To win, Democrats should chuck their leadership

The past year since Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican Parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last twelve months have shown that the GOP is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections and the White House in 2028.

The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively countering bogus right-wing populism. And so the struggle to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same battle.

Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in the midterms. 

The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win — it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.

Democratic Party leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.

Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.

Extensive polling shows strong public support for major progressive reforms, such as raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy, lifting the Social Security tax cap, boosting the federal minimum wage and greatly expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing coverage.

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The multifaceted tyranny that Trump and his lieutenants want to impose is both abrupt and gradual. Relying on techniques honed with the “Big Lie,” they strive to turn this month’s shocks into next month’s old hat.

Yet counting on denunciations of Trump to win elections is a very bad strategy. It didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020 and it failed miserably in 2024.

Democrats on the ballot in November will need to be offering plausible relief to voters in economic distress. But it’s hard for the party’s leaders to come across as aligned with the working class when evidence is profuse that they aren’t.

In essence, Schumer and Jeffries — and the majority of Democratic officeholders who keep those two in the party’s top positions — represent the Biden-era status quo that was unpopular enough to return Trump to the White House. A key reason is a reality that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders described soon after Trump’s 2016 win: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

These party leaders should be removed from seats of party power or bypassed as relics of bygone eras. Their ongoing refusals to distance from corporate power, rich elites and militarism have alienated much of the party’s base.

Last year, nationwide polling found that 62% of self-identified Democrats agreed that “the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.” Constituents should pressure elected Democrats to comply by ousting leaders like Schumer and Jeffries from their powerful posts. Democratic voters should insist that the people they elect to the Senate and House stop submitting to ineffective party leadership.

Schumer and Jeffries remain entrenched on Capitol Hill because a culture of conformity has a firm grip on the party’s legislators. Dislodging the current leadership would require breaking away from deference to top-down power. Any number of Democratic senators and representatives would be real improvements. In the Senate, I’d wish for Jeff Merkley of Oregon or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. You might have your own favorites. But it’s not going to happen unless Democratic voters actively hold the people they’ve elected to a much higher standard.

As I write in my free new book “The Blue Road to Trump Hell,” “The Democratic Party enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still plague the top echelons of the party.” To eject Republicans from power — and to advance a strong progressive agenda — true leadership must come from grassroots mobilization.

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