“This is our moment in history. We cannot choose to go backwards,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said. | Getty House Democrats seize on anti-Trump strategy

BALTIMORE — House Democrats have come here to regroup, reconnect and rally around a message to take back the House in 2018. Their political playbook already seems written, in fact, and it’s pretty simple: We’re not Donald Trump.

“This is our moment in history. We cannot choose to go backwards,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats in a closed-door welcome ceremony. “This man in the White House is incoherent, incompetent and dangerous. And we have to protect children and other living things from him. We will do it.”


One after another, Democratic leaders, clad in their best retreat chic, hammered home that simple idea in their opening news conference. The main message: Republicans created the president, and they will have to answer for every single controversy he creates over the next four years.

“It’s not just about the contrast between Democrats and Donald Trump,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s about the Republicans in the Congress. There’s hardly anything that Donald Trump has said that the Republicans haven’t said sooner and for longer periods of time, in the worst way.”

If their plan sounds vaguely familiar, it is. House Democrats tried the same thing in the run-up to the 2016 election, tying House Republicans to whatever the Trump controversy du jour was, with dismal results. Democrats picked up only six House seats, despite predicting big gains for weeks ahead of the election.

But Democratic leaders and aides think this time will be different and that if they play their cards right, the strategy could even help deliver them the double-digit wins they need to take back the House in 2018.

This time they have a much longer runway to link individual House Republicans to Trump’s actions. And the stakes are much higher — whereas before, Trump was preaching from behind a powerless pulpit on the campaign trail, he’s now sitting behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office and his policies have real world implications for voters.

In a little more than two weeks, Trump has turned the world upside down with a chaotically implemented executive order on immigration, daily name-calling attacks on Twitter, and unfounded claims of widespread voting irregularities.

House Democrats are betting voters won’t be able to stomach four years of Trump if his chaotic reign continues and will be looking for someone to blame in 2018 when Trump’s name isn’t on the ballot.

“Our Republican colleagues understand that what the White House does, they either have to answer for or they have to condemn. They can’t have it both ways,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley of New York told reporters.

Democrats also are counting on a little luck: Midterm elections generally favor the party not in the White House, a message Pelosi hammered home during the closed-door caucus meeting on Wednesday.

“History is on our side. And so, we have to remember that,” she told her colleagues in a nod to the 2006 elections that swept Democrats into power and Pelosi to the speakership under Republican President George W. Bush.

The message, essentially “Let Trump be Trump,” is something Pelosi has been preaching for months. During the campaign, she repeatedly referred to him as “the gift that keeps on giving,” predicting he would hand Republicans huge losses in both the House and Senate.

After the election sent Democrats licking their wounds and questioning their longtime House leadership regime, Pelosi again renewed her declarations about Trump as a pitch for why the caucus should keep her in power for at least two more years.

But that doesn’t mean she’s ignoring the Democrats who rallied around Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who challenged her for the position as minority leader. Ryan and others sharply criticized Pelosi, saying that under her leadership Democrats failed to craft any kind of campaign message other than being anti-Trump and that it cost them big time with working-class white voters.

Pelosi privately met with Ryan as well as Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio to talk about crafting a strategy to reach voters in former manufacturing strongholds who were once devoted Democrats.

Democratic aides say they will eventually shift to a positive economic message that Rust Belt Democrats can run on. But for now, aides say, the focus is on slaying the giant and proving to the voters who sent Trump into the White House why his policies will fail.

House Democrats’ strategy is basically this: They’ll publicly goad Trump on subjects he’s clearly sensitive about, like insinuating he’s being blackmailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin; and on other issues, like Obamacare and tax reform, they’ll get out of the way and let Trump and House Republicans fall on their face.

House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairwoman Linda Sánchez of California on Wednesday summed up the strategy this way: “kicking a little ass for the working class.”

