These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats
Janet Mills, the 78-year-old moderate who has served as Maine’s governor since 2019, is staid and a little boring—which is exactly why, last fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pushed her to run against progressive upstart Graham Platner in the state’s Senate primary. Mills was reasonably popular and polled well against Susan Collins, the Trump-enabling “moderate” who had represented Maine since 1997. Most importantly, she had been in politics a long time—she was first elected to Maine’s House of Representatives more than 20 years ago—and therefore had already been vetted.
The same could not be said about Platner, who announced his populist Senate campaign last summer, seemingly out of nowhere. An oyster farmer and a war on terrorism veteran, Platner was gruff and tough—and looked like the answer for a party struggling to reach working-class voters and men. As it turned out, he also carried a ton of baggage. Soon after Mills announced her candidacy, nuclear-grade opposition research began falling.
Let’s get this out of the way: Graham Platner isn’t a Nazi. He had a Nazi tattoo, sure, but he doesn’t anymore. He got it covered up in October, a few days after the world learned about the Totenkopf symbol he got inked on his chest in Croatia while on military leave two decades ago. If one can get a Nazi tattoo innocently, then Platner almost certainly did. He says he didn’t know its true meaning at the time, and there’s little reason to doubt him. There is nothing in any of the statements that Platner has given in town halls, interviews, or other campaign events to suggest that he’s a bigot either, though he did write some bad stuff about Black people and women on the internet a few years ago. (For what it’s worth, he also said white rural voters were stupid and racist.) When those posts were unearthed, Platner apologized, citing his PTSD and political and cultural ignorance. Still, it’s hard to think of any recent Democratic campaign that could survive having to make so many disclosures.
It’s also hard to think of a more lethal, better-orchestrated political hit—or one better designed to showcase the value of Democratic power brokers. There was just one problem: Mills had baggage, too. The DSCC had no idea. Platner knew it the moment she entered the race. “DC’s choice has lost to Susan Collins five times in a row,” Platner posted on social media shortly after the DSCC endorsed Mills. “We can’t afford a sixth.” There were no Reddit posts lurking in Mills’s past, no fascist tattoos hidden on her body. Instead, she had a different problem: She was endorsed by the Democratic elite.
In his first town hall since the oppo started raining down, Platner apologized to a full house of 600 in Ogunquit, population 1,577, and then flipped the script: “The machine is turned on because it is scared,” he said. The attacks against him, he argued, were reflective of a party elite that had lost touch with its voters: “If the party was run by the people that were in it, it would be the party you want it to be.”
Not so long ago, any one of the scandals Graham Platner faced in mid-October would likely have sunk his campaign. The race is now up for grabs—if for a while his lead was over 30 points, it has since shrunk significantly—but Platner is still in the game. Some recent polls suggest that he has at least a small but stubborn advantage, and multiple surveys have indicated that he may be a more formidable challenger to Collins than Maine’s current governor. That is partly a result of Platner’s charisma and populist platform, but it is also a result of the growing frustration and anger many Democratic voters feel toward their leaders.
Donald Trump’s reelection represented the failure of the Democratic establishment, explained Joe Calvello, Platner’s former senior adviser. “People who in 2018 or 2020 were taking their cues from party leaders or elders are like, ‘What the fuck do these people know that I don’t know? They’ve failed time and time again.’” Having watched Democratic power brokers lose two presidential elections to Trump and control of both houses of Congress, many voters no longer trust them on questions of candidate selection or policy. Or anything else, for that matter.
And if the support of the establishment previously guaranteed a certain level of fundraising, said Rebecca Katz, a political strategist and a co-founder of Fight, a consulting firm working with Platner, “this cycle, we’re seeing a lot of anti-establishment candidates raising real money off of not being the DC favorite.” Voters are increasingly suspicious of—if not downright hostile to—candidates who have been fêted by a party establishment that keeps getting it wrong. A base that has long made pragmatic, sober decisions appears increasingly attracted to charismatic outsiders who promise to break from the party’s failures of the last decade. They see their party’s leaders as feckless and inept. They are looking to populists who represent a vastly different approach to politics. The Democratic Tea Party is here.
