Under a blazing sun in Berryville, a pastoral town in northern Virginia, a chastened group of Democratic leaders gathered to try out a new message for the party during a kind of relaunch event this summer.

“Too many Americans don’t know what we stand for,” Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader in the Senate, admitted to the assembled crowd in a county Donald Trump had won last November. “Not after today,” Schumer added, burnishing an economic platform of “A Better Deal”.

The event in July came nearly a year after Hillary Clinton had celebrated her historic nomination to run for president with a cascade of star-spangled balloons and confetti at the Democratic national convention. And it came after the message that Clinton and the Democrats took to the electorate in November 2016 had collided with Donald Trump.



As the first anniversary of Clinton’s loss approaches, a critical question remains: what do the Democrats stand for?

“Everybody wants to crack the code. There is no code-cracking,” said Jason Kander, a Democrat and the former secretary of state for Missouri, who has been traveling the country speaking to voters since November. “We’ve just got to go out there and have the courage to make our argument. More than anything, what folks are looking for is authenticity. That’s the big lesson from 2016.”

In the aftermath of such an unexpected, ruinous defeat, the party in the wilderness is still struggling to forge an identity that strikes deeper than a pledge to resist Trump. That economic message has struggled to compete with the barrage of distractions dispensed in 140-character capsules each day. And internecine strife, a hangover from a bitter Democratic primary, threatens to divide the party along ideological, generational and racial lines.

But the party is also emboldened by a swell of grassroots activism that rose up in response to Trump’s victory. The movement, broadly known as the resistance, is active and organized across the country, springing to action in the wake of Trump’s travel ban and Republicans’ multiple attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

A house divided

Moving forward after ruinous defeat is complicated by the fact that there is still no consensus on exactly what happened.

Few disagree that Clinton was a flawed candidate or that her campaign made consequential tactical errors. She was a historically unpopular candidate bested by the only candidate in modern history who was less popular. She was also a pragmatist swallowed by a populist tide with a muddled message that competed for headlines against controversies inspired by Trump and those of her own making. Clearly, Democrats learned, an anti-Trump message was insufficient. The party failed to convince voters that they had a coherent policy platform of their own to deliver.

And yet Clinton decisively won the popular vote after committing to the “most progressive platform” in party history.

The outcome has led to divergent conclusions on what this means for the future of the party.

Progressives emerged from the ashes of 2016 more powerful than they have been in decades. The ascendent left expects the party to adopt a policy agenda that is uncompromisingly progressive and economically populist – Medicare for all and a federal $15 minimum wage.

“The best way to avoid a civil war is to fight with purpose and unity for the fundamental, progressive values that the party stands for,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org.

Progressive organizations played a crucial role in helping to defeat the Republican healthcare repeal effort. The next major tests for congressional Democrats, Wikler said, are whether they can pass legislation for Dreamers – young people brought to the country illegally as children – a path to citizenship and whether they can remain united against the Republican tax cut proposal.

“As the healthcare fight demonstrated,” Wikler said, “following the energy in the streets is the surest path to victory for Democrats.”

Meanwhile, several Democrats are running for re-election in conservative states, treading lightly around fractious cultural fault lines. These candidates want the party to hone a jobs-focused economic message that resonates with the working-class Americans who abandoned Democrats for Trump en masse.



The debate, however, does not fall neatly along the left-center divide. A class of young Democrats are rising quickly to fill the party’s leadership vacuum.

“Leadership wants to stick with the status quo. And the status quo has failed us – not just in 2016 but in 2014, in 2012, in 2010,” said Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton, one of the young Democrats stepping into that vacuum.

“It’s time for a new generation of leadership in the party – a generation that’s focused on the future not just a response or a criticism of Trump and the Republicans.”

Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, speaks with voters at a restaurant in Berryville. Party leaders hope victory in Virginia can reset the narrative ahead of the 2018 midterms. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

The morning of 9 November was a reckoning nearly a decade in the making. Since Obama was elected in 2008, the Democratic party lost control of its majorities in Congress while suffering even steeper losses in state capitols. Meanwhile Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in the state legislatures, forfeiting control of dozens of state legislative chambers. And only 15 of the country’s 50 governors are Democrats.

Much of the rebuilding will fall to the Democratic National Committee, which was battered by a Russian hack of the organization’s emails and accusations of bias during the primary – a claim that was given new fuel last week by Donna Brazile who served as the party’s interim chair during the election.

