What Democrats Must Do to Regain the Trust of the American People
A not-so-modest six point plan for returning America to sanity
This is the last of four pieces I’ve written on the trials and tribulations of the Democratic Party in the age of Trump 2.0. In this one, I finally get to possible solutions. We got here via three deep dives:
- First, I examined the depths of public disdain the Party is experiencing today, and how Republicans managed to turn the Democratic Party into a cultural caricature of itself in the 2024 election.
- Next, I considered the issues of white status threat and implicit racial bias, and how those create serious challenges for Democratic messaging and outreach in the run-up to the 2026 and 2028 elections.
- Finally, I looked at the core of the Democrats’ Dilemma: should they tack to the center or should they take a more progressive route? I conclude that the opportunity for Democrats lies in a revitalization of the Democratic brand and a rededication to the Economic Bill of Rights spelled out by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.
Now let’s turn to how to do it.
How Democrats can get out of the dog house
The table at the top of this post summarizes results from a survey taken in 2023. It shows unambiguously that 81 years after it was first presented, FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights remains overwhelmingly popular with the American people.
Having said that, none of the conditions necessary for adopting Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights have been present for decades — until now. Republicans since Reagan have made sure of that. But now, a radically dumbed-down Republican Party has become the dog that caught the car, and they don’t have the slightest idea what to do next, other than continue their wholesale destruction of everything most Americans care about.
Above and beyond the economic shocks already in the pipeline thanks to Trump’s erratic tariff games, further calamities may well be just around the corner. Perhaps it will be a poorly managed climate disaster in the middle of hurricane season, or maybe an unanticipated disease outbreak, or a financial meltdown, or simply the shock of seeing empty store shelves and astronomical prices as the holiday shopping season approaches, but Americans under Trump 2.0 are going to experience depths of suffering the US has not seen in generations (source). Americans of all political stripes, with the possible exception of the most incorrigible MAGA cultists, are going to be begging for relief.
Here are six actions I strongly believe the Democratic Party must take if it wants to win back the trust of the American people and successfully exploit this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finish off an incompetent Donald Trump and a seditious Republican Party, once and for all.
- The people want fresh blood: Provide space and for new leaders to rise
- Acknowledge the moment: America is in a class war and the morbidly rich are winning
- Obstruct, resist, and expose the Administration at every opportunity
- Keep up the legal battle against Constitutional violations, gerrymandering, and voter suppression
- Worry less about “reaching” MAGA voters, focus more on winning back anti-MAGA/anti-Dem voters who sat out 2024
- Campaign messaging/rebranding: Reconnect with the legacy of FDR
#1 The people want fresh blood: Provide space and for new leaders to rise
The Democratic Party has a gerontocracy problem (source). And everyone seems to know it except the geriatrics themselves (source).
If Democrats want to take seriously the main lesson of 2024 — that Trump’s victory was more a function of anti-MAGA people staying home than pro-Trump people showing up — they need to acknowledge that their brand and their leaders are deeply underwater with too many of their own supporters. An April 2025 Pew survey found that 83% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said it was extremely or very important that their elected officials pushed hard against Trump’s policies, but 74% said those same elected officials were doing only a fair or poor job pushing back against Trump’s policies. As for leadership, Chuck Schumer scored a 17% favorability rating in a recent CNN survey, along with a 44% unfavorability rating. Other Democratic leaders fared only slightly better. (source)
Such negative polling is bound to generate leadership challenges, but so far, the Party’s veteran leaders are treating any efforts to refresh leadership as a threat rather than an opportunity. They are quick to caricature Democratic progressives who seek leadership positions in the mainstream Party structure as naive rookies who advocate crazy and unpopular policies that alienate middle-of-the-road voters. Interestingly, they often use the same language and labels used by Trump and his minions. Progressives counter that they are actually not trying to move the Party more to the left. Instead, they say, “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.” (source)
Examples of Old Guard resistance are easy to spot. An early sign was the Party’s rejection of AOC’s bid to be the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee in late 2024. Party elders instead endorsed Gerry Connolly for the role, a 75 year old Party veteran who was under treatment for cancer. Connolly died from his disease a few months later, becoming the sixth House Democrat to die in office over the previous 11 months (source). Not a good look for a Party wanting to appear more attractive to a new generation of voters.
Meanwhile, over at the Democratic National Committee, gun control advocate and mass shooting survivor David Hogg was elected to a Vice Chair position. Hogg has been quite vocal about the need for generational change, and recently committed the sin of suggesting that “asleep at the wheel” Democrats should face more progressive primary challengers. Party elders have now called his election into question and are seeking to remove him (source). Whatever the merits of the case, it sends a definite signal to Party activists, and the signal is not a welcoming one.
