Here’s what I’m worried about right now, and what I’m not worried about
There’s such a long list of things to worry about right now, where would you even start? We have a President of the United States who’s psychotic and senile, and he’s handed off most of the job to a billionaire who’s psychotic and insane. We have a Secretary of Defense who’s mistakenly texting secret war plans to a reporter. We have airplanes falling out of the sky, and people being deported based on their ethnicity. And that’s the very short list.
But today I want to talk about something I’m not worried about: the Democratic Party. I know there’s a lot of concern right now about the party, its leadership, its response to Trump, and its direction going forward. But for all the consternation, hang wringing, supposed infighting, and alleged controversy, I think the Democratic Party is doing fine. Or at least it’s doing about as well as it can under the circumstances.
What I mean by this is that I think the Democratic Party’s response to Trump is more or less the correct one – for now. Where others see listlessness and infighting, I see a multi-pronged strategy that’s serving multiple purposes at once.
On the one end we’ve got Chuck Schumer taking one for the team by making sure Trump didn’t get the government shutdown he so desperately wanted. It wasn’t a popular move within the Democratic base, but so be it. The alternative, I believe, would have been worse. It’s okay if you disagree, but that doesn’t make the strategy any less valid. Even as Schumer is making sure (at great reputational cost to himself) that Trump can’t shut down the government and pin the blame on the Democrats, other Democratic Party voices are doing the necessary firing up of the base.
We’ve got numerous prominent House and Senate Democrats speaking up as loudly and directly as possible against Trump’s antics. We also have the party’s past (Bernie Sanders) and future (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) out there holding rallies to help steer the general public’s outrage in favor of the Democratic Party.
This comes even as party outliers like House Democrat Al Green are taking it upon themselves to do things like getting thrown out of Trump’s speech in order to raise awareness of Trump’s attempt at cutting Medicaid. You have to understand that a party leader like Hakeem Jeffries couldn’t have gotten himself thrown out of the speech, or the media would have made “should the Democratic House leadership be behaving like this” the story. But Green is far enough removed from party leadership that the media wasn’t able to play that game with him.
I’m not even worried about John Fetterman – at least not for now. Some people think Fetterman has lost his mind. I see it differently. Fetterman just watched Pennsylvania’s other incumbent Democratic Senator, Bob Casey, lose reelection last November. Now I believe Fetterman is concerned about his own ability to get reelected in the purple state of Pennsylvania, and so he’s trying out some bipartisan rhetoric. For all of Fetterman’s silly words, he has yet to cast a deciding vote against the Democrats. The votes he’s cast against the party have been instances where his vote wasn’t the deciding vote to begin with, which makes it nothing more than symbolism – the kind of bipartisan symbolism you can run for reelection on. Fetterman, for now, is our side’s version of Susan Collins. She talks up both sides, but then always votes with her own party when it matters. Unless Fetterman casts a deciding vote against us on something, I’m choosing to ignore him.
Nor am I worried about 2028 – at all. That’s a lifetime from now. The Democratic Party has a deep bench of rising stars, many of whom will run for President in 2028, and we’ll end up with a nominee who’s popular and highly qualified. Let that process play itself out when the time comes. In the meantime our focus should be on 2026. We have to keep our democracy in one piece until the midterms, and then win them decisively enough to overcome the inevitable Republican cheating. If we make it to 2026 and then we win in 2026, we’ll have a much easier task ahead of us in 2028.
The bottom line is that I’m simply not worried about the Democratic Party at this time. Nor would there be any point in sitting around openly fretting and complaining about the party all day long, even if I were concerned about it. Our focus right now has to be on knocking Trump and his henchmen down a peg. No matter how frustrated we may be with anything that happens, there’s no strategic or moral justification for us spending our time knocking the Democrats down a peg instead.
One thing I am worried about is that so many folks on our side are wasting so much of their time complaining about the Democratic Party, they’re not bothering to do their own jobs. If you consider politics to be important and you agree that we’re in a crisis right now, then you have a responsibility to help Democratic candidates win key upcoming elections.
As I’ve tried to explain all along, these upcoming House special elections are a mere facade. The Trump regime made a point of plucking people for the cabinet who were in the kinds of extreme far-right House districts where they would be replaced by Republicans all but automatically. You can expect the Republican candidates to win the upcoming House special elections by twenty to thirty points each, even in the current anti-Republican political climate. These are the far right districts full of people who love the crap that Trump is pulling.
But there is one upcoming election that is absolutely winnable, and that we have a strategic and moral imperative to get behind. That’s the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Elon Musk and other Republicans are trying to buy the election, because if they win it, they’ll have a Wisconsin Supreme Court majority. That would make it easier for them to gerrymander the state in House and state legislature elections, and potentially make it harder for people to vote in the 2028 presidential election. This is why we must win this election – and it’s in one week.
So now is the time to get behind Democratic Party-backed candidate Susan Crawford, no matter what state you live in. You can donate to her campaign here. You can sign up to volunteer for her, in person or remotely, here. And you can follow her on Twitter or Bluesky and amplify her posts.
In times like this, when there’s so much drama and chaos, figuring out what not to worry about is every bit as important as figuring out what to worry about. Your attention span can only go so far. So I would urge you (for now) to stop worrying about the Democrats, stop complaining about them, and focus your bandwidth on the actual bad guys. And if you want something to worry about, then worry about winning next week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election. We haven’t put nearly enough focus on it to date, and it’ll be dangerously close. Let’s dive in now and win it.
