When Senator John Fetterman got word that President-elect Donald Trump wanted to meet, the Pennsylvania Democrat didn’t have to think it over too long. Even though Trump had savaged Fetterman during the 2022 campaign—going so far as to allege he had an affinity for cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, and fentanyl—Fetterman reasoned that he represents all Pennsylvanians, including the 3.5 million who had just voted for Trump.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
“If the President invites you to have a conversation and to engage, I’m not sure why anybody would decide not to,” Fetterman tells TIME. “I’m in the business of creating wins for Pennsylvania.” And so, the weekend before Trump returned to the White House, Fetterman jumped on a plane to Florida to spend about an hour with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The two talked about immigration, the sale of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel, and the detention of Pennsylvania native Marc Fogel in Russia on drug charges. For Fetterman, it was about starting the next four years on productive footing.
“There’s plenty of things that we can work together on, and there are parts where we aren’t agreeing,” Fetterman says. “And I am going to avoid just jumping online and just dropping a lot of cheap heat.”
Eight years earlier, such a meeting would have drawn outrage in Democratic circles. This time the response to Fetterman’s pilgrimage, which caught most senior Democrats by surprise, was more ambivalent. Some party officials believe working more closely with Trump this time will be necessary as the 47th President takes office with political capital to spend and a Republican Congress lined up behind him.
At the start of Trump’s second term, the Democrats are stuck somewhere between discombobulation and despair. Conversations with two dozen Democratic sources reveal a party still struggling to figure out how they found themselves losing the White House and Senate and stuck in the minority in the House. Prescriptions for a comeback abound: A more inclusive message, not just what plays well among activists and on college campuses. More spending on state parties and less on D.C.-based consultants. Serious investments in a progressive media ecosystem to rival the conservative one. A foreign policy that is as easy to explain as Republicans’ tried-and-true “Peace Through Strength.” Better polling. Less fear-mongering about the end of democracy. More podcasts.
But those are all hunches at this point ahead of any comprehensive, sanctioned autopsy.
In fact, some Democrats fear the party is in danger of overreacting to Kamala Harris’ loss. They point to how bad a year 2024 was for incumbents around the world, from the United Kingdom to South Korea to Botswana. They stress that recent inflation made incumbents vulnerable regardless of political leaning, allowing opposition figures in nations such as Panama, India, South Africa, India, and Japan to make significant inroads. Others point to the promise of Democratic groups like suburban-powerhouse Red Wine and Blue and recruitment machines like Swing Left, which are notching successes for candidates further down the ballot.
As the debate churns, some say any remedies remain premature. “You can write a eulogy before someone dies. You cannot write an autopsy until the body is on the table,” says Jesse Ferguson, a strategist who formerly ran House Democrats’ outside spending program. In other words, the version of the Democratic Party that got killed in 2024 is still twitching. And the fact that no one in the party can agree on how to deal with Trump 2.0—or decide if Fetterman’s meeting was a shrewd move, a betrayal, or both—means Democrats are still at a loss for how to prevent more casualties.
A party strategist who’s been among those searching for a way out of the wilderness has a PowerPoint he’s been delivering since Election Day. The slides are meant to cheer his fellow Democrats up.
It starts with a grim New York Times story with the headline “Baffled in Loss, Democrats Seek Road Forward.” The piece begins: “The Democratic Party emerged from this week’s election struggling over what it stood for, anxious about its political future, and bewildered about how to compete with a Republican Party that some Democrats say may be headed for a period of electoral dominance.”
The next slide reveals the date of that verdict: Nov. 7, 2004. Two years later, Nancy Pelosi became the first woman elevated to Speaker of the House. Two years after that, Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first Black President. From the ashes of John Kerry’s defeat by George W. Bush, Democrats were able to forge a swift and successful comeback. The strategist who has been delivering this message in seemingly endless Zoom sessions for colleagues and clients says the point is that Democrats can recover quickly if they figure out the right lessons to take from the defeat.
Yet those gains 20 years ago were driven by two primary factors: the presence of Bush, who grew increasingly unpopular amid the Iraq war, and the rise of a transcendent political talent. As another strategist, Chris Moyer, a former aide to Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid, puts it: “You cannot wait around for Obama to come around. We cannot act like it’s just going to happen. We have to make it happen ourselves.”
In the meantime, Democrats are at odds over how to respond to a second Trump presidency. The so-called Resistance that propelled Democrats during his first term seems weary, if not depleted. In Congress, party leaders are settling into a strategy that focuses more on Trump’s expected failures to fulfill the promises he made to voters, and less on his norm-breaking provocations. As his latest TruthSocial posts and threats to invade Greenland make headlines, Democrats intend to stay on message: what’s he doing to curb inflation or bring down the cost of healthcare? A troll, some argue, can control the bridge only if someone feeds him.
Read More: Anti-Trump March Can’t Compete With the One 8 Years Ago
Others fear such strategies are an inadequate response to Trump’s agenda, including the possibility of deportation camps, military deployment in U.S. cities, and investigations into his political enemies. “The consequences are no joke. People are going to die,” says Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left. “We are not The Resistance 2.0. That is not going to be enough.”
That’s not to say the remedies are going to be fast, even if they are obvious. “We didn’t lose because of the last three months of last year,” says Rodell Mollineau, a veteran Democratic strategist who spent years advising top senators. “This didn’t happen overnight, and the fix isn’t going to be overnight, either. It’s foolhardy to think one reason is why we lost and one change will fix it.”
Yet as Democrats brace for the return of Trump’s chaos, there is little agreement on where the party’s focus should be. Few see either House Leader Hakeem Jeffries or Senate Leader Chuck Schumer—both New Yorkers—as the unifying national figure the party needs. The pair is known to donors but hardly household names who can be stand-ins as an unrivaled spokesman. Until Democrats anoint their next presidential nominee, the party will lack a single leader, and that is probably more than three years away.
Leave a comment
