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Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. It’s been a brutal few months for the Democratic party (to put it kindly). But it finally got some good news in yesterday’s special elections, and strategists say they can now see a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s get into it.
–Lauren
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The Democratic Brand Is Crap. Who Cares?
Democratic voters hate their party.
They think Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer massively fumbled the government funding negotiations. They thought House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s decision to go on tour for his new children’s book in the weeks after Donald Trump’s election was misguided. Top donors are demoralized. Voters feel disdain. There is persistent chatter of a Tea Party–like movement.
So what?
Sure, the Democratic party’s brand is in the toilet. But Tuesday’s election results give credence to what had been a whispered prediction among party officials: the infighting, the despair, the bad name ID . . . it all probably doesn’t matter. The party can still win.
In Wisconsin, Susan Crawford won the state supreme court race by 10 points Tuesday night—a massive shift in margin compared to just five months ago, when Trump carried the state by a little less than a percentage point (though not, admittedly, compared to April 2023, when the liberal Janet Protasiewicz won a fierce election by about 10 points).
In Florida’s special congressional races, where Republicans prevailed yesterday, there were positive signs for Democrats. Josh Weil, the Democratic candidate in the 6th Congressional District, lost by 14 points—a meaningful shift left from 2024, when Trump carried the district by more than 30 points.
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Last week, Democrat James Andrew Malone narrowly won a special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate seat in a red district that voted for Trump by 15 points and hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades. In January, Iowa Democrats also flipped a state Senate seat in a Trump-won district.
Special elections in an off-cycle can be imperfect temperature checks of the political environment. But Democratic strategists and pollsters who spoke with The Bulwark were relieved Wednesday morning. Many argued that despite the party’s leadership vacuum, its lack of a unified strategy for taking on Trump, and its dogshit poll numbers, the political pendulum was swinging back in their direction. Thermostatic politics would prevail.
“The relief that you’re hearing from Democrats is that there’s an open-minded electorate still out there,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told The Bulwark. “It can be easy to think, ‘Oh my gosh, have we lost the thread on how to talk to folks?’ But there’s an electorate that’s willing to be persuaded—and that’s implicitly a buoyant feeling.”
Lakshya Jain, cofounder and CEO of the election data analysis firm Split Ticket, compared the anger currently coursing through the veins of Democratic voters to how Republicans felt toward Sen. Mitch McConnell during the second half of Barack Obama’s presidency. McConnell was one of the most unpopular leaders in the country at the time. Democrats argued that voters would turn against him and rebuke his oppositional approach to governance. But when the time came for ballots to be cast, the Republican party was given control of Congress in the midterm elections.
“Yes, people hate the Democratic party’s leadership, and a lot of that discontent comes from Democrats. But at the same time, the Democrats aren’t the ones in power. That’s Trump and Elon Musk—and voters on the Democratic side recognize that they can walk and chew gum at the same time,” said Jain. “They can be mad at their leadership for not doing more, but fundamentally, the best way to block Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win elections.”
But amid their victory lap on Wednesday, strategists cautioned that the party should not bank on thermostatic politics delivering them wins in 2026. Some operatives argued that Crawford’s campaign was successful because she ran as a no-nonsense moderate and tied her Republican opponent to Musk and Trump. She stayed away from ideological litmus tests and focused on presenting herself as tough on crime while saying she’d protect healthcare.
“They didn’t get lost in the sauce on personal attacks on Elon or distractive issues or social issues where the Democratic party hasn’t always quite found an electorally viable way to talk about some of these things. And it worked,” said Evan Roth Smith, a pollster for the liberal firm Blueprint.
Other strategists also said that it would be ill advised for the party to walk away from Tuesday thinking that it did not need to seriously grapple with its low approval ratings. Margins of victory matter. Relying on the 2026 electorate to be reactive to Trump might be enough to take back control of the House, but in order to really put a check on the Republican party, Democrats need to win as many seats as possible. And in order to do that, they need to be more than a party for those who hate Musk or Trump, but a party that motivates voters on its own.
“The fact is that the Democratic party has a 60 percent unfavorable rating. We have been winning because they lose. We aren’t doing anything to help ourselves most of the time,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked for Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Obama.
“What’s happening now in these special elections and in Wisconsin is a psychological boost for Democrats,” he continued. “I’ll take default election wins any day, but it’s not a long-term strategy.”
🫏 Donkey Business:
— Liberal groups are planning a day of action this Saturday, April 5, in an effort to highlight the impact of the DOGE budget cuts. Organizers are describing it as the largest single-day protest since Trump’s second inauguration, wit