Democrats are failing to Trump test. It's primary time.

Maybe fearing for their jobs will motivate them?

Feb 02, 2025

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Primary Comes Early This Year

Elon Musk was given the keys to the federal government’s payment system on Friday, granting him the ability to monitor and block the more than one billion transactions processed by the Treasury each year. A radicalized white supremacist and the world’s richest person, Musk also now has access to the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans, including their addresses and Social Security numbers.

Access to that sensitive data is normally reserved for a small number of non-partisan civil servants, and for good reason. Now, Musk and his small team have the power and means to punish millions of people in targeted acts of retribution or ideological cruelty. He was granted this unprecedented weapon by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who was confirmed on Monday with the support of 16 Democratic senators.

Groundhog Day must have come a day early this year, because it feels like we’ve been reliving the same excruciating day for the past two weeks. While it required Phil Connors to go through a profound personal transformation to break the doom loop, the solution to achieving a functional, gutsy opposition party is more clear: Primary challenges.

Save for a few stern press releases and media availabilities from the comfort of their office, Democrats in the Senate have done virtually nothing of any value to condemn the Trump administration’s relentless onslaught of cruel, illegal, and dangerous executive orders, agency firings, or other reckless decisions.

I wrote about this on Monday, so I won’t go too deep into it, but the dereliction of duty has only become more egregious after a week of astounding perniciousness, incompetence, and disregard for even the constitution. It’s been all capitulation and collaboration from a bunch of exhausted and cowardly lawmakers who can’t be bothered to stick up for their constituents even in the scenarios that fall under the groupthink poll-brained “kitchen table issues” that they’ve have singled out as their sole focus.

When the budget freeze disaster landed in their laps like a political gift from above, they were so slow to recognize it — or just cared so little — that the House Democratic caucus scheduled an “emergency” Zoom meeting for 1 PM the next day. Senators only wound up holding a press conference about it because they had already scheduled one about a week-old order.

The budget freeze was an economic wrecking ball that had already begun to cause problems for working people and promised to destroy an exceedingly wide range of jobs and full industries, and it was repeatedly telegraphed in Project 2025 and the various writings and ravings of returning OMB director Russell Vought. Senators even asked him about his belief in the president’s ability to unilaterally withhold money apportioned by Congress in his confirmation last week. Yet they were somehow caught flat-footed when the actual order went down.

If my first instinct as a journalist was to start looking for people who were facing catastrophe (watch for my coverage coming soon), it boggles the mind that their representatives, even as their offices were flooded with calls, evidently did not think to reach out to their field offices, local allies, and businesses to invite them to channel their fear and outrage at press conferences and in videos for social media. They could have called for protests in DC at the OMB office and nationally in their districts, where a bit of publicity would have produced a riled up coalition of construction workers, teachers, business owners, scientists, and so many people from all walks of life.

Instead, this is the sum total of what we got:

Because the White House has made it clear that it intends to pursue these cuts one way or another, the opportunity to get people activated is still there for the taking. They could also be leading protests at the Treasury, where Elon Musk is snorting ketamine and reading your tax returns on his sofa bed, and perhaps at the offices of Tesla or Twitter. Instead, the Senate Minority Leader did some tweets about tomatoes, under the careful direction of Cory Booker, who has senators posting a few times a day like it’s 2015.

If you’re flummoxed as to why young voters moved to the right last year, think about how and how often the two parties present themselves to the public. The GOP has a large number of young and tech-savvy senators with an understanding of how to craft a voice and a persona (however annoying those personas may be). They post constantly, cracking jokes and throwing haymakers and pounding their narrative. They show up at rallies and events and make the news constantly.

Democrats, on the other hand, are mostly a caucus of older social media illiterates with the personalities of drywall, which is especially problematic when the caucus has failed to deliver on promises time and time again (blame Sinema and Manchin all you want, the results are the same). Many Democrats are slow and afraid to offend their outdated concept of the median voter and the party is beholden to institutions and seniority. Even the ones who are more outspoken online rarely seem to launch real investigations, lead public campaigns, or even use the rules of the institution to slow down Republicans.

