Over the weekend, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led a group of 10 Democrats in voting for President Donald Trump’s government funding bill, despite promising up until the day before that he would use every ounce of leverage he had to stop the legislation, and despite near-unanimous House Democratic opposition to it.
Schumer argued that the shutdown would allow Trump and Elon Musk to do even more damage to the federal government, but beyond that, his rationale, according to his many prepared interviews and an op-ed released after the vote, was also political. He believed that the GOP agenda it represents will prove to be unpopular with voters—even more so than a government shutdown.
In other words, Schumer wanted to let Trump be Trump and hope the chips fall as they may.
He’s not alone in this belief. Schumer’s taking his cues from pundits like James Carville, the octogenarian political strategist who recently wrote in The New York Times that Democrats should “roll over and play dead” rather than fight back against Trump’s agenda, and whose advice is taken as gospel among his peers—meaning: many members of Congress—despite not having run a successful national campaign in over twenty years.
Let me say this as clearly as possible to the Democrats in Congress and across the country: Do not listen to the likes of Carville and Schumer. Do not roll over, do not play dead, do not back down.
Democrats need to stop turning to the people who got us into this mess and start making a sincere effort to elevate and listen to leaders who understand how to navigate us out of it.
The party can’t sit back and hope that Republicans dig their own grave. Sure, that sounds nice, but that’s not how our reality works anymore: Their highly-lauded communication strategies—combined with major Republican donors like Musk and Rupert Murdoch controlling major social media platforms and news outlets—have allowed them to boost whatever narratives they choose.
We’re 18 months from the 2026 midterms, so there’s still time for Democrats to course correct.
The task right now is not to win votes, but rather to build the narrative for when most voters start paying attention. As a minority in Congress, Democrats can’t do much legislatively at this time, and the base (mostly) gets that. But in lieu of action, what they do want is to see that their fury is valid; that they’re not crazy for being mad. We’re asking for Democrats who are willing to at least attempt to call it like it is—and yes, sometimes that means being a little rude. Democrats need to get caught trying.
The key to being caught is getting attention, which means generating productive conflict and spectacle—in other words, virality! Sometimes that might mean throwing decorum out the window. Sometimes it will mean bringing a club to a trollfight.
But being petty doesn’t always mean getting dragged through the gutter. Rather, it means expressing genuine indignation and refusing to normalize the obviously abnormal. Congressman Al Green, for example, tried this by making a cane-waving scene during Trump’s recent joint session speech to Congress. Despite the fact that he was reprimanded by leadership, Green has seen an outpouring of support from the grassroots. He got more people talking about Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid—a subject not enough low-information Americans know about.
To be clear, I’ve already made the case that Green and his generation are no longer well-suited to be at the forefront of efforts to combat Trump. But I’m grateful that he’s been willing to go out on a limb and try to shake his party out of its stupor. Just imagine if there was a broader, younger crop of Democrats who could do the same.
We can’t wait for Trump to become toxic—we have to make him toxic.
Voters across the country are looking to Democrats in Washington and aren’t seeing the response that they’re looking for, so they’re taking matters into their own hands. We’re seeing that in the town halls, the barrage of calls into congressional offices, the planned protests that forced the cancellation of Schumer’s book tour, the outrage in comment threads across social media, and in polling, with Democrats having their lowest approval ratings in decades.
If the politicians in power won’t do it, they won’t hold on to that power much longer. 32,000 people have signed up to run for office via my organization, Run for Something, just since Election Day. In my personal capacity, I’ve heard from a half dozen young leaders ready to primary congressional Democrats who aren’t approaching this moment with the urgency it requires. We’ve already helped elect a new generation of leaders who are standing up for their communities—and we’re going to keep at it until we build a Democratic Party that is responsive to the fears, concerns, and yes, feelings, of the people who elect them.
So, to all the Democrats who are taking the advice of Schumer, Carville, do so at your own peril. The choice between evolving or becoming irrelevant has never been clearer.
