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The party’s rank and file are angry and searching for a Democrat who can lead the way.
April 1, 2025Updated 3:14 p.m. ET
Before the election, Julisa Rojas believed that Democrats were by no means perfect, but she thought they could steer the country in a better direction. So, she said she canvassed neighborhoods in Georgia, where she helped register people to vote.
Now, her hope has curdled into frustration — not just with President Donald J. Trump but with her own party. The Democrats’ response to an unrelenting Republican administration, she said, has seemed too scattershot and clumsy. When she saw them show up to Mr. Trump’s address to Congress in March wearing pink and holding matching signs, she scoffed. “A little pathetic, in my opinion,” she said.
“I don’t think that they’ve done anything,” said Ms. Rojas, a 24-year-old literacy instructor. “But also, if they might’ve done something it could’ve been washed-out from all the news in regards to Trump since he’s doing something every day.”
Her concern is shared by many rank-and-file Democrats, who believe the Republicans returned to power with a clear, aggressive and unsettling agenda, while their own party has yet to find its footing, much less coalesce into a formidable opposition.
In roughly two dozen interviews across the country over the past week, loyal Democratic voters expressed a hunger for the party to fight the Trump administration’s expansive view of presidential power, but they also discussed their uncertainty about whether the party has the gumption to do so effectively. While many liked certain politicians, ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett and Bernie Sanders to Chuck Schumer, they described feeling stranded in a political wilderness and yearning for leadership and strategies to guide them out of it.
“The one thing all of us can agree on: Democrats across the country are angry, and they’re angry because there does not seem to be a unified fight,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, 70, the presiding prelate of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for a swath of the Mid-Atlantic region. “The real question, the real issue: What the hell is it that Democrats are willing to fight for?”
