Democrats Must Invest in Team Building
Even Republicans are starting to cheer on those rag tag Americans in the streets.
Protesters in Des Moines April 19, 2025. Americans are ready to take the field for our democracy.
After 100 days of his second presidency, Donald Trump and his Republican team are stressing our constitutional Republic to the breaking point. In response, there is a growing awareness that America needs a strong Democratic team to fight the threats. The team building can’t wait until the midterms.
Fortunately, it’s starting to happen from the ground up. Unfortunately, the resistance to that very team building is coming from the top down. Too many national Democratic leaders are still arguing that our best course of action is to simply let Republicans fail.
As I travel around Iowa and engage with fellow progressives from across the country, I see the threats from the White House are motivating people to act. However, I fear that the resistance isn’t growing big enough, bold enough, and fast enough.
I do have a lot of hope. Americans are mobilizing, showing up, and preparing to defend our nation. We are strong. We are builders. We are creators. We are growing in numbers. And we are not simply victims.
We are, however, late to the game as the Trump 2.0 team shot out of the gate with a flurry of executive orders. It’s been an all out effort to flood the zone and to bully any Republicans who dare show even a hint of restraint.
Republicans have been team building around Trump, and so far it’s been working. For Democrats, we haven’t been focused on building our team. The failure to mobilize a multi-generation, multi-ethnic, and broad geographical Democratic team gave Trump and the Republicans the political trifecta of the Presidency and both chambers of congress.
In the coming weeks, the difference between holding onto our democracy and upholding the constitution or losing the whole load in the ditch will be if the unity of the Republican team starts to crack. And even more importantly, it will depend on whether Democrats can grow our team quickly and boldly enough.
I’m seeing energy, creativity, and smart-ass confidence like the picture of the three young men at the rally in Des Moines earlier this month. I’m seeing moms, dads, older men, retired ladies, and young women with snarky signs. Parents are bringing their kids to the protests. There is comradery and support for each other at these marches. There is a sense of identity and team. I’m cautiously hopeful. But I’ve been hopeful before.
The morning after the June debate between Biden and Trump, I emailed and texted many friends with this take on the situation in the Democratic party. “The sound of 4000 Biden-Harris Administration appointees opening their resumes this morning was deafening.”
The election looked sealed for a Democratic defeat unless there was a major shift. Weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the shift. I got excited again that there was a path to winning.
As I was poll watching on election day in Pleasantville for the Marion County Democrats, I remained optimistic, until 4:30. I looked up from scrolling through social media and texting to see men in their 20s occupying all four spots at the table to check in to vote. I had seen a real mix of people all day, but this was the first time I noticed the Trump Bros as a block.
I looked at the line extending out the door of the community building and saw almost half of the 50 people were men in their 20s and 30s. They were in their work clothes. These low propensity voters were on the Trump team and had shown up.
I started to text fellow appointees across the country that my confidence was giving way to doubt. By 7:30 as Florida’s results started to roll in, I knew it was going to be a very bad night for Democrats and for our country.
The cottage industry of Democratic pollsters, strategists, political operatives, and talking heads has looked six ways to Sunday to understand the election in ways that shift the blame from their industry to other data driven explanations.
I’m a rural sociologist. While I did the course work for quantitative research, I’m much more grounded in qualitative analysis that also aligns with my background in the humanities–history, language, religion, philosophy, and music. I pretty much have liberal arts coming out of my ears and running down my cheeks.
I argue Republicans didn’t win. Democrats lost. We’re now seeing some polling data that supports my belief that Democrats were viewed as more toxic than the Republicans by most voters last November.
Republicans are to blame for this outcome. They have invested decades and billions of dollars in creating narratives to undermine Democrats.
However, in the past decade, Democratic leadership has failed to provide an alternative story about who we are, what we believe in, and who we fight for. In terms of policy, we’ve done a pretty good job. In terms of team identity and building power, we’ve failed to invest in the work to overcome Republican attacks.
In the face of the Republicans' total embrace of throwing out the post World War II world order, including liberal democracy, there is a growing push back. But it’s not coming from the top of the Democratic Party. It’s coming from the streets.
