Waiting for the rally

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Democrats’ time in the wilderness after Trump’s 2016 win was, in retrospect, short-lived.

The party spent a brief two months reeling and ruminating (in a too on-the-nose metaphor, its defeated nominee literally wandered in the woods). But for all their initial navel-gazing, Democrats gained purpose and direction almost immediately following Trump’s inauguration. The new administration’s message was dogged by amateurish PR misfires. Its sheer inexperience and incompetence made thorny questions of bipartisan collaboration and compromise moot.

Most importantly, large-scale, organic opposition emerged: The Women’s March became the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history and people flooded airports to protest new travel restrictions, seizing the narrative of Trump’s presidency in its earliest days and never really relinquishing it.

It’s against that performance that many are unfavorably measuring Democrats’ relatively muted response to Trump’s second term. Until this week, party leadership appeared rudderless to both its own members and the electorate. But Democrats’ quick rally in 2017 was unusual. Historically, it’s far more common for defeated parties to spend months casting about for a direction and message. And history suggests that, if 2026 reverses the parties’ fortunes, the forces that could drive such a change won’t emerge for several months.

Early in Obama’s presidency, neither party expected the seismic rebellion that would come in 2010. In one indicator of just how much the political sands would later shift, a July 2009 Politico headline warned that Wyoming’s sole House seat was “no longer a Republican lock.” It wasn’t until the winter of 2010 — when job losses had proven far more enduring than expected and healthcare reform had become a political morass — that the conditions for a GOP wave truly arrived.

It was a similar story after President George Bush’s 2004 re-election: The Iraq war was actually popular for the first few months of 2005 and it took until the summer for Republicans’ effort to partially privatize Social Security to collapse. Hurricane Katrina, the turning point for Bush’s approval ratings, did not make landfall until August, and several high-profile ethics scandals, which ultimately became a defining issue in the 2006 midterms, were not yet public. Even skyrocketing inflation, the phenomenon to which Republicans owed their 2022 and 2024 victories, did not really become apparent to either party until mid to late 2021.

In that light, Democrats’ present struggle for a clear message, whether real or purported, looks eminently normal.

In recent decades, political scientists have posited that the electorate’s views on policy issues tend to move away from whichever party is in power, becoming more conservative when liberals are in control and vice versa. The theory, known as “thermostatic public opinion,” was developed by Christopher Wlezien, now a professor at the University of Texas Austin. 

“The best way to avoid thermostatic backlash is to not overshoot [a mandate],” Wlezien says. That may seem intuitive. But it’s a particularly apt warning for an administration that seems to earnestly believe it has a sweeping mandate — and especially after a week in which it attempted a sweeping effort to halt spending on popular public programs and, without evidence, publicly blamed diversity efforts for the tragic aviation crash on the Potomac.

Certain issues do appear more susceptible to thermostatic effects. “Immigration opinion is pretty highly thermostatic,” Wlezien said, pointing to Americans’ rising dissatisfaction with immigration as border crossings skyrocketed under Biden. But he argues that media coverage and general public perception are just as important as policy itself. “The policy part of this is just part of the story,” he said. “There's a lot of other stuff that matters that’s more performance based and that maybe is only loosely connected to policy.”

The performance element helps explain the small sense of momentum many Democrats are now feeling: For the first time in months, the party was a relevant player in the political battle of the day, uniting around a coherent message to help pressure the administration to reverse the (still legally dubious) funding freeze. “Yesterday was the first day I actually felt good about Dem messaging in, like, six months,” one Democratic strategist told NBC.

Still, Trump’s presidency is less than two weeks old (there are 206 weeks remaining, for those keeping track). Ultimately the most open question about his second term is how much similarity it will bear to his first, which, by gifting Democrats a consistent and clear message right out of the gate, defied the usual pattern governing parties’ comebacks. Until now, the story of his second term — winning the popular vote, being welcomed by elite power brokers, positive approval ratings, the lack of immediate popular resistance — has been how different the rules are now. This was the first week since November in which things began to feel similar to the first go around.

For his part, Wlezien believes Trump’s moves thus far have been significant enough to begin reshaping the electorate’s views. “It does start kicking in when they start taking action,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if [his approval rating] has dropped.”

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