As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a “distraction” from something else — whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.
That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families. It also reflects their hesitation about contesting Trump’s actions relating to immigration and crime.
But the tendency of Democratic congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to dismiss Trump’s moves threatening democracy as a “distraction” from other issues has created the most significant fissure between the party’s grassroots and its Washington leadership.
That one word now divides the principal competing theories of how Democrats should respond to Trump’s militant second term.
While the Democratic congressional leadership believes that focusing on the economy gives the party its best chance of gaining ground in next year’s midterm elections, many party activists argue they are failing to convey the urgency of the sweeping actions Trump has taken to erode American democracy.
The party’s top political strategists are equally split. Some believe that Trump’s 2024 victory demonstrated the necessity of remaining “laser-focused” on average families’ economic struggles, while others are just as certain that soft-pedaling Trump’s moves to shatter democratic safeguards — especially his domestic deployment of the military — is a moral as well as an electoral failure. Far from a distraction, the latter group argues, Trump’s efforts to raze democratic safeguards, crush opposition and entrench his hold on power constitute the central goal of his second term — and the greatest threat facing the country.
Describing Trump’s actions as “a distraction” is “absolutely wrong,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster. “I think it misses completely where Democrats are at.”
If party leaders maintain that course, in 2026 Democratic candidates “would have turnout problems that would make the turnout problems of ‘24 look like child’s play,” Lake said. “They don’t understand that it is the central ballgame, the central point — that we are under a fascist dictatorship for billionaires. They are completely out of touch with the base.”
Other leading Democrats maintain that the party can only slow down Trump by winning back the House next year — and that focusing mostly on the economy offers the best chance of doing that. “Based on my research with these voters that we lost and we have to make up ground with … it’s the economy, it’s the economy, it’s the economy,” said Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin. Democrats in this camp see the special election victory last week of an Iowa Democratic state Senate candidate who ran on a message of affordability in a deep red-district as evidence they’re right.
Democrats try to choose their battleground
By describing Trump’s actions as a “distraction,” the congressional leaders may be engaging in a form of projection. They clearly see time spent focusing on those moves as a distraction from their own desire to center the 2026 campaigns on the argument that Trump’s agenda has favored the rich at the expense of average families, couched in language that Chris Matthews could have written for Tip O’Neill to use against Ronald Reagan.
When Schumer and Jeffries have discussed Trump’s deployment of military forces to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, they have denounced it. In June, Schumer called Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles “a dangerous authoritarian overreach that threatens the very fabric of our democracy.” When Trump sent the Guard into Washington and seized control of the city’s police department, Jeffries described it as “nothing more than an illegitimate power grab.”
But both men have also repeatedly signaled — using that flashpoint word — that they don’t want to dwell on these issues. After the deployment to Washington, Schumer told one podcast host that Trump’s action were a distraction, “plain and simple.”“What’s he trying to distract from?” Schumer continued. “Well, a lot of things. But above all, Epstein.”
Jeffries last week used a similar formulation but pointed to a different target. Trump, with his troop deployments, is trying “to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular,” Jeffries told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” He added, “The one big ugly bill is deeply unpopular.”
This approach has deeply frustrated those Democrats who believe that it shows these leaders consider Trump’s assaults on democratic institutions less important than whatever they say he’s diverting attention from. “You’re dismissing (Trump’s troop deployments), and you are dismissing all of the people who are horrified by it, and all of the people who are living under this level of oppression,” said Lake.
The conflict over the word “distraction” is, of course, a proxy for the much larger debate over which messages Democrats should emphasize as they work to rebuild the party’s tattered image and shape their campaigns for 2026. Democrats have been compulsively picking at that scab since the 2024 election, when many across the party felt that Vice President Kamala Harris failed to articulate a convincing economic message and relied too much on warnings about democracy.
To a striking extent, this divide does not track the party’s familiar tensions between progressive and centrist elements.
Tulchin, for instance, was the pollster for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. But while he is outraged by many of Trump’s actions, he believes the party’s congressional leaders are correct to prioritize economic concerns. “If you have one thing to say, hammer Trump on the economy,” Tulchin said. “Ultimately it’s going to be the most effective thing we do through next November.”
Longtime Democratic communications consultant Jesse Ferguson was on the other side of the 2016 presidential race as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. But he agrees that Democrats should emphasize the economy rather than Trump’s authoritarian actions. “He doesn’t want the country debating the economy, inflation,” or the GOP’s cuts to Medicaid, Ferguson said. “He wants us locked in a fight over this instead.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading progressive message consultant, believes this argument is flawed on many levels. The biggest problem, she said, is that party leaders are unlikely to reach the public in today’s media cacophony by repeating the familiar economic arguments that Democrats have long leveled against Republicans. “They may agree with it,” she said, “but they are never going to hear it, and they are not going to repeat to their neighbors.”
Moreover, Shenker-Osorio said, the choice to avoid consistent confrontation over Trump’s anti-democratic actions is compounding the party’s biggest problem: the perception that it is weak and cannot effectively advance its goals. “When you are not even willing to admit we are in a fight against fascism, not a fight against inflation … how are people going to believe you are going to be their champion on any dimension, including the economic one?” she said.
Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has generally argued for moving the party in a more centrist direction. But on this he agrees with Shenker-Osorio. “In our party we have so many armchair generals who love to spout the conventional wisdom about ‘only fighting on our terrain,’” Clegg said. “That’s not really how war works. You don’t always get to pick your ground. Sometimes you have to stand and fight.”
Democratic congressional leaders may be especially hesitant about opposing Trump’s National Guard deployments because of their links to immigration and crime, two of his strongest issues in polls. In a recent memo, the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research argued that the party should quickly “pivot” away from the troop deployments back toward tariffs and the Medicaid cuts. Partly, they maintained, that was because Trump’s claim that he was “restoring order” proved “highly persuasive” to voters.
Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and CNN commentator, says Democratic congressional leaders are correct to resist a full-scale confrontation over Trump’s domestic troop deployments. “I think they rightly understand that fighting Trump on crime and immigration is picking ground he’s going to beat you on,” Todd said. “And part of that is because Democrats got themselves way out of position in 2020 and the four years of the Joe Biden administration, and voters do not trust them on those two issues.”
Still, several recent polls have found that more Americans oppose than support Trump’s DC deployment (though another also found most say it’s acceptable for the National Guard to “assist” local police). And Clegg noted that support for Trump’s handling of internal immigration enforcement — as opposed to securing the border — has dropped since Newsom and others confronted the president over his Los Angeles offensive.
Newsom has emphasized that Trump is not floating troop deployments into red-state cities with higher crime and murder rates than Washington. “If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there’s no question in my mind that he’ll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states,” Newsom said at a news conference on Thursday.
Prioritizing kitchen-table issues can be a self-perpetuating cycle
With their reticence, the congressional Democratic leaders have left a huge vacuum in the party. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Newsom, a pair of potential 2028 presidential candidates, have most effectively filled that space.
Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,” Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as “unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”
Newsom has attracted even more attention among Democrats by resisting Trump actions he’s portrayed as a threat to democracy through over three dozen lawsuits; speeches; mocking social media posts; and his ballot initiative to offset the Texas Republican gerrymander.Tellingly, on the day Trump sent the National Guard into Washington, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted on social media that the president was acting “to distract” from his policy “blunders.” Newsom posted: “This is what dictators do.”
In a recent interview with podcaster Molly Jong-Fast, Newsom implicitly criticized the instinct of other Democratic leaders to pivot back to economic issues whenever possible. “I know a lot of good people (say), ‘Just play nice … and people will pay attention to your 10-point plan on affordability,’” he told her. “Well, we’ve been doing that every damn day for years and years and years.”
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg says that while there is an electoral logic to the congressional determination to center economic issues, Newsom is much more accurately reflecting the mounting frustration and anxiety of party activists. “They feel the Democratic Party is not taking on Trump effectively and they don’t understand what anyone is doing,” she said. “And that makes them feel the party is weak. So, when people like Newsom do what he’s done, he represents kind of what Democratic voters are looking for in the party.”
Voters’ lukewarm response to Harris’ democracy messages last year, Greenberg added, is no guarantee they would not react to a more forceful message now that Trump has fulfilled or exceeded many of her warnings. “Everybody is overlearning the lessons from the last election,” she said.
Neither side in this Democratic debate sees the choice as absolute. Tulchin agrees that showing concern about Trump’s moves to consolidate power will be essential to turning out the party’s growing base of college-educated voters — who respond much more powerfully than swing working-class voters to messages about democracy, he said. Conversely, Lake, Shenker-Osorio, Greenberg and Clegg all agree the party must present a sharp populist critique of Trump’s economic priorities.
Yet the difference in emphasis between these two approaches is real, and not unique to Democrats. These same tensions have divided other parties around the world facing opponents maneuvering to entrench strongman rule, said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth University political scientist who studies democratic backsliding.
Looking at the experience of other countries, Nyhan said, “the science isn’t clear” on whether it is more effective for parties opposing quasi-authoritarian opponents to stress their anti-democratic actions or to focus on conventional political concerns like affordability. Most parties, he said, nonetheless choose the latter approach of emphasizing kitchen-table issues — the course Democratic congressional leaders clearly prefer.
But whatever the long-term electoral merits of such an approach, Nyhan argued, it carries the substantial short-term price of failing to present the public a compelling case that Trump’s actions are unraveling the nation’s democratic traditions. “Democrats have been so paralyzed and so hypercautious that they may be underproviding those messages,” he said. Polls showing that more voters are worried about material issues than democracy can become a self-perpetuating cycle, he said.
Shenker-Osorio similarly argued that the messaging from party leadership has the wrong goal. Democrats are looking for ways to drive down Trump’s approval rating, she said, but this far from the next election they should be trying instead to sharpen public concern about his assault on democratic institutions — just as the GOP in recent years elevated the salience of issues around transgender rights, classroom teaching of race and gender, and undocumented immigrants.
Nyhan agrees. Only partially joking, he said the Democratic congressional leadership may still be shouting “’What about the price of eggs?!’” when “they are dragged off to the camps.”