Democratic rage

100 days of Democratic rage

Trump has enabled the Democratic Party to overlook its serious problems.

By GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI

By most traditional measures, the Democratic Party hit rock bottom at the outset of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The Democratic National Committee was leaderless and in shambles. Congress and the White House were under Republican control, as were about two-thirds of the statehouses. Perhaps the most popular national figure associated with the party, Sen. Bernie Sanders, refused to even call himself a Democrat.

Yet Trump’s first 100 days in office appear to have resuscitated the party, if for no reason other than the rank-and-file loathe him so deeply and furiously. Grassroots activism and organizing is surging. Irate Democrats are flooding GOP town halls even in conservative states like Idaho and South Carolina. Small-dollar fundraising is also on fire — six of the 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election in states Trump won collected over $2 million in the first three months of the year. For some of them, that represented more than had ever been raised in their state this early in the election cycle.

But while the president has generated a vibrant culture of resistance on the left, it’s obscuring the depth of the hole that the Democratic Party still finds itself in. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows more Americans view the party negatively than positively.

“We have a new energy but we don’t have a new brand,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who gained national attention in November for unsuccessfully challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for her leadership role. “I would think that if the Democratic Party had a halfway decent national brand or an exciting, affirmative agenda, that we would have been able to get at least a couple more percentage points in the Georgia [special election where Democrat Jon Ossoff fell just short of 50 percent last week]. We had a great candidate and great energy running under a very negative brand.”

The brand is only part of the problem — the party's central infrastructure itself is in need of an overhaul. Democrats got dragged back into a redux of the presidential primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders during the first month of Trump’s presidency in the race for the DNC chairmanship between former Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison. That divisive fight appears poised to resurface in May, with the beginning of the DNC's “Unity Commission” meetings to reform the presidential primary process, featuring representatives hand-picked by Clinton and Sanders themselves.

While many individual Democratic officeholders are cash-flush — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, brought in more than $5 million from January through March on her way to building out a campaign account of more than $9 million — the national party itself raised just $23.6 million in the first three months of the year. Compare that to the RNC's $41 million-plus, powered by Trump. And while new DNC Chairman Perez is criss-crossing the country trying to restore trust in his institution and heal the raw wounds from 2016’s presidential primary, party leaders acknowledge that their rebuilding project — both at the DNC and at the state level — needs to be a comprehensive one after November’s shocking losses and the down-ballot massacre of the previous eight years.

They’re still in the beginning stages of mapping out that path: the DNC has yet to announce the hire of an executive director or senior staff in many prominent units of the building, and no plan to conduct any sort of autopsy or accounting of the 2016 election cycle has been circulated.

It all adds up to a Democratic Party suddenly fueled by a massive outpouring of energy but without the established power structures to channel and amplify it. Recent Democratic special election candidates in traditionally conservative House districts in Kansas and Georgia performed over 20 points better than the party’s nominee had in November, yet they still fell short of picking up the seats.

At the moment, it’s a party in which Washington is learning to follow the grassroots’ lead. On Capitol Hill, Democratic senators’ practice of rejecting as many of Trump’s nominees as possible started once protesters and constituents began to demand it with massive letter-writing campaigns, organizing nationwide resistance to new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and even forcing Warren, the liberal hero, to apologize for her initial move to allow a vote on new Housing Secretary Ben Carson to proceed.

National party committees, meanwhile, started funneling campaign cash to special election candidates in Kansas, Georgia, and Montana only after the liberal Daily Kos site put them on the map by focusing attention on them.

Indivisible, a group that came together after Trump was elected, has provided much of the fuel for town hall protests and local organizing around the country. Run For Something, another new organization formed in opposition to the president, is also stepping into the void, one of a handful now providing individuals with resources and information they need to run for office.

“It’s clear in this moment where the center of political gravity is. You don’t get the 20-point swing in deep red Congressional districts without a genuine, very organic grassroots surge of energy and attention,” said MoveOn.org executive director Anna Galland, referring to the pair of recent votes. And that energy, she said, is slowly translating to Washington — not the other way around. “What I see is a grassroots hurricane of bold, principled, opposition from our elected officials to the unprecedented threats posed by this administration.”

Trump’s attempts to push an Obamacare repeal, a border wall, and various iterations of his travel ban have also motivated a drove of new candidates to jump into the fray ahead of 2018’s elections, including in a handful of deep-red states where some Democrats now feel like they might — just maybe — be able to compete, against all odds.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke, for one, is challenging GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas — as Republican a state as there is, but one where a recent poll showed a tied race, even as the national party largely ignores O’Rourke’s bid.

At the presidential level, Trump has had an equally catalytic effect: Up to 30 Democrats are in preliminary considerations — or the subject of preliminary conversations — about possible 2020 presidential runs.

“The first 100 days has been Dickensian: the best of times, the worst of times,” said ACLU political director Faiz Shakir, whose group raised an eye-popping $24 million online during the weekend after Trump announced his initial ban on entry from citizens of a handful of Muslim-majority countries. The 97-year-old organization subsequently launched its first organizing push. “On the one hand, we’ve experienced a tremendous rebirth of civic activism on a mass scale. But on the other hand, we’ve seen such harm unnecessarily inflicted on so many lives because of Trump’s policies. The civic activism can and will be sustained if political leaders demonstrate that they are able to meaningfully resist the worst of Trump’s excesses. And so far, the good news is that it’s working.”