Democrats are furious. And they want their leaders to get mad, too.
“I wish you’d be angry,” a constituent told representative Gil Cisneros, a Democrat of California, at a recent town hall. At an event in Minnesota featuring a panel of Democratic attorneys general, an activist voiced a similar sentiment: “Get angry, man,” punctuating the message with a profanity.
The anger roiling the party, slow to build, is now a forceful current coursing through the electorate and pulling in Americans terrified that the country is descending into authoritarianism. Democrats – with no leader to guide them and little power to wield in Washington – are scrambling to harness the sudden fury.
At rallies, town halls and protests, voters are venting their fury with Donald Trump and his empowerment of Elon Musk’s full-frontal assault on federal agencies, stoking what progressive activists believe are the embers of a populist backlash against the president – and the Democratic leaders they believe are not meeting the moment.
But then the country really and truly did vote for him. And that ~36% who didn’t vote at all did vote for Trump. That is not up for debate.
That is also an oversimplification, because you’re assuming that all 36% of the people who didn’t vote had the option to vote. We are the most imprisoned population on earth, with some states (including one of the 2024 swing states) removing voting rights from people convicted of felonies.
That’s not even going into things like people working in jobs that have no problem violating the law and refusing to let them take time off to vote, people being illegitimately denied the vote at the polls over ID issues, long poll lines that mean some people wind up unable to vote for unavoidable reasons (childcare, disability, etc), 14 states don’t allow no-excuse voting by mail, I can keep going on with all the problems people run into while voting in the US if you want.
Obviously that’s not all of that 36%, but you are living in a dream world if you think every American citizen that wanted to vote got to.
Fine. We’ll call it 30% of the population who didn’t vote at all voted for Trump. Is that better?
You’re asking me if it’s better that there are ~14 million less Nazis in the US than you thought?