Leadership is possibly the biggest challenge Democrats face today. It also the challenge they least want to talk about. But it must be faced. Reluctantly or not, Party leaders must provide avenues for new talent to ascend. Now is the time.
#2 Acknowledge the moment: America is in a class war and the morbidly rich are winning
Let’s assume Democrats find and promote the leaders they need. How should these leaders frame our current situation? How far should they go in condemning the Republican Party for its betrayal and destruction of America’s economy, democracy, and world standing? Should Democrats dare to call Republicans traitors? Should they dare to take seriously the 14th Amendment’s assertion that insurrectionists who have taken an oath to support the Constitution should be banned from ever again holding public office in America?
In the recent past, Democrats have been reluctant to admit that America is in the midst of a class war. They have been reluctant to place blame for America’s failures, for its excesses and its biases, in part because they know they share some of that blame themselves. But Democrats have not always been so timid about calling out the connection between the Republican Party and its plutocrat overlords. I believe a close look at FDR’s 1932 campaign can provide some useful lessons. Republicans did not call Roosevelt a “traitor to his class” for nothing. He was quite willing to connect the failures of the Hoover Administration to the interests of the wealthiest Americans who supported Hoover, calling them, among other things, “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth” (source). He was not deterred by Republican “whataboutism” and projection. Today, Democrats seem to want to leave that kind of language to Bernie Sanders and “the Squad”, essentially (by implication) declaring FDR to be a “social democrat” outside the boundaries of the modern Democratic Party. This is a serious mistake that must be corrected (see #6 below).
Democrats may not want to declare all-out war on the Republican Party and the morbidly rich who direct them, even though that war has been actively pursued by the Right for decades (source). But they need to paint a picture, much as Roosevelt did in 1932, of a deliberate attack on America by malignant forces bent on overthrowing everything the country has stood for since its founding. They need to be clear about what has been lost and what may not be recoverable. In turn, that message of deliberate destruction must be connected to an equally vivid message of planned recovery.
For the midterms, the Democratic message must be: “give us a majority in Congress and we will stop the mayhem.” For the Presidential election in 2028, their message must be: “return control of the federal government to us, and we will fix this.”
Some words Democrats should not be afraid to use: “liars”, “fascists”, “conspiracists”, “insurrectionists”, “seditionists”, “traitors”, “Russian assets”, “criminals”, “predators”. Democrats need to teach the public what these words mean, and why they are relevant today. Name-calling is a longstanding Republican tradition. It’s about time they got some of their own medicine.
#3 Obstruct, resist, and expose the Administration at every opportunity
Democratic passivity in the first few weeks of Trump 2.0 was extremely damaging to the Party’s brand. More recently, the Party has become more activist, sometimes in cringeworthy ways (e.g. the widely mocked protest paddles during Trump’s address to Congress), but also in ways that have been positively received by the public (e.g., Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster, Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador). But the Party needs to do more, much more, to convince the public it is putting up a fight, even in case where that fight might be temporarily futile. (source)
Also, it goes without saying that any sign of capitulation is going to be disastrous for Democrats in the run-up to 2026.
#4 Keep up the legal battle against Constitutional violations, gerrymandering, and voter suppression
This is another point that goes without saying. Today, the courts — at least the courts below the Supremes (source) — are Democrats’ friends, if only because both the Judiciary and the Democratic Party still believe American should be governed by the Constitution and rule of law, not the arbitrary rule of one mad king.
Marc Elias is a national hero. Every person who cares about democracy should be following his work and donating to his Democracy Docket website. Democrats need to constantly publicize their legal wins in order to help the public understand that criminality and self-dealing underlie almost everything this Administration is doing. They also need to continue monitoring and opposing the illegal gerrymandering and voter suppression that are now regular features of GOP-dominated Red States. Focusing on these repeated violations of the rule of law helps to establish the lack of legitimacy of the Trump 2.0 regime, thereby encouraging the public to reconceptualize both the Dear Leader himself and his appointees as illegitimate usurpers of American power.
#5 Worry less about “reaching” MAGA voters, focus more on winning back anti-MAGA/anti-Dem voters who sat out 2024
Disillusioning and demotivating MAGA voters is not the job of the Democratic Party. It is the job of the Trump Administration. And it is a job they are doing extremely well. There is no need for Democrats to jump in. But it will be fun to watch (source).
