This Is Gonna Hurt—Pulling the Democrats Back From the Brink | Opinion

There’s no sugarcoating this. The election was terrible for America. We must now endure President-Elect Donald Trump’s renewed assault on the Constitution and destructive ideas that could wreck the economy and put us all in danger (pray there’s no repeat pandemic with anti-science Robert F. Kennedy Jr. whispering in the president’s ear). It was equally devastating for the Democratic Party, which utterly failed to stop a felonious autocrat.
But it’s also not quite as bad as it looks at first.
In the short term, there is a tested playbook that Democrats can use to mitigate the damage. They must apply these tools with energy and determination. In the long term, if Democrats can face some hard truths, bottoming out could be exactly what they need: the necessary impetus for them to have a stronger future.
Here’s what the future could look like:
In the short term, the old joke “how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time” is a bit on the nose, but apt: once you break down the realities of Trump’s second term, it’s not quite as overwhelming. For one thing, it’s not forever. This will be Trump’s final term. And while that seems to suggest a four-year problem, it’s mostly a two-year problem.
Historically, a president’s ability to accomplish anything legislatively wanes significantly after their first two years (look no further than our current president). Every mid-term election of the past 20 years brought a major thermostatic backlash against the party of the president. Even if 2026 breaks that mold, a lame-duck Trump will have a much harder time pushing his agenda among Republicans positioning for 2028. Remember, when he’s not on the ballot, his sway over the electorate has been decidedly mixed. Republicans know that and will likely act accordingly.
And the next two years won’t necessarily be a cakewalk for him even in a Republican Congress. Sure, there will be plenty of Trump lapdogs yipping under the Capitol dome. But Senate Republicans will be defending more seats than Democrats in 2026 (one senior Republican aide calls it a “nightmare map”). Senate veterans facing re-election like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Thom Tillis will have an incentive to watch their step when walking near a MAGA cliff. If Democrats take control of the House of Representatives (as of this writing, the outcome remains uncertain), their ability to stop the worst Trump extremes will go up significantly.
But even if they don’t, they will have the same opportunity to delay, defuse, and de-louse that they used successfully eight years ago in the same situation. Remember, Trump did get one major tax bill in his first two years, but not much else. Democrats were able to slow the gears, exploit fractures in the Republican coalition, and expose the worst offenses to force Republicans to sand them down. They can do it again.
That leaves executive action and judicial appointments. These are dangerous, and Trump will surely inflict serious pain on the administration of justice: from his Project 2025 plan to turn the Department of Justice into a Trump retribution squad to the chance to further cement an unshakeable far-right Supreme Court.
But for the time being, the judicial branch of government will still provide a powerful check on Trump power-grabs. As much as the Supreme Court has been captured by MAGA loyalists cosplaying as “strict constructionist” Justices, it’s the lower federal courts that make the vast majority of final determinations. During the critical next two years especially, Democrats will, ironically, be able to use the same maneuver on Trump’s actions that Trump just deployed to kill his multiple criminal cases: tying them up in the legal system. Again, Democrats can’t stop everything, but they can stifle the onslaught.
But if that short-term plan offers a glimmer of hope amid the pain, the longer-term plan requires pain to achieve hope.
Democrats need a brutal moment of clarity, and it’s going to hurt. This is why Trump’s complete victory—winning the popular vote, all the swing states, and improving in almost every single county—may be a blessing in disguise. It kills the excuses. A slanted media ecosystem, economic misperceptions, and structural challenges were valid obstacles. But they are not the real problem.
At a core level, the Democratic Party has corroded. How did the party of working and middle class opportunity become the party of high income and high education? In 2008, Barack Obama’s slogan was literally “change.” How did Democrats become the party of the status quo? In 2012, Democrats won Latino voters by a 3-1 margin. How did that become about 50-50 this year?
To put it even more succinctly, try this pop quiz: what does the Democratic Party stand for? If you can’t come up with a compelling, positive one-sentence answer that most voters would agree with in less than a minute, that’s a problem.
And it’s a problem years in the making. Ever since the 2010 midterm “shellacking” under President Barack Obama, Democrats have had the luxury of running against extremes: Tea Party wingnuts (2012, 2014), MAGA wingnuts (2016, 2018, 2020), and anti-abortion wingnuts (2022).
That artificial shelter often worked, but it allowed Democrats to lose their core DNA, avoid the compromises needed to meet voters where they are, and continue wallowing in misperceptions. The 20-year-old theory that held sway among Party leaders that Black and Latino voters were somehow congenitally liberal—and that their growing population would give Democrats permanent majorities—has been repudiated by its authors and disproven by reality. But the party continued to make appeals based largely on racial identity. Big government populism epitomized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) fueled much energy in 2016. But the hard truth is that it never resonated with voters in general elections, or even in Democratic primaries. And “woke” cultural norms became a destructive self-parody that alienated voters.
The good news is that if Democrats can admit to these problems and commit to some changes, they have shown the ability to evolve. Their 1988 landslide loss became a 1992 triumph under a rebrand. Republican crowing about a “permanent majority” in 2004 disintegrated in the 2006 midterms and Barack Obama’s sweeping remaking of the party in 2008.
It may be rock bottom today. But after a dark period, there’s a path back, and it’s not that far away.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.