The last two electoral realignments in US politics came in 1932 and then in 1968. Thereafter, Democrats have struggled with whether economic policies or identity politics were the key to success.
Since the Democrats’ electoral embarrassment in 2024, when Maga-cult-supporting Republicans meant Donald Trump could gain a modest but winning electoral margin in the presidential race and party control of both houses of Congress, shell-shocked Democrats have been licking their electoral wounds and wondering what they must do to forestall political irrelevance.
There are several competing schools of thought or visions about what they must do. But there has been no clear answer from senior office-holders about what their clear challenge to Trump must be to regain political relevance.
Both among themselves and in the media, their leadership in Congress and among leading governors is being excoriated for failing to deliver definitive positions beyond saying “No!” to whatever Trump is proposing or doing. Or, worse, their party has been articulating a multiplicity of sometimes conflicting ideas about what they stand for or about how they must frame their opposition to a wild and crazy Trump administration.
Much of this paralysis stems from the party’s inability to reconcile effectively different ideas of what being a Democrat means in the 21st century. This has its distant origins in the great realigning election of 1932 that came in the midst of the Great Depression, and then the quadrennial elections that followed it, on into the mid-1960s.
In 1932, when the country was facing a vast economic contraction, its exports were shrinking in the face of the tariff war incited by the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and with a quarter of the nation’s workforce unemployed, Franklin Roosevelt and his political team engineered a major reshaping of the Democratic Party.
This included the (white) voters of the Deep South, the now-impoverished farmers of the Midwest and elsewhere, African-Americans in northern cities, unionised workers, and the increasingly enfranchised, now-citizen immigrant communities and their adult children in the big cities, all as its supporters for a major change from the Republican orthodoxy. The Democratic Party offered a raft of government programmes in the New Deal, such as Social Security, and built an enduring support base.
That lasted until the social upheavals of the 1960s allowed Republican candidate Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to splinter that Democratic coalition. He gained support from white southerners angry over civil rights legislation and working-class whites in the north increasingly aggrieved over social and political protests and the early days of affirmative action.
Thereafter, the Democrats have been caught between trying to recover that earlier coalition versus a growing reliance on a new coalition that would rely heavily on ethnic minorities, young people and the LGBTQI+ population, and thus a distinctly identitarian bent in its party’s image. The charisma of Barack Obama was sufficient to make that work, while Joe Biden’s candidacy became a reachback to the New Deal-era coalition in the face of a great national crisis — the Covid pandemic.
The challenge
But now, given the Trump administration’s “move fast and break things” modus operandi — destroying whole sections of the government’s bureaucracy, assaulting due process and the nation’s legal order, and most recently its wholesale destroying of the international economic order through a massive new tariff regimen — Democrats are faced with figuring out who they are and who they want to be for the future.
This challenge comes in the face of what The Economist, that bastion of the rule of law and free trade, wrote the other day: “If you failed to spot America being ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far’ or it being cruelly denied a ‘turn to prosper’, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century — and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.”
There seem to be three different schools of thought on what Democrats must do to respond to Trump’s depredations upon the national and international order.
One approach is what James Carville — the veteran political operative and “the ragin’ Cajun”, the man often credited with the ultra-successful political mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” — has argued to his fellow Democrats.
Essentially, Carville says, Democrats should concentrate on growing a crop of younger, vigorous candidates for the mid-term election in 2026 and beyond. The Democrats should allow the Republicans to continue on their self-destructive path, and as the economic and legal actions continue, Democrats should allow their opponents to begin tearing chunks of flesh from each other’s bodies as they assign blame for what the Trump administration is inflicting on the nation.
In this way, as reported in Fox News of all places, “Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul warned Republicans that ‘electoral disasters’ are coming if they do not abandon support for President Donald Trump’s tariffs. In a Thursday op-ed for Fox News, Paul called tariffs ‘taxes on foreign imports that are paid by American consumers’ and noted that historically, tariffs have been nothing but bad news for Republicans. Trump put forth sweeping tariffs this week on imports from a number of countries, leading to the stock market taking some major hits and retaliatory actions, including from China. Paul predicted everything from homes to gas will see sharp cost increases.”
