CNN
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The question has loomed over Democrats and their allies since Donald Trump was elected to a second term: Do party leaders and liberal, pro-democracy activists have the juice to launch a passionate, organized opposition to Trump and the Republican congressional trifecta?
The early takes, in the days and weeks after the election, were gloomy, bordering on defeatist. But less than a month now before Trump’s second inauguration, a picture is emerging of Resistance 2.0. It’s out with the “pink pussy hats” and often performative pop culture gesturing and in with strategic confrontation, from the halls of Congress to the courts and, when called for, the streets.
That, at least, is the plan.
“We don’t have rose-colored glasses. This is going to be a hard fight. They are more organized than they were last time. The landscape has moved further to the right in many ways in terms of the governmental balance of power,” said Skye Perryman, the leader of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal organization. “But there are real opportunities with both where the American people are on issues as well as with where the judicial landscape is.”
Organizers and activists repeated varying versions of this argument in dozens of interviews with CNN over the last month: Yes, Trump and his movement are better poised to act than they were when he first entered the White House in 2017. But so are we. Democracy Forward, Perryman said, has been studying documents like Project 2025, mapping out legal battlegrounds and recruiting hundreds of lawyers from nearly 300 organizations to coordinate a proactive response to what she called a fundamentally unchanged GOP playbook.
Several groups, including those focused on immediate pressure points, like Trump’s mass deportation plans, said they expect supports to turn out in full force when inevitable crises emerge. There is also a growing sense that the GOP’s narrow congressional majorities are at risk of splintering under pressure from a well-organized opposition. The Republican bust-up over funding the government proves, advocates said – in conversations both before and after the fight exploded – that Trump’s agenda is ripe for spoiling.
“There will be policies that will cause clear riffs and divisions in their own base, in their own voter coalition,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.
Those cracks are already showing up on Capitol Hill as some conservative Republican lawmakers butt heads with Trump and influential allies, like billionaire Elon Musk, over the outline of a spending bill to keep the government running.
Leaders of groups like Indivisible, which sprung up in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, balk at the assumption that Trump’s popular vote victory, powered in part by gains in some Democratic strongholds, had demoralized the “resistance” to the point of paralysis.
Mostly, they point to the calendar – and to some revisionist history regarding Trump’s first election. The Women’s March, multiple activists noted, did not come until the day after his inauguration, on January 21, 2017. The Democratic Party, post-2016, was arguably in a deeper funk and more contentious state of internecine battle.
Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, said the political landscape has changed so much over the past eight years that it effectively zeroes out any apples to apples comparisons.
“The Trump election in 2016 was a total surprise and seemed like an accident of history. We didn’t think the threat was that real. We didn’t do as much as we might have been able to do. And then this guy squeaked through,” Levin said, describing the motivating frustrations from 2016 and 2017.
This time, he added, there is no suggestion that Trump’s ascent was a fluke. And though that might be dispiriting to some Democrats, it is also useful lesson – the search for a quick fix or white knight, in the form of a character such as special counsel Robert Mueller and his Russian election interference probe, is not on the table.
“I don’t really give a sh*t about the spin. There’s either going to be a movement or there isn’t, and the proof is going to be in the pudding,” Levin said. “But I wouldn’t though expect more than what I’m seeing now. We had a 140,000 people on a call two days after the election.”
Those numbers are growing, he said. MoveOn, another older liberal activist group, and the Working Families Party have reported similarly estimable engagement stats. Some Democrats have also noted the makeup of the state and federal judiciary is, on balance, slightly better for the party than entering 2017. Democrats, too, have considerably more power now at the state executive and legislative levels.
Michigan is a prime example. Republicans there had a supermajority in 2016, with Democrats down to under a dozen seats in both the state Senate and House. The GOP controlled the offices of the secretary of state, attorney general and governor. Entering 2025, the executive seats are all held by Democrats, who also have legislative majorities.
“We’re in a bit of a different position here to be able to fight back and maybe see people feel a little less powerless than they did in 2016,” said Curtis Hertel, a former state senator and candidate to become Michigan Democratic Party chair. “But that doesn’t mean (people) are not on the ground, ready to move and looking at ways to build new coalitions across the state.”
Angst over the willingness of Democrats, from the party’s rank and file to its traditionally energetic advocates, to remain engaged and push back against Trump’s agenda has been a talking point both on the ground and among the party’s most prominent figures.
“Many people have come up to me, telling me they feel tired, maybe even resigned – folks who have said to me that they’re not sure whether they have the strength, much less the desire, to stay in the fight,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a speech to young leaders in mid-December. “But let me be very clear. No one can walk away. … We must stay in the fight, every one of us.”
The incoming chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Texas Rep. Greg Casar, acknowledged that the period of “grief and soul-searching” is not yet over. But he argued that internal debate would benefit the party – in the coming weeks and as the next round of elections come into focus.
