For months, Democratic leaders have been struggling to develop a strategic response to the problems that Donald Trump has laid at their doorstep: his demographically expanded electoral coalition, his flood-the-zone dismantling of the federal government, and his turbocharged push for authoritarian control. While Democratic electeds have found some collective will on occasion—like their House caucus forcing the GOP to pass their own budget bill—the party establishment has, in the main, failed to coalesce around a clear plan to fight this multifront war. Worse, their overall approach has generally lined up with James Carville’s recent call for Democrats to “roll over and play dead” and “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight.”
This was a bad strategy when Biden made it the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. It was a bad strategy for Germany’s opposition parties in the early 1930s. And it is a bad strategy today, especially at a time when Trump’s plans are advancing and the American people are increasingly agitated by the administration’s encroachments—and growing more angry with Democrats in Congress for their perceived inaction. Voters, in fact, have already rendered a judgment about Carville’s strategy, with a recent poll finding that 40 percent of voters don’t think the Democratic Party has any strategy at all for responding to Trump and 24 percent think they have a strategy that isn’t working. By contrast, just 10 percent think they have a good strategy.
Arriving to head off this trend is Bernie Sanders, who has formulated a very different vision. With his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Bernie has begun holding a series of rallies in GOP-represented swing districts to bring attention to Trump’s billionaire-boosting, middle class–busting agenda. As he’s swung through heartland states such as Nebraska and Iowa, the grassroots response has been electric. Last Friday, 4,000 people came out to hear him in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the next morning he was joined by 2,600 in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000; and then in a suburb outside Detroit he spoke to a crowd of 9,000 that filled a packed gym, two overflow rooms, and the parking lot outside.
Sanders seems to understand something that many Democratic elites do not: In today’s brutally divided attentional economy, Democrats can never take for granted that their messaging will get through to people without sustained efforts to capture and direct voters’ attention. Precisely zero swing voters give a crap when Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer holds a press conference on Capitol Hill to speak in boring generalities about the threat Trump represents (while every other aspect of their business-as-usual demeanor screams, “Actually, everything is fine”). No one outside of Washington is reading sternly worded “Dear Colleague” letters or the latest milquetoast op-ed. But when you go into someone’s small town to hold a rally—not a campaign rally right before an election, which most people understand as somewhat instrumentalizing, but an off-year emergency rally to stop oligarchy—now that screams urgency. And it signals that something different, against the grain, or unconventional is happening—three adjectives with which Democrats could use more of an association.
By rejecting passivity, Sanders is also doing more to actually put Republicans—who’ve recently been ordered to abandon town halls in the wake of mounting anger from their own voters—under pressure, demonstrating how Democrats locked out of power in Washington can go on offense. What if, rather than simply praying that some swing-district Republican legislators will grow a spine and help Democrats hold the line against irreversible cuts to life-or-death social programs, we instead rallied their constituents to directly demonstrate to them that going along with Trump might cost them their next election?
Finally, Bernie’s approach is proving to be a far more effective mechanism for delivering new information to targeted communities, and not just through the mega-blast of social media discourse that actions like these produce. Just take a look at a few examples of local coverage from Bernie’s rallies this weekend.
News Channel 3 (local CBS affiliate in Detroit): “CBS News Detroit’s Jack Springgate spoke with two cancer survivors who attended the rally. ‘They’re cutting children’s cancer research and the NIH and also interfering with grant funding rules for medical research,’ said rally attendee Elliot Stephens. ‘I have a daughter with cancer, and that for me is unforgivable.’ Stephens and his brother are also cancer survivors. They say potential health care cuts could have fatal consequences. ‘If they cut Medicaid, that’s going to hurt a lot of people,’ Elliot Stephens said. ‘Senior citizens, disabled people, single moms, children who rely on Medicaid, it’s going to hurt them. People are going to die from that.’”
News 18 (local ABC affiliate in Eau Claire, Wisconsin): “In his speech, Sanders called for Republican Congressman Derrick Van Orden to hold a town hall with constituents. In February Van Orden’s staff canceled an Eau Claire meeting between constituents and a member of Van Orden’s office. ‘I’m here, we’re doing a town meeting, and I come from Vermont,’ Sanders said. ‘I think if I come from Vermont doing a town hall meeting here, your own congressman should come here.’ 18 News reached out to Van Orden’s office and asked for an interview. As of Saturday night, they have not responded.”
These are exactly the kind of local stories—illustrating the depravity of Trump’s actions through the words of regular people and calling out the cowardice of GOP leaders in clear terms—that Democrats need to be generating, particularly in swing districts.
Sanders hasn’t always enjoyed a good relationship with Democratic elites, who have done much to scorn him over the past decade. Nevertheless, Bernie hasn’t given up on the Democratic Party. On the contrary, at the moment he seems to be the only major figure associated with the party who’s out there prosecuting the case against Trumpism in the communities that most need to hear it. Kamala Harris has entered a period of self-exile since her loss. Biden hasn’t said a word since wishing Trump a warm “welcome home” to the White House. Barack Obama seems content to maintain his celebrity dream life rather than put his massive platform to work fighting Trump’s authoritarianism.
This failure by the Democratic establishment to meet the moment is particularly self-defeating because, if there’s one thing Trump’s political success has demonstrated, it’s that Americans like fighters. Democrats’ “roll over and play dead” response to Trump’s shock-and-awe misrule communicates a feckless bunker mentality. Rather than bunker down, Sanders is in the arena, communicating that he is a fighter, that he’s not cowed, and that he’s willing to take on Trump and his kleptocratic regime. Whether they agree with Bernie’s specific policy views or not, there are tons of Americans who respect these qualities, and the integrity they imply.
Hiding out while the world burns is an untenable look for Democrats. But they may find themselves quickly back in business if they can simply swallow their pride and follow Bernie’s lead in breaking out of the paralyzing bubble of Capitol Hill and mixing it up with the ordinary people who—if Sanders’s success is any indication—are waiting for them to show up.