Not to be outdone, The Washington Post chipped in with “Sen. Rand Paul — a right-wing firebrand from a deep-red state — is in some ways an unlikely figure to articulate a searing case against President Donald Trump’s agenda. But the senator from Kentucky is issuing a stark warning to fellow Republicans that Trump’s tariff policies could lead to a generational political loss for the party.”
Paul’s is not the Trump party line, although the senator may be channelling the agonies of many middle-aged and older voters who have watched their 401(k) retirement accounts (values based on stock market indexes) shrivel following the announcement of the Trump tariffs.
Other approaches
A second approach among some Democrats seems to be to take a visible return to the party’s core economic messaging central to the earlier grand coalition back in 1932.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been carrying out a kind of fightback joint rally/speaking tour that has been drawing big crowds and lots of enthusiasm for their message that economic issues are paramount — including a populist framing that Trump is in thrall to the oligarchic business community (including the insidious tech bros from Silicon Valley, beginning with Elon Musk) and that they are significantly responsible for the trouble the country is now in.
The senator and congresswoman come from the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party (Sanders is, in fact, officially an independent, although he votes with Democrats and ran in that party’s presidential primaries in the past) and they are drawing upon the feeling of many leftist Democrats that the earlier identitarian coalition led them astray and away from the primacy of economic concerns that must be the centre of Democratic Party appeals to voters.
A third approach, although one with less visible leadership, is arguing for a revitalisation of a version of the successful Obama coalition of black and brown voters, young people and other identifiable population groups at its core.
Over the past several weeks, there seems to be something of a coalescence of the latter two approaches, first with New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker’s all-day and all-night, 25-hour and five-minute filibuster in the Senate protesting against Trumpian economic and legal due process decisions that are increasingly dangerous to the nation. Booker has taken his efforts on a roadshow, telling audiences, “A gathering like this can’t be the end of our activism. This has got to be a moment in America where all of us begin to say, what more can I do?”
Some are already calling this Booker’s preliminary shot at building a presidential campaign for 2028.
Millions protest
Beyond Booker’s rousing words, millions of ordinary Americans recently rallied at the weekend in the nation’s big and small cities in opposition to the Trump agenda. In some of those gatherings, participants were a blend of those with the economic agenda at the forefront of their minds, while others, at least from the signs they carried, represented a range of complaints, including international affairs issues like the Ukraine conflict or the devastation of Gaza and its people by Israel.
Naturally, these latter two positions will overlap in the efforts of some politicians and certainly in the minds of many voters. Analysts point out that the US political majority lies in the centre of the ideological continuum, or even a tiny bit to the right of centre. That’s where the biggest number of votes are — as opposed to the ideological extremes — and winning requires votes.
All of this action points to the fact that even as some Republicans are becoming nervous about the tenor and reality of the Trump decisions, such as Rand Paul’s harsh warning to his colleagues, Democrats have yet to truly coalesce around a leader or leaders who can inspire their opposition to Trump’s policies and motivate ordinary citizens to engage in a mix of demonstrations, flooding the zone of congressional email systems, engaging in energetic lobbying, and cogent arguing and advocacy in public forums and electronically.
But crucially, a growing number of Democrats are wondering if their current congressional leadership (such as Senate minority leader Charles Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries) is truly up to this task or whether new leaders who can carry out the struggle are needed.
Meanwhile, a crop of capable Democratic governors such as Gavin Newsom in California, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Andy Beshear in Kentucky, JB Pritzker in Illinois, Wes Moore in Maryland and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania may need to be pushed into the front line.
As the Trump policies deliver on their increasingly likely promise of economic and trade chaos, while the national uproar grows over that administration’s ignoring the standards of due process and civil liberties, Democrats will need cogent positions and well-articulated arguments embracing potential voters, rather than putting them off supporting the party.
It remains to be seen if the Democrats can pull themselves together and make such a case effectively amid the growing chaos of Trump 2.0. So far, however, with Congress now in recess for the Easter break, as a collective, Democrats still seem unable to shake off their torpor and go on the offensive, despite all the ammunition from the chaos the president’s foreign affairs, trade and economic policies are creating. DM