The morning after election day was supposed to be one of reckoning for Republicans battered by internal strife over their unpopular nominee, Donald Trump.



Instead, it was the Democrats who awoke to a harrowing new world. Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat on Tuesday left the party leaderless and opened a struggle for control.

“The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election,” Stephanie Taylor, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement. “It’s time for new leadership of the Democratic Party – younger, more diverse, and more ideological – that is hungry to do things differently, like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls.”

Shell-shocked, the party’s liberal wing is climbing from the wreckage, angry at the running of an establishment candidate in a year when the electorate clearly wanted change. In cities around the country, thousands of young people have taken to the streets to protest the president-elect.

During the campaign, scenes of Democratic unity – Barack and Michelle Obama and two senators, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, campaigning on behalf of Clinton – contrasted with top Republicans disavowing their nominee. Such scenes, however, could not hide deep divisions in the party.

The cracks were there to see, from Sanders’ unexpectedly strong primary challenge to protests at the convention in Philadelphia in July and the removal on its eve of the party’s head, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

The first test lies in the selection of a new chair of the Democratic National Committee, the position filled by Wasserman-Schultz and now, temporarily, Donna Brazile. On Thursday, former Vermont governor Howard Dean put himself forward for a second spell. On Friday, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, unsuccessful in his run for the presidential nomination, said he was “taking a hard look” at the position.

Martin O’Malley. Photograph: Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock

The name that seems to resonate most among progressives, however, is that of Keith Ellison, a representative from Minnesota. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Ellison, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Warren, a liberal firebrand from Massachusetts, said on MSNBC he would make a “terrific” chair.

On a conference call Thursday night, Ellison said he was prepared to help the party rebuild and would announce his decision on whether to run on Monday.

“My shoelaces are tied up tight and I’m ready to get out on that court,” Ellison said on the call, which was hosted by Democracy for America, a progressive group founded by Dean. On Friday, Dean severed ties with the group.

Ellison, who is African American and the first Muslim member of Congress, would be a symbolic choice to lead the party under a Trump administration. Had Clinton won, she would have nominated someone, likely from her circle, to replace Brazile, who will serve until a new chair is elected in March 2017.

Wasserman-Schultz stepped down after hacked emails revealed that party officials had explored ways to hamper Sanders in the primaries. Another tranche of hacked emails revealed that Brazile, working for CNN, had shared a debate question with Clinton.

‘The sun will keep rising and we’ll keep fighting’

Without control of the White House or either chamber of Congress, Democrats must protect gains made under Obama while trying to advance their agenda.

“We do not control the tools of government, but make no mistake, we know what we stand for,” Warren said in a speech at the AFL-CIO union on Thursday. “The sun will keep rising and we will keep fighting.”

She laid out issues on which Democrats might be able to work with President Donald Trump, including reforming international trade policy. Already the Obama administration has backed away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, a win for progressives and Trump. Other possible areas of compromise include infrastructure improvement, tackling college and childcare costs and protecting social security.

Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, said liberals needed to form a “resistance army” to combat policies that would beat back equal rights.

“Anger is not bad,” Reich said on the conference call. “The angrier we are and the more activated and directional – the more we can channel that anger into real constructive change and blocking things that are bad, so much the better.”

Reich has argued for some time that the Democratic party has lost touch with working class voters it one represented. Exit polls suggest Trump won among white working class voters who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. Reich said Democrats had to repair relations with the white working class but also embrace the “new American electorate” – millennials, minorities and single women.

He added that it was also the party’s job to oppose intolerance.

“We do have to fight bigotry in all its forms,” he said. “Any kind of bigotry that has been unleashed by this campaign, by Trump, giving permission to that kind of bigotry is something we’ve got to be alert to and we’ve got to fight.”