Voters are expressing their anger at the polls when given the opportunity. A number of special elections have been eye-openers, with 15-point swings away from Trump’s 2024 vote share, sometimes in very conservative districts. This is the kind of immediate backlash we saw in his first term, when it foreshadowed landslide midterms in 2018. And underneath its familiar bluster, the Trump administration appears to be feeling the pressure. It withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the U.N., reportedly out of fears that Democrats might win a special election in her New York district and imperil the Republicans’ razor-thin House majority. Less than six months ago, she won her district by more than 24 percentage points.
Of course, you could be forgiven for not noticing all this. I’ve despaired, too, and wondered whether the lack of high-profile protests like those that defined the 2010s meant that an era of resistance and outrage had given way to an age of acquiescence, with many liberals tacitly accepting the terms of their defeat (and some flirting with reactionary criticism of the left). Law firms and universities have been shockingly quiescent, by and large, though there have been more hints of resistance lately. Protests have gone relatively unheralded on cable news and the country’s front pages.
Even away from Elon Musk’s X and Trump’s Truth Social, the country seems ever more captive to narrative, and for the past few months, the predominant one has been that the Trumpists were on the march and Harris voters had collapsed in pathetic, fatalistic despair. That story captures some aspects of political reality, but the protest data tells another one. However gloomy the liberal mood, the streets have been pretty full. And the tariffs don’t necessarily mark a phase shift, either. Last week before they were announced, The Financial Times documented that among normie Republicans — those Republicans outside the small group of die-hard Trumpists — support for Trump’s economic policy had fallen by more than 20 points since February. The latest polling suggests that his signature economic policy is underwater by 30 points.
How much hope should this give you? It’s easy enough to see why the answer should be “not much.” On matters such as arbitrary and destructive tariffs, purposefully cruel deportations, near-indiscriminate federal layoffs and extralegal funding cuts, the Trump administration is basically steamrolling in all directions and daring the rest of the country to stop it. On every front, Trumpism is a test of whether the old rules of political reality hold. (And distressingly, those normie Republicans have remained supportive of deportations.)
For the most part, the Democratic Party has fumbled the moment, undertaking instead an ugly wave of self-lacerating self-criticism, in which prominent leaders seem to be competing over who can pile more blame on the party. Even when it comes to the trade war, coastal progressives like Ro Khanna and Elizabeth Warren and representatives from postindustrial areas like Chris Deluzio keep strangely emphasizing the value of tariffs before pointing out the needless pain of a stock market crash and likely recession. On his new podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom has chosen to interview right-wing firebrands like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and to do so with a mix of curiosity and sympathy for their views. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour offers what is in some ways the opposite criticism — but aimed still at the party, which now counts remarkably few committed supporters.
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