Tested by Trump’s first 100 days, Democrats take stock of lessons learned for fights ahead

The good news, say Democratic leaders and top party strategists wrapping their heads around what Donald Trump’s next 45 months will mean when just the first three months went like this: no shortage of actual impacts to talk about—and that’s before the market turmoil has had the effect on prices or jobs that they expect.

The good news, say Democratic leaders and top party strategists wrapping their heads around what Donald Trump’s next 45 months will mean, is that there is no shortage of actual impacts to talk about – and that’s before the market turmoil has had the effect on prices or jobs that they expect. The bad news, they say: the speed and thoroughness out of the White House keeps scrambling their already frantic efforts to fight back. Every bad Trump poll number has top Democratic operatives and officials wondering if they’re actually seeing the country start to move their way again or if they’re just talking themselves into seeing that. It’s what Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, first elected in the anti-Trump wave of 2018, calls a progression from apathy to fear to anger to action. Now: “I think we’re moving from incoherent to directed anger,” Casten said, then added his own stage direction: “He says, optimistically.” Beyond the arguments in private meetings or posts ripping into each other online, often odd and unexpected alliances within the Democratic Party have been hammering out ideas and tactics over group texts and quiet phone calls. Not having agreed on leaders or set organizing principles have come at a cost. Post-election promises of really digging into the data to figure out what went wrong have faded, but Democrats have started to actually rethink both what they’re saying and how they’re saying it in ways that go far beyond spats over wording or insisting that they should all do more podcasts.