Beyond Resistance—and Special Elections

Although the political tide could turn before year’s end, 2025 has proved to be an absurdly trying year for the Democratic Party. On several fronts the Trump administration and the GOP Congress have taken unpopular actions that confirmed progressives’ worst fears about Project 2025 and Trump’s autocratic instincts. Yet, as TLP’s Ruy Teixeira notes, Trump’s falling poll numbers have not translated into a Democratic rebound; on the contrary, Democrats are seen overall as less trustworthy than Republicans on the most salient issues, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The most revealing—and damning—data point should alarm all who are wondering why the #Resistance isn’t reflecting the same grassroots energy witnessed in 2017 and 2018. On the question of which party is more committed to “respect for democracy,” Democrats come in at 31 percent—a mere two points higher than a GOP repeatedly accused of eroding democratic norms and institutions.

Standpat Democrats may wager this score is either atypical or a sorry consequence of unchecked right-wing propaganda and negative partisanship. The party’s congressional leadership would certainly much rather discuss signs that voters are waking up to Trump’s dangerous centralization of power. When asked recently by CNN about the fact that a striking majority of Democratic supporters want new congressional leaders, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries deflected, boasting that “in special election after special election, we keep winning all over the country.” It seems that, for Jeffries, this impassioned mobilization is proof enough that Democrats’ message on democratic values is finally resonating—despite plenty of harsh reminders that it failed when Kamala Harris led the ticket last November.

Democrats have indeed found solace in several encouraging wins, most recently in Virginia, Arizona, and a state Senate race in Iowa. Still, these elections are not a reliable barometer of lasting political conversion. As most analysts of trends in party competitiveness have observed, Democrats’ overperformance in special elections is the exception that proves the rule about Democrats’ regional headaches in a deeply polarized era. Democrats remain at a pronounced disadvantage in swing regions and all their former strongholds due to the defection of blue-collar whites and Latinos as well as the decline in turnout among lower-income blacks. And the party lacks the infrastructure (and often the candidates) necessary to convince these demographics to rejoin their coalition. Anyone who doubts the scale of the problem need only consider the phenomenal surge in registered Republicans since 2020.

Special elections aren’t going to fundamentally change any of these dynamics. For one thing, they are unexpected, one-off events that draw highly engaged voters, not across-the-board elections that require more extensive and sustained voter outreach. Turnout, moreover, is typically skewed toward more-educated, older, and whiter voters who are already persuaded by Democratic overtures to “defend democracy.” These voters comprise the new party faithful, donate generously to ActBlue, and are determined to show up at the polls—regardless of their own disappointments with the Democratic establishment. That can leave Democratic strategists and pundits with an exaggerated, if not distorted, impression of voter enthusiasm that omits who is staying home.

And many people are. While local Democratic candidates occasionally have to woo independents who have soured on specific GOP policies, particularly swing voters in less culturally progressive districts, they are thus far not powered by the sort of grassroots movement that would scramble assumptions about the GOP’s dominance of the Farm Belt, the Rust Belt, and diverse, conservative-leaning states such as Texas and Florida. In fact, when Democrats prevail in special elections, it is partly because they benefit from the GOP’s growing reliance on lower-propensity, less-affluent voters, who were key to Trump’s 2024 coalition but are less likely to show up in off-year elections for down-ballot Republicans. To break GOP majorities in state legislatures and turn Trump precincts back to purple, Democrats must engage more of those voters who are animated by anti-establishment beliefs, not the forebodings of legal scholars and ex-intelligence officials on cable news.

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Special election victories, then, are not concrete evidence that Democrats are dedicated to rebuilding their local party branches. Perversely, such elections might even feed the erroneous narrative that Democrats ought to treat the next midterms as a simple referendum on Trump’s character and overreach. Doing so will almost assuredly limit how and where Democrats invest their time and resources. It will also reinforce the tendency to “nationalize” every race, which all but pushes away persuadable working-class voters who tilt right on the issues that currently favor Trump. In turn, Democrats will once again find themselves rejected in regions that should be battlegrounds, without any insight as to why so many demoralized workers find their preaching about democracy shallow and condescending.

The obstacle for top Democrats who at least understand fixing this perception is a matter of political survival is that the level of estrangement is so bad they are ignorant about, and basically afraid of, the workings of communities they need to win back. And here is where campaign money, no matter how prodigious, isn’t going to solve much. While social media has helped formerly unheard-of special elections attract heaps of donations—much of it furnished by patrons outside the contested district—little mind is paid to the more mundane but essential aspects of long-term community engagement. That includes steady examples of Democrats being present to address local concerns neglected by conservative officials but also spearheading civic activities with no ideological bent beyond elevating neighborliness and the common good.

