It was November 2024, and Democrats had just suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump.
Democratic lawmakers and strategists quickly acknowledged that their party had drifted far afield from the working-class voters who once made up their base, and they began to discuss the need to pivot away from some of the unpopular messaging that had fueled that shift.
But several months into Trump’s presidency, their recalibration has seemingly stalled. Fighting the Trump agenda on every front, many Democrats have found themselves fiercely defending positions that were just recently at the heart of the party’s soul-searching efforts, solely because Trump has taken the other side.
“Democrats willingly took the least popular position on those issues – perhaps the most popular among their activist base, but the least popular among independents and the general public – and then Trump brilliantly locked them into those positions by strenuously opposing them,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. “That [would otherwise] put Democrats in the untenable position of agreeing with Trump in a party that has no leaders and no real agenda.”
“Its only unifying theme is opposition to Trump,” Lipson added. “And it is just political death, in a Democratic primary in most states, to endorse Trump’s position on virtually any issue.”
On immigration, Democrats have retreated from their nascent recognition that the party’s embrace of illegal migration without limits during the first three years of the Biden administration had cost them. Many are now openly opposed to deportations of any kind, including of convicted murderers who were in the U.S. illegally.
On transgender issues, Democrats have gone from acknowledging that their absolutist positions alienated millions of voters to defending the most radical among them, such as allowing children to undergo medical treatments that can have permanent effects on their development and fertility.
And in a litany of fights Trump has picked with elite institutions, such as universities and the legacy media, Democrats have sided almost unanimously with Trump’s targets, even though the public’s trust in those institutions has plummeted and even when the institutions themselves admit the need for the kinds of changes Trump has demanded.
Immigration
Some Democrats and left-leaning commentators conceded that images of an out-of-control border and city facilities overflowing with migrants had driven away voters ahead of the 2024 election.
“[I]f you look at the polling, there’s just no evidence that that is ever what Americans wanted,” David Leonhardt, editorial director at the left-leaning New York Times opinion desk, told the New Yorker in an interview in March. “It was part of this broader shift to the left of the Democratic Party between roughly 2015 and 2020 to follow the wishes of very progressive, largely affluent members.”
Ruy Teixiera, a longtime Democratic political scientist now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, noted in January that the Democrats’ problems on immigration went beyond the political problems associated with bad campaign messaging and instead spoke to the deeper issues that arise when voters perceive one party as being bad at actually governing.
“Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law,” Teixeira wrote on his Substack days after Trump’s inauguration. “Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed.”
A handful of vulnerable Democrats won their races on the night that then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost hers by running to the right of their party on immigration, and they attempted to convince others at the start of Trump’s presidency that moving toward the center on the issue was necessary.
“When the Democrats basically dropped the ball on the chaos on the border for many years, we essentially lost the debate on immigration reform for years, because the everyday voter doesn’t trust us. For years they saw that chaos on the border, and we did nothing,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told the New York Times in February.
“[S]omehow we decided that we were going to essentially just give the issue to the Republicans,” Gallego said. “We could have had a very sane position on this.”
But Democrats have, in the months since, struggled to find that sane position.
Democrats have fought virtually every attempt by Trump to deliver on his promise to lock down the border and conduct mass deportations, including the ones that appear to have broad support.
Some Democrats have even embraced public spectacles meant to demonstrate their commitment to illegal immigrants. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sparked international headlines when he traveled to El Salvador to visit a suspected MS-13 gang member, accused domestic abuser, and alleged human smuggler who had lived illegally in Maryland after the Trump administration deported him to his home country in violation of a judge’s order allowing for his deportation anywhere but El Salvador. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) faces criminal charges for allegedly shoving federal law enforcement officers outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center amid a protest over deportations.
“I think Democrats have sought to duck any conversation about immigration,” Jeff Hauser, a Democratic strategist and the founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told the Washington Examiner. “But the extremism of the Trump agenda has kind of compelled them to react.”
SUPREME COURT MAKES TRUMP WAIT ON KEY DECISIONS
Democrats have more recently focused their messaging around the idea that the Trump administration is violating the due process rights of essentially all the illegal immigrants it has sought to remove. They have amplified the rulings of judges who found ways to block various deportation efforts, even when higher courts have overturned them.
That has allowed Democrats to place their support for allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the country at a rhetorical remove, giving them the ability to appear more centrist by arguing that their concern is with the means of Trump’s deportation agenda without having to articulate their position on the ends.
But without a clear answer to the question of how the party should change its immigration proposals in response to its 2024 defeat, Democrats risk letting Trump drag them into fights they can’t easily win.
“I think that they are probably going to end up back on some version of comprehensive immigration reform, because that’s been their position for the last couple of decades,” Hauser said. “What’s changed is how they’ve emphasized whether they try to talk about it or not.”
Transgenderism
After Harris’s past positions on transgender issues, such as her support for providing taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries to prison inmates who request them, came back to haunt her during the 2024 race, Democrats publicly and privately began reconsidering their party’s transgender advocacy.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), for example, made waves in November when he said in an interview that he did not want his two daughters to have to play sports with male athletes while acknowledging that “as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” The backlash he received from his own party quickly illustrated why.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom became the highest-profile Democrat to test a more centrist message on transgender issues when, in March, he said on a podcast that he views biological boys competing on girls’ sports teams as “deeply unfair.”
And Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the country’s first transgender member of Congress, recognized that the transgender movement’s maximalist demands had cost it public support.
“I think some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people,” McBride said in an interview last month. “We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it.”
But the Trump administration’s efforts to use some of the same laws Democrats had relied upon as the basis for their transgender policies, such as Title IX, to enforce its anti-transgender agenda has seemingly stunted the party’s soul-searching on the issue. A significant loss for transgender activists at the Supreme Court last month drew many Democrats into defending a position — that children should have access to irreversible gender-related medical treatments — some in the party recognize as deeply unpopular.
“I think that Democrats have never really wanted to talk about trans issues,” Hauser said. “I think that Democrats believe that passivity is a political strategy and I don’t think it actually is. Democrats are kind of scared of putting forth a vision on issues.”
“I think the 2024 election reveals that if you don’t put out your own vision, one is going to be ascribed to you,” he added.
Some Democrats have rallied around the idea of allowing transgender athletes to compete on the teams that align with their gender identity since Trump set out to ban it. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a relatively unknown Democrat, attracted national attention in February when she vowed to fight the Trump administration in court over its pledge to interpret Title IX as precluding transgender inclusivity in sports, rather than allowing it.
However, if, as McBride suggested, the goal of Democrats should be to tether their positions on transgender issues to public perception, the party has so far failed.
Only a quarter of U.S. adults believe doctors should legally be allowed to prescribe medical treatments to children for gender transitions; even fewer believe transgender athletes should be allowed to compete on the sports teams that align with their gender identity, according to the Pew Research Center.
“I think this is the first time in decades when the Democrats have lost the messaging war on cultural issues, and I think that they’ve lost it because they refuse to be ‘out progressived’ on any issue,” said Lipson, the political science professor. “That’s put them in the position of wanting elementary school children to see drag shows, and they want biological men who identify as women to play sports against women.”
Democrats’ inability to stake out their own ground on transgender issues has, like in other areas, largely let Trump dictate where they stand. They know opposing Trump is popular with their voters, but many struggle to move beyond the resistance into what might come next.
Hauser said Democrats should stop being afraid to say things that are unpopular.
“I think that Democrats have an authenticity problem,” Hauser said. “The Democratic Party in general is characterized by people who sound like they talked to pollsters before they talked to people.”