The number of Democrats who voted for Bessent would have been damning even before he gave Musk total access to the nation’s financial transactions, and now it makes the party borderline collaborators on whatever disaster follows. This is Weimar Republic behavior, but they can’t seem to grasp that the urgency.

Before you tell me to focus my ire on Republicans, note that I’m already doing so, as you can see from Friday’s newsletter. If you want to insist that criticizing and challenging Democrats just hurts the party and helps Republicans, I assure you that nobody is as good at hurting Democrats and assisting the GOP as Democrats themselves. That’s how we got to the point, where even amid all the chaos, the Democratic Party just clocked an all-time low approval rating.

Plus, this past election season was filled with brutal Democratic primary challenges, they just happened to be coming from the right and backed by crypto billionaires and AIPAC. New DNC chairman Ken Martin has already said that he won’t necessarily protect incumbents or discourage dark money Super PACs from spending in primaries, so grassroots challenges should be welcomed. If anything, primaries should be seen as a favor to the Democratic Party, because its lack of urgency and enabling of horror shows that nobody votes for only further drain its credibility.

Assessing the best primary opportunities

Conveniently, the 2026 midterm elections offer some excellent targets.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate minority whip whose failures as the chair of the judiciary committee eased Trump’s re-ascension and protected the Supreme Court’s most corrupt justices, is 80-years-old and up for re-election next year. He’s already indicated some uncertainty about running again, and a state as blue as Illinois has plenty of qualified progressive lawmakers who could jump into the race and make his decision for him. Doing so instead of waiting to see if he retires would be an infinitely stronger statement about the change that is needed.

Delaware’s Chris Coons, a corporate centrist who voted down the $15 minimum wage in 2021, supported many of Trump’s judicial nominees the first time around, and has been a depository for private equity donations and conservative dark money, is out of step with Delaware’s shift from liberal tax shelter to more solidly progressive state. Challenging him, like Durbin, would be virtually risk-free and deeply satisfying. No longer having to see his face on CNBC, slandering the left, is enough upside for me.

Sens. Mark Warner (VA) and Jeanne Shaheen (NH) are also up for re-election after terms in which they regularly undermined core Democratic priorities. Warner, now 70-years-old, was one of several senators who held out on co-sponsoring the PRO Act, omnibus legislation that would have given organized labor a fighting chance even in this newly disastrous environment, and he’s been one of the most frequent yea votes for Trump nominees. Shaheen, who just turned 78, has backed six Trump nominees.

Their milquetoast politics, long incumbency, and their advanced ages — Shaheen would finish her next term in her mid-80s — put them at risk of being upended by younger and more dynamic GOP challengers. Protecting tired incumbents and establishment stalwarts, as we’ve seen time and again, continues to backfire.

As for the House, there are a plethora of targets, largely ossified and irrelevant lawmakers who have owned safe blue seats out of a combination of local elite machine politics and public disinterest. Look to those who supported seniority in committee elections, vote to loosen regulations on crypto and banking, and throw the LGBTQ+ community under the table.

It’s going to be a sizable list, with smug right-wing suck-ups like Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who played footsie with Trump soon after the election, as well as stubborn institutionalists like Rep. Gerry Connolly who refuse to step aside for the good of mankind, should be at the top of the list. I would be shocked if people in Ritchie Torres’s district, the poorest in the nation, felt represented by a guy who spent the past two years laser-focused on Israel and is now on a national left-bashing press tour as he considers a run for governor.

It’ll take resources to run credible challenges to some of these lawmakers, especially guys like Torres, who swam in AIPAC money last year. But with Republicans now in power, most of the big donors’ focus is likely to be on the right, and I think people are craving representatives willing to take a stand. This isn’t about finding the most left-wing candidate, but finding fearless leaders who will push back against fast-encroaching fascism instead of capitulating to it. Lawmakers who vote on their values and shape public opinion instead of rushing to conform to skewed polls and consultant memos.

Going forward, I’m committed to holding the useless lawmakers accountable and giving a look at serious primary challengers. I’ve never done it this early in the cycle, but the sooner the pressure begins, the faster these lawmakers will either begin to change their behavior or give the public more reason to oppose them. Stopping Trumpism can’t happen if we don’t have representatives who are up to the task.

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