Axios reported on April 16 that inside the Beltway instead of feeding the movement of Americans being ready to hold Republicans accountable, some leading Democrats are instead trying to tap down the movement.
Reality check: The sentiment within the party about rallying behind deportees is not universal.
The second House Democrat who spoke anonymously, a centrist, called the deportation issue a "soup du jour," arguing Trump is "setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we're falling for it."
"Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy ... the thing where his numbers are tanking, we're going to go take the bait for one hairdresser," they said, likely referring to Andry Hernandez Romero.
Only if Trump tries to deport U.S. citizens, the lawmaker argued, will Democrats need to draw a "line in the sand" and "shut down the House."
While the boogeyman of immigration played well for Republicans as Trump took office, some recent polls are showing less than half of Americans approve of his handling of immigration, down from 60% in December. Americans are now challenging Trump’s crackdown on immigration around due process, the constitution, and the rule of law. While undocumented immigrants were targeted first, we now have documented cases of American citizens being deported.
But according to unnamed leading Democrats by Axios, there’s nothing to see here folks. In the perennial trotting out of the words of President Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Except, there is a through line to all that Trump world is doing to America and the global order. The front line of their attack is using the power they built around demonizing immigrants and dehumanizing federal employees to tear down due process, the rule of law, and the functioning of the federal government.
Politics at its core is competition. Let’s draw on sports as metaphor for the Democrat’s lack of team building and thus lack of winning.
I’m arguing that if we want to win, then it’s a foolish approach for Democrats to ignore how Republicans have built power as a way to compete with them for the hearts and minds of Americans.
While Republicans went from attacks on Critical Race Theory to attacks on DEI to attacks on immigrants and then to tens of millions of dollars spent on ads attacking transgender kids and their families in the final weeks of the campaign, Democrats pivoted to an all out attack on how terrible Trump was going to be if re-elected.
The argument was that Republicans were a terrible team and if we could just convince Americans about how bad they were, we’d win. Today those same leaders appear to be arguing that Trump and Republicans will fail on the economy and then we’ll swoop in and win again.
This seems as idiotic as the high school football coach whose approach to the drills the week before the game, the plays they plan to use, and the pep talk in the locker room are something like this:
“The team we’re playing Friday night thinks they are really good. But they aren’t. They are terrible. And when we let them fail, we’re going to win the game.”
How do you think that message plays with young men? How do you think it plays with young women as well? Latinos? Rural Americans? Small business owners? Or just about anyone who is going about their lives and only picking up political messages as secondary information? It’s a totally losing strategy, and yet, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars in ads leading up to the election with that message.
Now those same folks are doubling down on the strategy of winning by convincing everyone how bad their opponent is. Don’t practice. Don’t organize. Don’t elevate new leaders. Don’t have fun building your team. Just watch as your opponent fails.
Our coaches, the leading Democrats inside and outside the Beltway, have access to the money and the power. It appears they are more committed to holding onto it themselves rather than investing it in building a team of Americans showing up at town halls, making signs for protests, and constantly calling elected officials. They aren’t investing in building a team right now, which makes it that much harder to have a team in November 2026 that can win at the ballot box.
Now, as the polls show Trump and Republicans starting to falter, Democrats should be celebrating with their team. The calls, the signs, the protests, the town halls have all made a difference. When your team scores, you don’t need to do a victory lap, but you certainly can throw some high fives and shout some woot, woots! That is if you were engaged in team building.
The attack on America has now gotten so bad and so deep that leading members on the Right, who have continued to make excuses for Trump because they like deregulation and hate taxes, have started to sound the alarm bells.
On April 26, David Brooks had this to say on PBS News Hour as he now publicly encourages Americans to stand up to the Trump Administration.
But people who oppose what they want to do and want to defend American institutions can do lawsuits, they can do lobbying, there can be leaking, there can be protests. There are all these things that can happen and they have proven this week they will have an effect.
Heather Cox Richardson on April 17 provided a good rundown of conservative commentators providing the intellectual and historical framework for Americans to continue to protest against the Trump administration.
