Democrats look for places to work with Trump 2.0

Democrats say one thing is certain: 2025 won't be 2017, when it comes to the start of the Trump administration. 

Two months after their grueling and disappointing White House loss to President-elect Trump and their failure to win back the House or keep the Senate majority, Democrats acknowledge that lawmakers are going to have to find places to work with Trump during his second term. 

Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the results “have had a chastening effect” on the party, forcing it to rethink the way it does business and how it seeks to communicate with voters who have soured on Democratic officeholders.

“Smart Democrats right now are listening and processing and taking in the political environment with an open mind,” he said.

“You are going to see Democrats go to places that are viewed as unfriendly and partner with people who seem unlikely allies in an attempt to better understand where the electorate is,” Payne added.  

The mood and outlook stands in stark contrast, Democrats say, from eight years ago when Trump won a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential contest.

After Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s defeat in an election where she won the popular vote, the term "resist" was coined in opposition to Trump and became a regular part of the Democratic vernacular. In the subsequent years, Democrats sought to consistently oppose the president, refusing to support Republican legislation and launching a string of Trump-related investigations. 

Democrats also impeached Trump twice. 

But Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said he expects members of his party to tone down the rhetoric and antagonism in the first months of Trump’s administration. Democrats, Simmons predicted, would be “selectively combative” in responding to Trump’s actions, taking a lesson from the results of the presidential race. 

“I don’t think any voters are looking for Democrats to fight Trump at every turn,” Simmons said. “They want something that yields results that matter. You’re either trying to do something that matters or you’re part of the problem. 

“That’s why I think saying ‘no’ isn’t a great strategy,” he said, adding that there will be few Democrats who will compliment the president directly but many who will be open to quietly working with Republicans. 

In a New York Times op-ed this week, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) wrote that Democrats should not be the party of no during the second Trump administration. 

“I know my party will be tempted to hold fast against Mr. Trump at every turn: uniting against his bills, blocking his nominees and grinding the machinery of the House and the Senate to a halt,” Suozzi wrote. “That would be a mistake.” 

While the congressman said he’s “no dupe” — saying some of Trump’s moves and machinations offer “little reassurance that he is ready to embrace the bipartisanship and compromise essential to a functioning democracy” — he urged those in his party to “try something different when it comes to the president-elect.”

Democrats are still in the thick of conducting election postmortems, largely reaching the conclusion that they can’t simply be the anti-Trump party. Voters in the 2024 election wanted palpable solutions on the economy and the border, and they weren’t satisfied with the Democratic response, party operatives acknowledge. 

“They weren’t interested in hearing what we had to say,” one aide who served on Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign said. “That’s the bottom line.

“I think we have to get to a place as a party where we’re listening to what voters are saying, not just pretending that we’re listening and coming up with our own theories of the case.” 

Even in the lead-up to Trump’s second term, some Democrats have already expressed a willingness to be supportive of the president-elect’s Cabinet picks and his proposed initiatives. 

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told the Detroit Free Press in November that while some in the Democratic Party would oppose Trump’s nominees across the board, she said she would vote for some of them. 

“Others I may not, but I got to see the full file paperwork,” she said.  

And after Trump announced the formation of the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among the first to announce his support for the initiative, which will be co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. 

“Elon Musk is right,” Sanders wrote in a post on social platform X. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. 

“That must change,” he added. 

At the same time, Democrats acknowledge that they can’t give Trump carte blanche. They still believe — even if voters have expressed doubt — that he is a threat to democracy and that a second Trump term could be dangerous because there wouldn’t be so-called guardrails for the president-elect in a second term. 

“That’s part of the problem we’re wrestling with,” one Democratic strategist said. “Trump is going to propose some crazy s‑‑‑. It’s not like some of these proposals are going to be reasonable. 

“Also, let’s not forget that I don’t think he wants to work with us,” the strategist added. 

Still, some Democrats acknowledge that they have to change their approach if they want the results to be different in the midterm elections in 2026 and in the next presidential election in 2028.

“I think Democrats are signaling that if there's some good s‑‑‑ happening with Trump, we can rock with that,” a second strategist said.