The Democrats’ fight against Trumpism after November 3

The invaluable Dan Froomkin is looking forward to what a Democratic majority in one or both Houses of Congress can do over the next two years.

Writing for The New Republic, he quotes Ezra Levin on the Democrats’ task of rebranding themselves over the next two years – revitalizing is as a party willing to show the voters it is willing to seriously fight for its own professed goals and promises:

Democrats are running “on an argument of corruption and affordability,” says Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with over 2,500 local chapters. “If you then don’t use the power available to you, you will undermine your party’s reputation—for good reason—because you will have demonstrated that on the campaign trail, you’ll say whatever it takes to get elected, but once you’re governing, you’re not going to do s***.”

Levin says, “That’s the number one problem that the Democrats face now and in the future. It’s not an individual policy disagreement that they have with the voters. It’s that most voters think Democrats are feckless and don’t mean what they say. And so, a major project at the Democratic Party over the next two years has to be to revitalize its brand; prove [to] the voters that when you elect us, change happens.” (1)

As Froomkin puts it, “By staking out bold territory on policy, Democrats can make what’s at stake in 2028 more vivid.”

There are many things that go into an individual winning candidacy: a candidate who’s serious about the race; an campaign organization who can organize TV and podcast appearances, public events, and get-out-the-vote operations; and at least enough funding to make sure his/her candidacy reaches a large number of voters; competent messaging; and a clear focus on issues that mobilize their voters.

All of these things are actually interrelated. Name recognition is important, so just getting the candidate’s name well known is a necessity. Some commentators draw a clear distinction between “messaging” and “issues.” Most candidates require some of both. And some people are just better at campaigning than others whether by temperament or experience or what pundits might call “natural talent.”

Issues do matter. But offering a rote checklist of issues – no matter how popular the individual issues are – doesn’t accomplish what candidates like Zohran Mamdani (now the popular Mayor of New York) and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been able to do: articulate clear and popular positions on issues but also display the confidence to respond to Republican attacks without giving added credibility to the attacks to which they are responding. Once in office, Mamdani quickly followed up with popular actions consistent with his campaign positions, i.e., filling potholes. In other words, he campaigned on doing things voters wanted, then followed up and started doing some of them and also making sure his constituents knew he was doing so.

When voters see a candidate get elected and follow up on what they claimed to stand for in their campaign, voters can see they are fighting for their own side, i.e., the Democratic voters who elected them!

It’s worth noting since Mamdani ran explicitly as a “democratic socialist” within the Democratic Party, that he has been following up by practicing what was once known in the first half of the 20th century as “sewer socialism” – a term that referred to pragmatic accomplishments, not to dirty and dishonest accusations against the other side. Milwaukee, Wisconsin was one of the most prominent examples of decades in which politicians who identified themselves as democratic socialists provided capable and politically popular local government. Ironically, the self-identified Socialist practitioners of such policies disliked the term “sewer socialism,” because they worried it detracted from their larger long-term vision of a better national society.

A lot has changed since Milwaukee elected an explicitly Socialist mayor in 1910. But the challenge of showing immediate, popular results in governance without sacrificing a larger vision is a perennial challenge for politics across the ideological spectrum. If a party can do what the Republicans under Trump have done – making “owning the libs” (e.g., making Democrats angry) the prime goal of their voters, they don’t have to worry so much about articulating a broader vision.

If the Democrats win one or both Houses of Congress next Tuesday, they will have an excellent opportunity to use their Congressional investigative power to constantly hold the abuses, corruption, and criminal acts of the Trump regime and the Republican politicians who support it up to public light. If the Democrats hold both Houses, they can pass one popular bill after another and force Trump to veto them. Trying to sell the public on the abstract value of “bipartisanship,” vague appeals to vaguely-defined “centrist” voters, or issuing strongly worded letters that neither Trump nor anyone else will take seriously are not likely to show the voters that Democrats are serious about restoring functioning democratic government and holding Trump officials who committed cruel and/or criminal acts to account for their actions.

Joe Biden’s famous prediction that the Republicans’ “fever” would break on the Republican side was well-intentioned. But it sadly proved to be a false hope. (He was making that prediction in 2012 even before Trump took over the party!)

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2026): The No Kings Movement Is Already Planning for 2028. New Republic 10/26/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/article/216864/no-kings-movement-election-2028> (Accessed: 2026-28-10).