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It’s what everyone is asking today: Having had their clocks cleaned in November 2024 – and with the country facing an existential threat to our democracy – can Democrats ever get back on top? And if so, how?

First, two important points. One: No doubt, the Democratic Party will bounce back, as it always has before. As bad as November 2024 was, we’ve seen worse. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 out of 50 states. Two years later, Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1980.

Two: It’s going to take time. Given all the damage he’s doing every day, we’re all frustrated and angry that Democrats haven’t yet stopped Donald Trump in his tracks. But, though it seems like an eternity, it’s only been five weeks. Republicans were also in total disarray after Obama’s election in 2008. It took them six months to come up with a strategy, which was to deny Obama a second term. Democrats already have a strategy, taking back the Senate and House in 2026.

The big question is: How? This week, we saw three examples of how not to do it. From Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Gavin Newsom. Democrats are never going to win by surrender (Schumer), waiting for the sky to fall (Jeffries) or playing nice (Newsom).

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer infuriated fellow Democrats by attacking the Republicans’ budget bill one day, and then announcing he’d vote for allowing it to proceed the next. He defended his decision by insisting Democrats only had two choices: shutting down the government or going along with a bad bill. The bill sucks, he argued, but a government shutdown sucks worse. So, without putting up a fight, he simply surrendered.

Schumer was dead wrong. A shutdown would have been a disaster Trump could easily blame on Democrats, but Democrats had at least two other alternatives. One, proposed by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was pushing for a four-week extension to negotiate a bipartisan solution. The other was simply to fight like hell.

Even if they lost that battle, Democrats could have used that time to let the American people know how dangerous the Republican budget plan is. It guts funding for health care, increases military spending while slashing $13 billion in domestic spending, funds mass deportations and cuts many vital services, including FEMA’s disaster relief program, which is out of money after last year’s disastrous tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires. But Democrats never got that message out because Schumer walked off the field.

Newsom, meanwhile, adopted the losing strategy of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He launched a new podcast and bizarrely invited as his first guests three extreme MAGA Republicans: Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon and Michael Savage. In this case, Newsom’s extreme ambition got in the way of his good judgment. You don’t give the opposition a platform to spew their lies. And if you do invite them on, you don’t play nice. You challenge them and prove them wrong.

As Democratic leader of the House, Jeffries takes the “wait and see” approach. Yes, Trump’s doing a lot of bad stuff, he admits. But, he shrugs, “We can’t swing at every pitch.” Which raises the obvious question: How long do you wait before you swing – and do you have any juice left when you finally do?

“Right now, you have to swing at every pitch,” counters Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT). “If you let some of these egregious acts of his early days pass without real protest, it normalizes the behavior. It ends up less likely that you convince anyone to get off the mat later on.”

Murphy’s right. And, fortunately, he’s not the only one speaking out. So is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), holding packed rallies in the Midwest to protest Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. So is Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, comparing Trump’s authoritarianism to the rise of Nazism in Germany.

And so is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the first to challenge Schumer’s surrender, recently named in an SRSS poll as the politician who best represents the Democratic Party’s “core values.” In that same poll, 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said that opposing the GOP should be the party’s number one priority, rather than trying to find common ground with MAGA.

Surrender, playing nice or sitting on the sidelines is not the answer. Democrats must be raising hell every day, on every platform, against every Trump outrage. There’s no time to waste. The 2026 midterms are only 19 months away.

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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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