Resistance 2.0: Return to the Working Class

Last year’s election left the Democratic Party in shambles, and things haven’t improved much for them since. According to a string of recent polls, the general public’s perception of the party has recently hit rock bottom, with less than 3 in 10 registered voters expressing a positive view of the party. This collapse has been driven largely by Democratic voters themselves, who have become increasingly frustrated with their party’s leadership (or lack of leadership). 

A majority of Democratic-aligned adults now believe that Democratic leaders are taking the party in the wrong direction and failing to stand up to the current administration. And these polls were taken before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led nine of his Democratic colleagues to sign off on the GOP’s stopgap funding bill, which kept the government open through September and gave President Donald Trump and Elon Musk even more power over government spending. If Democratic voters were angry before, this latest capitulation to Republicans pushed their frustration to a boiling point. It also reinforced the belief that the party’s leaders are too old, too timid and too mired in traditions.

Taking on the current administration will require leaders who are willing to fight just as ruthlessly as their opponents. It will also require a party capable of delivering a sharp, compelling critique of the administration’s billionaire-driven agenda while presenting a bold, working-class-centered alternative. So far, the party has fallen short on both counts — and it shows.

Since voting for the GOP’s continuing resolution, Schumer’s approval rating has tanked among Democrats, while a growing number of liberal groups and lawmakers have publicly called for him to resign from his leadership position. But it’s not just the leaders who have to worry. According to a February poll from Quinnipiac University, congressional Democrats in general are now polling in the red with their own voters for the first time since the organization began tracking it. One year ago, congressional Democrats had a 75% job approval from Democratic voters; today it stands at just 40%, with 49% disapproval. This is a stark contrast from eight years ago, when rank-and-file Democrats broadly approved of their representatives in Congress.

This growing discontent spilled into the real world last week as voters flooded to town halls to berate their Democratic representatives for standing idly by as the lawless Trump administration drives a wrecking ball through the federal government. In communities across the country, constituents implored Democrats to start acting like members of a real opposition party and to even embrace the obstructionist tactics long used by Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell. While incensed voters were demanding action at town halls, demonstrators continued to gather at Tesla dealerships across the country to protest Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency takeover. 

These public displays of anger have rattled Democratic legislators, many of whom now worry about the prospect of difficult primary battles in the coming year. They have also invited comparisons to the Tea Party revolt against the Republican establishment during Barack Obama’s first term as president. Yet unlike the Tea Party movement, which was largely bankrolled by right-wing billionaires and corporate elites, the Democratic coalition’s brewing revolt seems to be taking on a much more genuinely populist form. It is perhaps inevitable that a Republican administration stuffed with billionaires would stir increasingly anti-billionaire sentiments among the Democratic base and voters in general. 

Even back in January, a majority of Americans already saw it as a bad thing for the president to rely on billionaires for advice about government policy. Since then, Trump has not only filled his cabinet with oligarchs but effectively handed over the reins of the federal government to the world’s richest man. As Musk and his allies steamroll through the federal government and plan for cuts to beloved programs like Social Security and Medicare, public anger toward billionaires is all but guaranteed. 

This helps to explain why many people have turned to longtime foe of the billionaire class, Sen. Bernie Sanders, as a symbolic leader of the opposition. Since embarking on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour last month, the Vermont independent has inspired a wave of enthusiasm and drawn massive turnouts in swing states across the country. This culminated last week in a handful of rallies, co-headlined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, in Nevada, Arizona and Colorado, where the two populists drew record crowds, including more than 34,000 people in Denver. 

For the last decade, Sanders has preached a simple message: America is rapidly turning into an oligarchy dominated by an unaccountable billionaire class that will stop at nothing to dismantle our democracy and consolidate their control over the economy. What might have sounded conspiratorial to some a decade ago now sounds increasingly prophetic as billionaires actively work to raze entire government agencies and tighten their grip on power. As Sanders recently commented, “You gotta be kind of blind not to understand that you have a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class, by the billionaire class.” 

For Democrats, the path back to power runs through the working class, and economic populists like Sanders and AOC have offered a model for winning back these voters. During Trump’s first term, the anti-Trump “Resistance” was largely a mainstream, establishment-aligned movement composed of liberal activists, journalists and Democratic politicians who focused the brunt of their critique on Trump’s alleged Russian ties and the 2016 election interference. The leaders of the Resistance 1.0 were elite politicians, prominent media personalities and bestselling academic book authors who put their faith in American institutions while positioning themselves as defenders of the old order. At its core, this “Resistance” was a political movement that tailored to the fears and concerns of the professional class. 

To stand a fighting chance against the second Trump administration, Democrats must center on the struggles of the working class and direct their critique at the billionaires who have hijacked American democracy and insulated themselves from public accountability. Any serious resistance to Trump must also take on the billionaire class that enables and benefits from his rule.

But the members of the Democratic leadership are unlikely to change course unless they genuinely start to fear for their positions. If Democratic voters want to steer their party toward a more ambitious path, they will have to be willing to hold incumbents accountable at the ballot box. Ocasio-Cortez made this point clear in Arizona when she praised the state’s voters for refusing former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema a second term after she repeatedly put the interests of her big donors over her constituents. 

“One thing I love about Arizonans is that you all have shown that if a U.S. senator isn’t fighting hard enough for you, you’re not afraid to replace her with one who will — and win,” said the New York congresswoman. Voters must be prepared to hold incumbents to account and elect candidates “with the courage to brawl for the working class,” she said. 

As Ocasio-Cortez was praising Arizonans for giving the boot to their billionaire-friendly senator, support was growing in New York and among her colleagues in the House for her to challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer if he runs for reelection in 2028. Regardless of whether she runs in three years, it is clear that Democratic voters are rapidly losing patience with their complacent incumbents. 

“Voters are absolutely ready to clean up shop in the Democratic Party and unseat the corporate, do-nothing Democrats to elect real working-class champions who will fight back against Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s corporate coup,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats.

Seven years ago, Justice Democrats was among several progressive groups that helped AOC mount her long-shot primary bid against powerful Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley, who was then widely considered a possible successor to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “The path forward for the Democratic Party isn’t left vs. right,” Andrabi told me, “it’s uniting the bottom against the top. It can only do that by rejecting the corporate control of their own party and showing working-class voters that they are not for sale.”

Last February, the man who ultimately replaced Pelosi as leader of House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, journeyed out to Silicon Valley to meet with more than 150 donors from the tech industry in an effort to “repair relationships with a once-deep blue constituency.” Like Schumer, Jeffries ascended to leadership in large part due to his extraordinary ability to tap into the vast financial resources of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In his remarks, the minority leader reportedly told these deep-pocketed donors that the Democrats would be moving toward the “center,” which presumably means shifting away from populism and back to the neoliberalism of the Clinton and Obama years.

But the Democrats did not suffer a catastrophic defeat last year because some once-blue billionaires and multimillionaires jumped ship to support Donald Trump. They lost because the working class abandoned the party in droves. While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have stepped up with a concrete plan to win back these voters, the party’s leadership has instead focused on solidifying their ties with wealthy donors. The biggest challenge to remaking the party “has always been the corrupting influence of big money in politics,” Andrabi told me. It is time for Democrats to choose whether they want to be the party of “good” billionaires or the party of everyone else.