What’s happening in the streets provides a way forward. We didn’t invest in voters as team members before the election, but we have to do it now.
Before the election, I had conversations with three young men in their 20s: a cousin, a former intern, and the son of a friend. All three of them supported the values and the policies of Democrats over Republicans. They were all adamantly against Trump. I believe they all voted. But they were also all disillusioned by the Democrats. They really didn’t see that Democrats offered them a way forward beyond stopping Trump.
To each of them I asked, “does it seem like you’re being told to shut up, get in line, support Democrats, or it’s going to be really bad with Trump?” They agreed.
They all felt like the Democrats were elitist and out of touch and doing nothing to invite them and their family and friends into building power. And that's what 20 something year old men want to do. They want to help build something.
Why is it taking so long for national Democratic leaders to truly invest in building the multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-geographical team of ordinary Americans around the values of our party?
That team building is starting to happen in the streets. We are starting to score points. We are pushing Trump back on his heels. The vibe is shifting. Even conservative talking heads know it and are encouraging action.
The leaders of the Democratic party, labor unions, environmental groups, and progressive think tanks are constantly meeting together. They often meet with wealthy donors. They failed to win the election. They have now failed to understand the moment we are in both in terms of our peril and in how to organize a resistance. Once our team of diverse and local leaders from across the country start to show power now, hold Trump and Republicans accountable now, we’ll be able to win in November 2026.
Too many top Democrats still fear that this rag tag group of Americans is somehow to extreme and too liberal to be trusted with real power. I was in a meeting with someone who shared this untrue, unhelpful, and toxic position: “In 2026 we have to get past extremes on both sides.”
I sort of lost it. I pointed out that when we say bullshit like that we empower the truly radical extremes of the Republican Party. Democrats have NEVER, NEVER given the keys to the bus to the extremes on the left. Those voices are on the bus. They are important voices. They make real contributions. But they have never driven the bus. You cannot legitimately argue that there is a parallel between activists on the left who push our party in important ways and the extreme anti-democracy, anti-constitutional ideology of this Republican presidency that is driving the bus for the whole damn party.
Even now as we see the willful disregard of the rule of law, the lack of due process for immigrants of all statuses, and now American citizens being detained and deported, "centrist" Democrats are still claiming that rising up to this moment in response to the treatment of immigrants is somehow a trap by Trump.
For them, it's all about the economy. Well, it's becoming clear that the economy wasn't as big of a motivator for people voting for Trump as the pundits have been reporting. It was and still is mostly identity politics. Republicans understood this. Democrats are struggling to do so.
It’s now time for the identity of resistance to respond to the emergency in front of us. That team of resistance will then be ready to shift into an all out effort to elect Democrats in the midterms and then to rebuild when we win back power.
Being on that team speaks to young men. It speaks to young women. It speaks to grandparents ready to put their bodies on the line for their grandchildren. If you aren't building that team, then you sure as hell don't need to be driving the bus, because you're driving it into the ditch.
When we have national Democratic leaders driving the bus who are ready to work with the loud, proud, passionate, and willing to put it all on the line Americans, then those Democrats become great leaders. And as a country we do great things.
Consider President Lyndon Johnson. His willingness to work with those rag tag Americans gave us Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All of that and much more is now under attack.
Those young men holding those edgy signs are ready to join a team, take back power, and then build a hopeful future. We need to be investing in them. We need to celebrate all of those who have shown up for decades like black women. We need to support young people showing up for the first time. We need to connect everyone willing to show up and fight.
Even some of the talking heads on the Right, who have defended Trump and made excuses for his extremes, are jumping off the Republican train as they call on Americans for action.
Let’s keep supporting each other in the streets with two jobs to do: beating back authoritarianism and demanding that Democratic leadership invest in team building now or vacate the field.
The Dems just don't get it. I liked the New Democratic Coalition in Facebook. That's a group of center left House democrats. They have a podcast. Their guest this week? The actress Sophie Bush.
I guess they are all trying out for The View rather than working to defeat trump 2.0.
Spot on!!!