The DNC party chair, Tom Perez, the former secretary of labor, acknowledged that the party has yet to reconcile entrenched internal divisions, telling a group of reporters recently that unity is a goal “we continue to work to strive for every single day”. But he said the party’s divides are over policy and not core values.

“I think there is a very real understanding that this is the most dangerous president in American history,” Perez said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington.

“And while we may have a disagreement on issue X or issue Y this existential threat to our democracy embodied in the Trump administration is where we need to train our focus.”

Perez pointed to healthcare as an example of where real policy differences exist on the left, but nonetheless Democrats bound together to defeat the Republican healthcare bill. That the minority party, in coordination with fierce outside opposition, could derail Republicans biggest legislative priority of the last decade was celebrated as a major achievement.

And Congressional Democratic leaders are confident that if they can repeat that success with tax reform and keep Republicans from accomplishing any major legislative achievements, 2018 will be the start of their return to power.

“It’s pretty remarkable that a year into the president’s term, with control of both houses, he hasn’t passed a single piece of legislation,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, who is regarded as a rising star within the party.

“That’s a pretty good indicator that we’ve held together and ultimately been able to rally the public against much of Trump’s agenda.”

The path forward

A Better Deal offers Democrats a template for 2018 that attempts to reconcile the clashing impulses in the party.

The platform sounds notes of economic populism while trying to strike a balance between the party who believe the White House will be won by winning back disaffected Americans and those who want to focus on turning out young, minority and women voters.

But its architects say the real challenge will be staying on message when each day has the potential to be blown off course by the president’s latest thought bubble. All the while, the Russia investigation is intensifying and calls for Trump’s removal are growing.

“If I could call the shots on this, I would say let’s focus 99% of our time on creating jobs and helping rural America, passing a jobs bill, passing a transportation bill, passing a farm bill, all the things that are important to the people I represent,” Cheri Bustos, a Democrat from Illinois who is leading the party’s efforts at “Heartland Engagement” and helped write the Better Deal agenda.

Bustos said she sees “inklings” that their message is resonating beyond liberal enclaves, but stressed that the party still has a “long way to go”.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is targeting 80 races ahead of the 2018 midterms, the most of any election cycle in the past decade. Congressional Democrats need to win 24 seats to claim the House majority next November.

The races will be ferocious. Losing the House would imperil Trump’s legislative agenda – and perhaps his presidency.

Republicans will accuse them of being obstructionists and aim to capitalize on their leadership vacuum in an effort to tie vulnerable lawmakers running for re-election in states where Trump won to progressive members of the party.



“President Trump and Republicans are laser-focused on a positive agenda that delivers on our promise to cut taxes for middle-class Americans,” said Michael Ahrens, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

“Meanwhile Democrats are flailing into 2018. They have no message, no money, and their base continues to pull them further to the left, leaving them out of touch with Americans.”

Yet Democrats have the historical advantage. The president’s party has suffered electoral losses in all but three of the midterms since the civil war, losing an average of 33 seats.

Jon Ossoff lost in Georgia’s 6th congressional district in the most expensive House race in history. Photograph: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters

The Democratic candidate has fallen short in a handful of special elections this year, including in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, where the Democrat, Jon Ossoff, lost by four points after raising $23m in the most expensive House race in history.

Party leaders are now turning to a pair of gubernatorial races on Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey, where they are hopeful Democratic victories there will reset the narrative ahead of the 2018 congressional midterms. They hope victories there will set in motion a “wave” big enough to take back the House the following year.

David Brock, the founder of the liberal news site Media Matters for America and the Democratic Super PaC American Bridge, said the divisions within the Democratic party pale in comparison with the “civil war” taking place in the Republican party. Meanwhile, he said, Trump’s favorability remains at a historic low and the Russia investigation continues to intensify.

Trump’s approval rating has hovered around 40%, dropping this week to 38% in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The survey found that nearly half of registered voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, while a similar number say they will cast their ballot to send the message to keep a “check and balance” on Trump and Republicans.

“You can get a very long way in opposition to Trump,” Brock said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t need your own message and you don’t have to have a strong platform, but the conditions are there for a wave election.”

Three hours west of Chicago, in a district Trump won, Bustos meets regularly with her constituents at “supermarket Saturdays”. Never once, she said, has one proactively raised the Russia investigation or impeachment.

“They want to know about the issues that affect their lives and pocketbooks,” Bustos said.

“We as Democrats,” she continued, “I hope, will have the discipline to stay focused on what matters to people back home.”