There are many ways to describe the drift of American politics over the last two decades, but one is rather simple. The Republican Party has experienced two related revolutions—the Tea Party in 2009 and the rise of Donald Trump in 2016—that resulted in widespread purges and transformed it into the hard-line nativist party it is today. The Tea Party forced out moderate Republicans and anyone who would dare work across the aisle; Trump then pushed out anyone who didn’t show absolute loyalty to him. The Democratic Party dealt with a single revolution—Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy in 2016—that it only temporarily quelled.
In 2017, Democrats had good reasons for turning against party leaders. The bosses had just backed a candidate, after all, who had lost a pivotal election to a racist con man. But voters stuck with them. Maybe the stakes were too high. Maybe the excuses for Hillary Clinton’s admittedly fluky loss—Russian interference, an eleventh-hour intervention from FBI Director James Comey, Sanders’s daring to challenge Clinton at all—were compelling. (Though none were as compelling as the fact that the party’s nominee, a divisive figure who was synonymous with a political establishment many voters detested, was arguably the worst imaginable person to run against Trump.) In any case, during Trump’s first term, Democratic voters didn’t rebel against their party’s status quo. They embraced it.
The heroes of the first Trump resistance were almost always establishment figures. They were party elders like Nancy Pelosi, who was 78 when she retook the gavel as speaker of the House after Democrats won back the chamber in 2019, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who handed a supermajority to court conservatives when she died at 87 the following year. Many had deep ties to the national security state, such as the former CIA director, John Brennan, and the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper. Some were even Republicans critical of the president, most notably Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman and the daughter of Dick Cheney, and John Bolton, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser. In the 2020 primary, Democratic voters selected Joe Biden, who had served as Obama’s vice president and was first elected to the Senate in 1972. When he was sworn into office in January 2021, he had just turned 78.
Between 2017 and 2021, Democratic voters were eager to promote figures who represented a return to the “normal” politics of the pre-Trump era. They trusted these elders in part because doing so aligned with a coherent theory of resisting Trump: Deep down, the country wanted respected, sober-minded, establishment types to make decisions—they would soon grow tired of the chaos and incoherence and unhinged tweets that defined the Trump administration.
“It was a reasonable theory to posit that Trumpism was an aberration,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime political strategist and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. “So was cold fusion. They both proved to be wrong.”
On February 5, 2025, The New Yorker published an article asking a question that was growing more and more common in the media: “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TRUMP RESISTANCE?” That piece, published two weeks into Trump’s second term, accurately noted the lack of widespread dissent, a sharp contrast to the early days of 2017, when across the country millions showed up to women’s marches, and thousands spontaneously arrived at airports, placards in hand, to protest the “Muslim Ban.”
What was going on? Many pundits agreed that the base was shell-shocked. Trump’s reelection was direct proof that the first resistance had failed. The fact that he had just won the popular vote—something he failed to do in 2016—pointed to another, related explanation for Democrats’ quiescence. Eight years ago, liberals could console themselves that Trump had no popular base of support. There was nothing to soften the blow this time. The Democrats may have rolled out the usual slate of celebrity appearances—Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah—but it was Trump who understood the zeitgeist. During his campaign, he embraced influencers and edgy podcasters; after the election, he watched as athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by dancing like him. The party’s long monopoly on popular culture had been shattered. Trump’s strong showing among young men and Latino voters, meanwhile, represented a direct refutation of a favored explanation for his first victory—that it stemmed from an economically anxious, racially resentful white base. It was a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Nearly a decade into his political career, many Democrats still didn’t understand his appeal.
There’s an alternate explanation for the languid start of the second Trump resistance, however. The Democratic base was doing what it usually does: taking cues from its leaders. In the lead-up to Trump’s first term, those leaders vowed to fight like hell. In the lead-up to the second, they were pledging to work with the new administration.
