that the Democratic Party views this moment as normal or standard and tries to act like a traditional opposition party,” says Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to Bernie Sanders. “The people are way ahead of the Democratic Party on this, and the politicians are rushing to keep up.”
After helping elect the Squad in 2018, Justice Democrats helped elect two more progressives to defeat incumbents in 2020 and increased the Squad’s numbers to nine after the 2022 midterms. But the left flank of the party spent 2024 playing defense as the more business-minded and pro-Israel forces within the party helped defeat two incumbent Squad members: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Plus, wins and losses aside, progressive activists say that they internalized a message from the Democratic Establishment over the past several election cycles that, with the prospect of a Trump restoration, now was not the time to risk pushing a progressive agenda.
Then, after Kamala Harris was defeated in November, many members of the party’s left flank found themselves bearing the brunt of the blame as senior figures in the party said that the left’s newfound prominence had permanently damaged the Democratic brand. “We can’t be the party of pronouns and land acknowledgments. We are bleeding people right now, and we are not going to get them back with the branding that we have,” Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, told me in the weeks after the election. “The left took the wrong lesson from the 2016 primary. They somehow decided that it meant that the party needed to move even further left.”
In 2017, many Democratic elected leaders seemed to understand their voters’ alarm. Senators like Cory Booker and Al Franken attended the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, for example. Democratic politicians rushed to the airports when Trump announced the Muslim ban; when Chuck Schumer teared up at a news conference discussing Trump’s executive order, he seemed to express what many rank-and-file Democrats were feeling. As the first Trump term wore on, more and more Democrats sought to tap into the newfound progressive energy. Weeks before he was defeated by Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Crowley and seven other members of Congress attempted to block the doors of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to protest Trump’s family-separation policy. Most of the Democrats running for president the next year endorsed some form of Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Green New Deal.
This time around, with rare exceptions like Booker’s 25-hour-long speech on the Senate floor or even the widely mocked protest paddles that some Democrats waved at Trump during his joint address to Congress in March, most elected Democrats have followed strategist James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead” and let voters get exhausted by the Trump administration. In March, Schumer voted to keep the government open and advance a Trump-backed government-funding bill, infuriating Democratic partisans. Schumer now has an approval rating of just 17 percent.
Democratic voters have been looking for outlets for their angst, and with few politicians on their own side giving voice to it, they have swarmed town halls hosted by Republican members of Congress to air their complaints about Trump’s actions. Tens of thousands came to arenas and fairgrounds in red-tinted districts to cheer Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez during their ongoing “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and Tim Walz on his own barnstorm of GOP districts.
Hogg and others, though, say that one distinction between the effort this time around and previous efforts is that progressives aren’t necessarily attempting to pull the party to the left. Instead, the idea is to make the party younger, more fluent in the ways that those under 65 communicate, and more willing to take the fight to Trump. Several cited the example of Jasmine Crockett as a model for the new type of primary challenger. Crockett is not a member of the Squad but is a 44-year-old two-term congresswoman from Texas who is adept at social media and creating viral moments.
“Trump is a master of spectacle. Democrats continue to treat politics like a debate club, and Republicans treat it like WrestleMania and make it a show,” Hogg says. “We are going to revive democracy by reviving the Democratic Party by getting the best Democrats possible in safe Democratic seats, electing people who have credible experience in working across generations and in fighting for the people they were elected to represent.”
Left-leaning strategists say that the environment is ripe for a generational change in the makeup of Congress with some anticipating that upwards of 30 to 50 new members could be elected next year. As much as Democratic voters fear the excesses of the Trump administration, they are almost as equally distraught by the actions of their own party. A recent study from Pew Research Center found that 83 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say it is extremely or very important that Democratic elected officials push hard against Trump’s policies, and three-quarters are unsatisfied with the level of pushback so far. A March CNN poll found that the party’s approval rating stands at just 29 percent.
And in what is usually a sign of a dissatisfied primary electorate, four Democratic senators have already announced they are not seeking reelection, as has one member of the House, and many more retirements are expected in the coming months. Left-leaning candidates are already lining up to replace them, including Kat Abughazaleh, a social-media influencer running in Chicago, and Saikat Chakrabarti, one of the original founders of Justice Democrats who is challenging Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.
“There was this notion after 2016 that the Trump phenomenon was just a blip, and now I think it is pretty clear that we are witnessing possibly a realignment and that performative protest and resistance just isn’t enough,” says Chakrabarti, who adds that he is running in part to combat what he calls “the Democrats’ defeatist mind-set” that encouraged the Biden administration to trim its progressive ambitions after winning, while Trump’s much smaller popular-vote victory provides Republicans with the inspiration to reorganize the administrative state. “People are just looking for something new, and they are really upset about Democrats who have been in office for decades and seem to not care about doing their jobs anymore.”
Center-left Democrats, meanwhile, disagree that the party is on the cusp of a progressive takeover. They point to the 2024-election results — which show that candidates like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez underperformed Harris — as well as downballot elections since, which were won by Democrats who rejected the left.
“Whether it is the 2024 election or the more recent elections, voters are leaning toward the more centrist candidates, and they are rejecting a lot of the more far-left progressive candidates,” says Jim Kessler, the executive vice-president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “Progressives have not flipped a Republican-held seat in the House for at least ten years, and that streak is likely to continue in 2026.”
But progressive leaders say that most Democrats just don’t understand the level of outrage bubbling out there in the country, both at Trump and at their own leaders who don’t recognize their fear and anger. Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, which helps novice politicians run for office, has had 45,000 sign-ups since Election Day. The left-leaning group Indivisible has doubled its number of chapters since November.
“There is a huge opportunity right now because there is a historic level of anti-Trump animus and energy out there,” says Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible. “If you treat this moment like a constitutional crisis, you will have followers. People are hungry for leadership.”
