Democrats Should Give Up on #Resistance 2.0

It hasn’t worked and it won’t work.

Nothing feels better than unloading with both barrels on Donald Trump. And few things are less effective. Or more boring. Is there anyone in this country who doesn’t know Democrats disapprove of everything Trump does, believe he’s a danger to democracy, and just really, really hate the guy? I don’t think so.

And yet Democrats keep rending their garments and screaming their hatred to the heavens. The latest example: Cory Booker, Democratic Senator from New Jersey—he of the 25 hour speech on the Senate floor—spoke against passage of bipartisan policing bills “including one to reauthorize support for mental health services for law enforcement officers, and another to make recruits eligible for funding for training programs” introduced by one of his fellow Democratic Senators. Booker, seething with fury, said:

This, to me, is the problem with Democrats in America right now. We’re willing to be complicit with Donald Trump to let this pass through, when we have all the leverage right now there is.

I say we stand, I say we fight, I say we reject this. When will we stand and fight this president? When are we going to stand up as a body and defend our work, defend our jurisdiction, defend this coequal branch of government?

He added:

The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call…[Passing these bills] is complicity with an authoritarian leader who is trashing our Constitution. It's time for Democrats to have a backbone. It's time for us to fight. It's time for us to draw lines.

How thrilling—he wants to fight! Cue the applause from Democratic activists, who can never get enough of this stuff. But to what avail? Famously, it failed to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election. And so far nonstop Democratic fulminations in Trump’s second term have been notably unsuccessful in resuscitating the party’s toxic brand. The recent Wall Street Journal poll found Democratic party favorability 30 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable), the worst result in 35 years. Ratings for both Trump and the GOP were much higher.

And voters, despite their negative views of Trump’s performance on key issues, still prefer Republicans to Democrats on these issues:

• Illegal immigration (R+24)

• Immigration (R+17)

• The economy (R+12)

• Inflation and rising prices (R+10)

• Foreign policy (R+8)

• Tariffs (R+7)

• The Russia-Ukraine war (R+5).

This shouldn’t be much of a mystery. Voters are taking Joe Biden’s famous advice and applying it to the Democratic Party: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Voters are doing just that, comparing Democrats to the alternative and Democrats are coming out on the short end of the comparison. Voters evidently believe, whatever the problems with the Trump/GOP approach on these issues, Democrats are unlikely to do much better and conceivably quite a bit worse.

In short, voters get that Democrats hate Trump; they’ve already priced that in. Endlessly reminding voters of that fact and how Trump must be #Resisted! does nothing to change Democrats’ fundamental problem: voters neither like nor trust them and therefore do not find them an obvious choice over their opponents.

If that’s true, why do so many Democratic politicians persist in reading—loudly—from the #Resistance script? Wouldn’t they be better off as a party if they concentrated on winning voters away from their doubts about the Democrats—convincing them, say, that Democrats are actually a culturally moderate party that believes in working class abundance? They would! The problem is that the #Resistance trope is what advantages individual Democratic politicians within the party because it generates adulation from activists, media coverage, and gushers of donations. This contradiction between the interests of the party as a whole and the interests of individual politicians is a tragedy of the commons that is not easily solved—or even widely recognized in the current context.

That’s why Democrats keep glomming onto the latest Trump scandal/outrage and insisting that this time is different—the #Resistance strategy will finally be vindicated. The latest example is the Epstein affair. Ever since Pam Bondi announced to widespread skepticism that there as no Epstein “client list,” Democrats have relentlessly hyped the scandal, adding it to their #Resistance litany of Trump transgressions. The result: bupkis, or pretty close to it. As Nate Silver observes:

The feeding frenzy around Epstein has caused some political junkies to forget that Trump is often impervious to consequences: that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t really cost him among his base. And although even Bannon has questioned that assumption in this case, so far the evidence that the broader public is greatly concerned about the details of Epstein is pretty thin.

Google search traffic in the United States reveals that the peak of interest in the Epstein case a couple of weeks ago was only about one-third as high as the one surrounding tariffs in April. I know that might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison, but tariffs are an interesting benchmark precisely because they’re one of the few things that did produce notable political fallout for Trump…

[T]he overall impact [on Trump’s approval rating] is pretty modest in our tracking. On July 7, Trump’s net approval rating was a −6.7, now, it’s −8.4. I don’t need to remind readers how easy it is to cherry-pick polling data to create a narrative that Trump is perpetually in a worsening crisis.

And so it goes. Another month, another Trump outrage, another fusillade from the #Resistance artillery. And another month where little is accomplished in terms of fixing the Democrats’ real underlying problems. Fixing those problems will be hard and will go against the material and ideological interests of many in the party who, as individuals, may benefit from the Democrats’ current tragedy of the commons.

Well, no guts, no glory. Someone or some ones have to step up and show that they get it—that they are truly a different kind of Democrat. As Larry Sabato puts it (quoted in a recent article by Tom Edsall):

No one could credibly claim the Democratic Party is in good shape. When the party’s presidential candidate loses ground (compared to Biden 2020) in virtually every category of voters and in a large majority of counties throughout the nation, it is foolhardy to contend that special circumstances explain the retrenchment….

The party as a whole has become intolerant of ideological diversity in its ranks. Democrats are too far left on many social issues and insist that their candidates check all the boxes, whatever the electorate as a whole may want.

Democrats are in even worse shape than all of these factors suggest. After the 2030 census, they will lose more electoral votes and House seats. With the Democratic Party’s collapse in rural states, it is difficult to find a way for the party to secure a Senate majority with any staying power. Unless Democrats get religion on all this and decide to let a thousand flowers bloom, with nominees that fit their states and districts, as well as candidates who are not expected to fall in line on every social issue, the future really doesn’t look particularly bright for the party.

That’s the hard work that needs to happen. And that work may become even harder after 2026 when, as seems likely, Democrats take back the House in a normal thermostatic reaction against the incumbent party. That will breed complacency and convince #Resistance aficionados that nothing really needs to change other than turning up the volume even higher—Booker, Jasmine Crockett, JB Pritzker, and hundreds of other Democratic pols will be more than happy to oblige. President Vance anyone?