“People didn’t sit in at the lunch counters just once, people didn’t go and vote during the Civil Rights Movement in only one election cycle. This takes some time,” Casar said. “There is a deliberate Republican strategy to get people to give up. I see it every day on Capitol Hill.”
As Democrats work to rehabilitate their own image with voters, they are hoping the incoming Trump administration will help offer a strong contrast.
Organizers pointed to the successful effort in 2017 to block the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which led to the health care law being a positive campaign issue for Democrats for the first time during the 2018 midterm elections. The upcoming debate over extending the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts could offer a similar opportunity, Democrats say.
“Those kinds of fights, I think, will energize the Democratic Party and become the defining issues in the 2026 elections and beyond,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and a candidate to lead the national party.
Democrats must also grapple with which policy fights to take on.
Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a progressive group that formed days after Trump’s first inauguration, said Democrats need to rebuild their image as a party of the working class and pressure Republicans to vote on populist policies, such as raising taxes on billionaires.
“We have been, for years, a party against Trump instead of a party for something,” Andrabi said. “We cannot just fight against Trump and just say this policy is bad.”
Molly Murphy, a pollster for Harris’ presidential campaign, told Democratic National Committee members this month that they must change their approach to Trump during his second term by emphasizing pocketbook issues over his Cabinet picks and various outrages.
“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” Murphy said during a presentation at a DNC executive committee meeting.
A Quinnipiac University poll released December 16 found that 53% of voters are optimistic about Trump’s second term.
But the poll also found majorities opposed key parts of his agenda: Fifty-one percent of voters opposed his plan to launch tariffs on Mexico, China and Canada. On immigration, 55% of voters said they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, compared with 36% who said they want the US to deport most migrants. Sixty-three percent of voters said they support birthright citizenship.
“That’s not what the marginal voter who gave him the plurality of votes in key states was voting for,” Levin said. “They were voting for lower egg prices.”
Mitchell, the Working Families Party leader, also argued that early reporting and opinion pieces “have been premature in trying to tell a story about where people are at and what people are willing to do.” Still, he told CNN that “Trump 1.0 will not be Trump 2.0, and we will not be the movement of 2016 and 2017.”
Back then, he recalled, “there was a march for every issue. There was the tax march, there was the Women’s March, there was the science march. … Those tactics made sense then, but we can’t simply engage in mass mobilizations every time there’s a new issue or a new Trump program that we’re opposed to.”
That understanding, he and others told CNN, should guide both Democrats in office and advocacy groups dedicated to stopping or stalling the new administration’s agenda.
There should be less focus, these leaders said, on puncturing what has often been described by liberals as a personality campaign designed to sour Trump voters on Trump.
“If Trump does the bidding of Big Tech, Big Oil and the billionaires who bankrolled his campaign, as early signs suggest, we must expose this monumental betrayal of the working people who voted for him seeking lower costs and a better living standard,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a speech earlier this month.
Only by seizing on those opportunities, she continued, could Democrats and their allies hope to “reconnect” with the working- and middle-class voters who are moving away from the party.
Bruna Sollod, the senior political director at United We Dream, an immigrant advocacy group, said her organization is focused on making sure those threatened by Trump’s promised deportation sweeps have the information they need, along with paperwork that could be critical in the coming month.
But their message, she said, will also address deeper concerns highlighted by the president-elect’s gains among voters who had once been expected by political operatives to immediately reject his anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“We completely understand that there’s people within our own communities – people who may have voted for Trump, who were immigrants in the past, or have immigrant family members – they feel like let down by the Democratic Party,” Sollod said. “We understand that we’re just in a very different place than we were in 2017.”
The group plans to lean into messaging about how immigrants contribute to the economy to counter the incoming president’s rhetoric and is already pressuring allies at the federal, state and local level to push back on Trump’s immigration agenda. The group is also holding additional informational sessions around concerns such as the rights of DACA recipients and others who could come into the administration’s crosshairs.
For transgender rights advocates, the 2025 landscape it already taking shape.
Throughout his campaign Trump vowed to block transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams.
And the US Supreme Court, now dominated by a conservative supermajority, recently heard arguments on a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors.
“There is organizing and direct-action planning occurring,” said Ash Lazarus Orr, a spokesperson for Advocates for Trans Equality. “It just may look a little different than it has in the past, because we are operating under a new territory now.”
Advocates for Trans Equality released an updated version of its legal survival guide last month and has urged transgender Americans to update their legal documents and renew their passports.
“We are still really in that early stage of Trump has been elected, but he’s not in office yet, so what can we do right now to best prepare,” Orr said. “Right now, our main focus is preparing our community as much as possible.”
CNN’s Eva McKend contributed to this report.