In late February, James Carville—a fossil who hadn’t managed a successful campaign since 1992—argued in The New York Times that the Democrats’ best approach was to “play dead.” During Trump’s first term, they channeled the pugilistic spirit of their base and fought back. That, Carville argued, was a mistake. Activism had doomed the Democrats. The party’s strong message—that it is the party of health care and high wages—had been “muddied” by its investigations of Russian election interference and its embrace of progressive policies aimed at racial justice and other social issues. Now, some voters weren’t sure what it stood for beyond opposing Trump, while others believed it stood for a smattering of radical policies that certain candidates backed during the 2020 Democratic primaries. Those policies came back to haunt the party in 2024, when they were endlessly recycled in attack ads. Carville had a simple, foolproof way to retake power: Sit back, let Trump destroy the country, then swoop in to pick up the pieces.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, seemed to be listening. Two weeks after Carville published that op-ed, he provided decisive votes to Republicans to continue funding the government. In doing so, he not only caved, he co-signed a check to fund an authoritarian administration. The vote underlined his powerlessness. It also woke up his base. Democrats were furious. “I guess we’ll find out to what extent Schumer is leading the party into irrelevance,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the group Indivisible, told Politico at the time. Many Democrats seemed to agree. They wanted a fight. Schumer and other party leaders wouldn’t give it to them. So they started it themselves.
As Trump’s abuses multiplied, direct action became more and more common, especially in response to the fascistic immigration raids that were occurring with growing frequency and violence in American cities. And as the second Trump resistance grew, so did its contrast with the behavior of party leaders. By the time millions took to the streets in June as part of the first No Kings protest, it was undeniable. The Democratic base was angry and ready to fight. Its leaders were still playing dead.
Meanwhile, a robust and sophisticated network of professional political operatives, including Katz and Calvello, were determined to rescue the party from itself. Many of them were aligned with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign. Over the last eight years, they had accrued experience and learned from their mistakes. Platner, in other words, didn’t just walk off a dock on the Maine coast and enter a crucial primary. He was recruited, Platner later told The New York Times, by a group of organizers who worried that “there was going to be a bad decision made for this race”—namely that the DSCC would repeat mistakes it had made back in 2020, when it put all its weight behind Sara Gideon, who spent millions only to lose badly.
Indeed, Platner’s success thus far owes a lot to Gideon’s failure. Six years ago, the Democratic Senatatorial Campaign Committee cleared the field for her to run against Collins. With the committee’s help, she raised more than $60 million—and lost by nearly 9 points, almost exactly the same margin by which Biden won Maine.
“People remember that and are like, ‘Why should I listen to you?’ Calvello said. “They don’t care about the gatekeepers telling them, ‘You can’t elect this guy.’ They want something real, and Graham offers that.”
Platner’s recruiters may not have been aware of the scope of his baggage, but they were certainly aware that he is a remarkably deft politician. He endured an October from hell by explaining his mistakes and depicting them as a model for regular people, especially men, who are struggling: He was once an angry and confused young man, but he changed. For those who are inclined to forgive him—and polling suggests many Maine voters are—it’s both a moving story and part of his larger message. If Platner is advocating for a politics that prioritizes people’s dignity and welfare, he’s also channeling rage—about Trump, the state of the U.S. health care system, and an increasingly oligarchic economy—in town halls all over Maine that regularly attract hundreds of guests. Mills, by contrast, is seemingly waiting around for the oppo to do its work.
Her strategy may yet prove effective, but one reason it hasn’t so far is that many voters are no longer taking cues about “electability” from party leaders. Instead, they want candidates who are not only loudly speaking out about the abuses of the Trump administration, but also explicitly detailing how they would govern differently.
Many of the new wave of candidates are, like Platner, populists and progressives. But not all of them are. Representative Jasmine Crockett, for example, a centrist from Texas whose description of her former colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” made her an instant star, may win the party’s Senate nomination, less for her establishmentarian platform than her pugilistic approach to messaging.
The common thread uniting these new Democrats is that they are fighters. Their campaigns may pull in Trump voters, as Platner’s is attempting to do, but not by way of carefully tailored moderation or left-bashing. Instead, they are guided by a willingness to dispense with focus-grouped messaging and conventional wisdom, a healthy skepticism of consultants and other Brahmins of “electability,” and a knack for getting and keeping attention, both online and in real life.
These outsider candidates are building alliances with figures and organizations that were previously aligned with the party’s mainstream. When Platner needed an outlet to address his Nazi tattoo, for instance, he chose Pod Save America—a podcast hosted by former Obama staffers. Once dyed-in-the-wool members of the Democratic Party, they are now emblematic of a new cohort of influential figures who are at once aligned with the Democratic Party and increasingly critical of its leadership. The group includes New York Times Opinion writer Ezra Klein; liberal wine mom and podcaster Jennifer Welch; Tim Miller of The Bulwark, an outlet founded by Never Trump Republicans that caters to moderates; and more outwardly progressive figures like the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan. Its members don’t have much in common beyond a shared intuition that the people running the party don’t know what they’re doing. (Unsurprisingly, one thing they also share is a sense of betrayal at the party’s decision to back a deeply unpopular 81-year-old’s doomed reelection campaign until the last possible moment.)