Democrats must attend to those less glamorous duties if they are to build a big tent that lasts more than one major election cycle. They will be unable to, however, so long as local and congressional elections are viewed primarily as proxy battles against MAGA, rather than larger opportunities to reinvigorate democratic citizenship and restore social trust. What Democrats need, therefore, is a strategy that forces them to do what special elections have mostly allowed them to avoid: fearlessly engage “Trump Democrats,” populist-leaning independents, and some portion of the roughly 90 million Americans who, by sitting out presidential elections, essentially say “none of the above.”

That can’t be done without confronting Democrats’ number one electoral problem: their appallingly dismal reputation in rural and small-town America. And they don’t have much time before the “winnable” races in 2026 are reduced to a handful that provide only the barest House majority in the 120th Congress. Among the grassroots organizations making the case is the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), which launched the “Beyond Resistance” campaign earlier this September. Endorsed by Representative Ro Khanna, who has urged Democrats to embrace a new “economic patriotism,” along with the Center for Working-Class Politics and the Rural Democracy Initiative, “Beyond Resistance” is very much concerned with all those unglamorous, party-building tasks national Democrats have disregarded since the Tea Party wave of 2010.

As I wrote in a profile of RUBI for The American Prospect in March, this work entails harmonizing two distinct priorities. One is to document the ways in which rural and micropolitan America has been deprived of a fair deal in the 21st century and explore how Trump’s policies, by and large, are only adding to the frustration and harm. The other is to consistently demonstrate that local Democrats are able to put their communities and specific regional concerns before ideology—for the sake of establishing common ground, but also to plant the seed that yes, plenty of Democrats are genuinely invested in representing rural Americans and not just scrounging for an edge in the Electoral College. In practice, that means eschewing the “nationalization” of all politics, which has imposed stringent purity tests on voters navigating complex issues, while offering substantive reforms that the GOP hasn’t and won’t.

In other words, Democrats have to figure out a way to be less partisan in order to attain and wield power on behalf of the working class, of which rural Americans are still a major facet. That might sound counterintuitive, but it is integral to transcending the regional polarization that has done so much to impede social-democratic change and prolong the Trump era.

Admittedly, the odds of an immediate turnaround in rural America are quite low. High-profile progressives like Khanna who are committed to winning back rural workers and small businesses might help break through the noise and nudge other national Democrats and the party’s donor networks to take the endeavor seriously. Yet the roots of reform and realignment can only ever be indigenous, diligently cultivated by fresh leaders unfamiliar to party elites but known and trusted by voters who are hostile to the establishment. This will be a painstaking process, rife with tests to morale. But unlike blaming the fall of democracy on “misinformation” and Trump’s talent for “flooding the zone,” it will have an undeniable purpose.

Of course, how such heartland insurgents will be tapped and supported without coming off as creatures of the very establishment they are trying to overhaul is less clear. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of distressed factory towns and farming communities have utterly transformed into Trump country. Their residents, as writers Arlie Hochschild and Joan C. Williams have respectively argued, sense that Democratic power brokers and the progressive intelligentsia either minimize their concerns or scorn them outright. Even if independent Democrats speak directly to their economic pain for the next three years, not many will be suddenly compelled to return to the Democratic fold.

Yet try Democrats must. The places Trump ostensibly champions are not seeing the grand investments promised by his tariffs, and are in many cases at a knife’s edge due to a stalling global economy pregnant with uncertainty over his ultimate intentions. Rural America is also at the forefront of a new health care crisis, driven by escalating insurance premiums, hospital closures, privatized and monopolized emergency services, slashed food assistance, and the GOP’s Medicaid cuts. With less income available for home upgrades, children’s nurturement, and simple pleasures, and more debt taken on to pay for routine expenses and emergencies, the plight of small-town Americans could well be a harbinger of a national downturn. And the costs of inaction, stemming from years of negligible party competition, will be steep.

In this fearful moment, it is thus imperative to build a new foundation. While some progressives shrink from the task ahead, the egalitarian project that is supposed to be the political left’s raison d’être won’t survive as long as Democrats dismiss unjust place-based disparities or regard them as inevitable and permanent. Rather than declare #Resistance a success—and dissemble about their own passive role in letting democracy wither—Democrats must summon courage of a kind greater than what their leadership has.