As noted above, the main focus of Democrats in 2026 and 2028 needs to be mobilizing the “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters who sat home in 2024, costing Harris the Presidency. Recent evidence indicates that this mobilization may already be underway, as voters continue to absorb the damage wrought by Trump 2.0.
Earlier this month, pollster G. Elliott Morris conducted a “do-over” survey, in which he asked respondents how they would vote if the election were held today. The survey found that 5% of Trump voters would switch their vote to Harris, while only 1% of Harris voters would switch their vote to Trump. In addition, among people who said they did not vote in 2024, one-third said they regretted their decision and would now choose to vote. Of those, nearly two-thirds (62%) said they would cast their vote for Harris (source). Translating those updated preferences into simulated election results, if only those who voted in 2024 were counted, Trump would have lost by 4.2 points (versus his actual 1.5 point win). If nonvoters had voted as well, as they stated in this survey, Trump would have lost by 7.9 points, or 13.7 million votes (source).
Americans are ready to reject Trump 2.0 and its war on everything. And this is before the real destruction has even begun yet (the stagflation, the shortages, the recession). The only question is: Are they ready to trust the Democratic Party to take over in its place?
#6 Campaign messaging/rebranding: Reconnect with the legacy of FDR
I’ve argued that Democrats need to be cautious about triggering status threat and racial backlash in their messaging to white supporters. The Party must recognize, if not publicly acknowledge, the reality of racism and bigotry in its own base of voters. Failing to do so risks the kind of backlash that may have sunk the Democrats in 2024.
I believe that focusing on FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights provides a potential way to bypass the risk of white racial backlash. The key is not to abandon the Party’s deeply-held cultural values, but to embed them in a broader economic message:
We cannot repair the damage to any of us if we do not repair the damage to all of us.
Recovery from the destruction of Trump 2.0 is not something that can be reserved for one identity group or another. It is a society-wide mission.
Franklin Roosevelt introduced his idea for an Economic Bill of Rights in his fourth State of the Union address on January 11, 1944 (source). He began by noting the importance of the political rights established in the original Bill of Rights:
This republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights — among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
Roosevelt then argued — correctly, it now appears — that these rights could only be protected in a broader context of economic rights. Presciently, he observed that America’s cherished political freedoms could be too easily undone in the absence of economic security:
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. (emphasis added)
Roosevelt then listed eight “economic truths” he believed “have become accepted as self-evident” (well, FDR was an optimist). They are summarized in slightly modernized language in the table above. To be truly free, Americans require additional inalienable rights: adequate medical care, a decent education, an affordable home, a clean and safe environment, an adequate income, access to banking services, and a right to unionize.
“necessitous men are not free men” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt
As reported, these rights are still wildly popular today, 80 years later. Yet they have never seemed further from realization. As a campaign theme for Democrats, they encapsulate a vision that a great majority of Americans can embrace. From a messaging point of view, they have an added advantage: Republicans, up to and including the Trump 2.0 regime, have relentlessly opposed, blocked, and actively sabotaged every one of these rights for decades. So every “economic right” that Democrats support has an accompanying anti-GOP narrative: “Republicans are actively working to deny you these rights.”
Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights has never been realized. I believe this is because America has not since the Great Depression experienced the level of pain necessary to overcome the Republican resistance that so deeply compromises our political system. Until now.
Not enough Americans heeded the warnings about Trump 2.0 that Democrats delivered incessantly throughout the 2024 campaign. Instead, too many of them chose to believe Trump’s firehose of lies. Now those warnings are turning into undeniable facts on the ground. Theoretical discussions are being replaced by debilitating lived experience. As the wheels come off the Trump bus, there will be great suffering, but there will also be opportunity. Democrats must convince Americans that there is a pony in the pile of horse manure that is Trump 2.0. It is up to Democrats to find that pony, clean it off, and convince the American people it can work for them again. I believe re-committing to FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights is the best way for the Party to package and sell a progressive vision to America, possibly without ever mentioning the word “progressive”.
I’m reminded of a statement Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) made following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016. It has stayed with me, because it was true then and it’s even more true now:
The ordinary working man or woman in this country isn’t asking for a lot. They want to make a decent living. They want to be able to provide for their family, buy a home in a safe neighborhood, put food on the table, go the doctor when they need to, afford their medicines and educate their children. What many don’t understand is how these things are in danger of becoming unattainable for too many Americans. (source)
If Democrats can convey this simple message to the American people … if, more importantly, the American people can be convinced to trust the Democratic Party to deliver on its promises … an opportunity to right many wrongs may be at hand, for the first time in decades.