Their emergence owes a great deal to a larger fracturing in organized politics and mass media over the last decade. Just as political parties have lost much of the top-down control they had throughout much of the twentieth century, traditional news organizations have also lost much of the influence and power they once had. They have been replaced by more ideologically diverse outlets—or in some cases, individual commentators—that are less beholden to access to power brokers, official statements, and elite-driven narratives. The result is a political landscape where outsiders can flourish. Indeed, in many cases, it’s one where outsiders are preferred, given the pervasive distrust of organized political parties and mass media. This shift has been less pronounced in Democratic-leaning circles than in Republican ones, which have been dominated by outsiders since the rise of the Tea Party nearly 17 years ago. But it is still apparent—as the rise of outsider candidates and outlets in the wake of Trump’s reelection in 2024 suggests.
The new schism in the Democratic Party is best understood less as an ideological battle than a battle over political approach. The fight is between the politicians, interest groups, and party operators who want to play it safe—the complacent Democrats, let’s call them—and the insurgent Democrats who want to hold a lawless administration accountable and take bolder stands on policy. The emergent quasi-alliance supporting them is channeling not only the base’s anger at the current administration, but its frustration at its own leaders. What unites them is a larger sense that the establishment’s approach to politics in the Trump era has failed. But what should replace it?
In November, Zohran Mamdani, a charismatic, 34-year-old self-described democratic socialist, won New York City’s mayoral election after running a campaign laser-focused on a big theme, the affordability crisis, and the concrete policies he would advance to help fight it: free buses, a rent freeze for two million tenants, and a pilot program for city-owned grocery stores were three of many. If Mamdani was exciting, he was also divisive. Relentlessly attacked by the right for his socialist views and his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, he was hardly embraced by his party’s mainstream, even after he defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary. When voters cast their ballots, he had only just been endorsed by the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, who represents a district in Brooklyn. Neither of New York’s two Democratic senators, including the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer—another Brooklynite—endorsed him. He won anyway, beating Cuomo, then running as an independent, a second time.
For all of the excitement and attention surrounding Mamdani, many in the party’s mainstream rolled their eyes following his victory. After all, the establishment wing had won big, too. In Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, Democrats romped to victory by margins that exceeded Mamdani’s. Rumors of the party’s demise were exaggerated, it seemed. Then, one week later, Schumer caved again, ending a government shutdown that had dragged on for weeks without garnering any concessions from the administration. The base, which had cheered on the shutdown as a sign that the party’s leaders were finally attacking, was furious. The establishment was back where it was in the spring.
The most straightforward takeaway from November’s elections is that the party’s base wants a fight and will respond to any candidate who brings it. Their anger does not appear to be so profound that, as happened with the Tea Party, they will embrace any bomb-thrower who promises to burn it all down. Democratic voters still care more about stopping Trump than anything else. Stevens said he hopes Democrats will embrace the fact that the likes of both Mamdani and Josh Shapiro, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania, can win: “It’s so absurd that the party is losing its mind over a guy who’s talking about maybe five city-owned grocery stores and we’re nationalizing Intel.” In the short term, the result will almost certainly be midterm elections in which both mainstream and outsider candidates win—and lose. We can look forward to a bigger tent and an even bigger argument over the direction of the party.
Can this new generation of insurgent anti-establishment Democrats win voters over? As primary season slowly kicks into gear, their approach will be tested in Senate primaries like Michigan’s, where the establishment-backed Haley Stevens is facing off against two progressive challengers, and in contested primaries in dozens of House districts. Platner, of course, may very well lose in the primary or the general—and a loss in either race will seemingly vindicate the Democratic power brokers who have set out to destroy him. But he has already demonstrated their weakness. He has been speaking for months about the sky-high cost of health care and the stagnant growth of wages, yes, but also about a craven political establishment with outdated ideas that shuts out newcomers to protect its own. It’s a message that he has consistently delivered to hundreds of people, before and after the raft of scandals that threatened to prematurely end his campaign. Can you say the same about Janet Mills or any other establishment Democrat?