- Democrats hope blue states can be the party’s redoubt against Trump’s second term.
- Democrats will be in the minority in both houses of Congress in January 2025.
- Democrats are also lining up lawyers to stymie Trump’s agenda and planning for 2028.
With Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential election loss, President Joe Biden leaving the White House in January, and Democrats looking ahead to life in a Senate chamber that they’ll no longer control, the new year will bring a new reality: the party’s power in Washington, DC will be diminished.
A newly empowered Donald Trump, meanwhile, is aiming to reshape the federal government to a degree that he failed to achieve in his first term. He’s assembling an array of loyalists to help further his goals on everything from immigration to foreign policy.
Early in Trump’s first presidency, protests against his administration were common in Washington and other cities. And as Trump’s first term progressed, Democrats remained laser-focused on opposing him. The party harnessed that energy to retake the House in 2018, win back the presidency in 2020, and flip the Senate in 2021.
But this time, the Democratic Party appears to be coalescing around a revised strategy.
Democratic officials and activists are hoping blue states can be the center of opposition to the president-elect, The New York Times reported. From abortion rights to paid leave, the party sees its Democratic strongholds as bulwarks against Trump, especially with the US Supreme Court dominated by conservative jurists.
Democrats are also building up a legal operation to challenge the new administration, according to the Times. The newspaper reported that advocacy groups are rallying hundreds of attorneys to fight Trump’s agenda from the start of the president-elect’s second term.
Skye Perryman, the CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit organization created after Trump’s win in 2016, told the Times that challenges to the president-elect will be different in his second term.
“Resistance this time is a lot more about collective power building,” she said. “It’s using the law and using litigation.”
Democrats are also already looking ahead to the 2028 election.
While Democrats are still smarting over Harris’ loss — and trying to assess how their party can reverse electoral gains that Trump made with working-class voters — many of the party’s crop of governors have emerged as potential 2028 contenders.
Democrats occupy 23 of the nation’s 50 governorships, which will remain unchanged at the beginning of the year. Some of them — like Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — have long been considered White House aspirants.
For Democrats, the focus on states will give many of these leaders a platform as Trump aims to enact a conservative agenda in a nation that remains politically divided. Harris easily won California and Illinois in the general election, but she lost Michigan — a state that for years had been part of the party’s vaunted blue wall — by about 1.4 points.
After the election, Newsom called a special session, which will begin on December 2 in Sacramento, to boost the state’s legal resources to challenge the incoming administration on issues like abortion, civil rights, climate regulations, and immigration.
Pritzker pledged to work with the Trump administration but also called himself a “warrior” for his state.
“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” the governor, now in his second term, wrote on X. “You come for my people — you come through me.”
Meanwhile, Whitmer reiterated that she worked with Trump during her first term and would find a way to do so again.
“We’ll figure out how to work with a Trump administration into this last two years of my term,” she told reporters after the election.
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