The NPR Politics Podcast - Dems In Disarray? Finding Unity In The Caucus

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

After bruising losses in November's elections, Democrats are trying to figure out how to unite their many factions behind a common set of ideas & objectives. Infighting in the party itself, though, doesn't make it any easier. This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt, and political correspondent Susan Davis.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Dave in Smyrna, Delaware. Right now, I'm adjusting the 1930s underwood typewriter I recently bought on Facebook Marketplace. This podcast was recorded at 1 0 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be tapping away at the novel that now I'm inspired to write. Okay, here's the show. I have two typewriters. That's a nice typewriter, too. I got them fixed by a man who called himself the typewriter doctor. You have two typewriters?

I do. Why two? Because they're cool and different. How's your novel coming along? My novel, I struggle with the typewriter, I will say. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Barbara Sprint, I cover Congress. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

Today on the show, while congressional Republicans are united behind the president and his policies, the Democrats are fighting amongst themselves about how to push back or even how to respond. Since the party's bruising loss in November, Democrats have been very publicly grappling with how to move forward. And Barbara, I want to remind listeners of some of the conflict that took place last week as Democrats were weighing whether to back a Republican effort to fund the government or to shut the government down. There was ultimately a disconnect between House and Senate Democrats. Yeah, I was at this retreat with House Democrats who were gathered in Leesburg, Virginia, not too far from here.

And they were kind of charting the path of how to take back the House, you know, for next year. And there was this sense that like we are now finally united. We can push back against this idea of like the Democrats are in disarray again. We have a message, all but one House Democrat voted against this GOP spending bill. That's a pretty like big sign of solidarity and unity within the caucus. And then Thursday night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he would be supporting, you know, essentially voting for a procedural element that would allow the Republicans' CR spending bill to advance. And I talked to several members of House Democrats who were floored and who felt, they said, I feel betrayed.

So many Democrats said, it's so vital in this moment to be singing from the same hymnal when we're talking to the American people. And we just staked out this ground of messaging about a shutdown is terrible, but this is the one piece of leverage that we have as the minority party and like we're going to use it just to have it kind of like crash and burn. I mean, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that there was no strategy. And I think sometimes the rank and file lawmakers have a lot of faith in their party leaders that they're bringing them somewhere.

And when it became pretty clear that Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, not only had not spoken to each other but were taking their parties down completely different paths, like that is naturally going to spark a lot of anger. And not only to Jeffries that Barbara was experiencing in real time and they even dramatically came back to the Capitol to have a press conference about it. But there was a tremendous amount of anger at Chuck Schumer in the Senate as well. I think there was a lot of Senate Democrats that were prepared and ready and wanting to

wage a shutdown fight. And Schumer had a really hard decision to make. I mean, this was not a popular decision. And there was a moment last week where I thought like, could this be the end of Chuck Schumer? Because he said he was going to support this. And all of these Democrats are coming out saying they weren't with their leader. And I thought, if a leader in the Senate

cannot deliver the votes, they're toast, right? Like, that is the whole predicate of being a leader, is you know where the votes are and you can deliver them. He did ultimately get the votes. It was really narrow. But he walks away with a lot of bruises. And I think Democrats right now are like having a lot of these existential questions of like, who are we? What are we fighting for? And how do you stand up to the Trump administration?

I agree. And I feel like on the strategy, what is it? Where is it front that you're talking about? Like so much of what was confusing to me initially, and then also to all the members who came back and they were like, what is going on? Is the sense that like, if this was always to be, if Schumer always felt that a shutdown was too high a price to pay, as he described on the floor, like two bad options, the shutdown is worse. Why go through the first half of the week and some of the week prior with the messaging of Republicans don't have the votes and we're going to stand in this realm. And I think that's where the breakdown sort of happened. I mean, there are a lot of Senate Democrats who voted against cloture, but were really kind of glad to see that the government did not shut down. All the more reason why, why

was this not a conversation earlier? Because you could see a situation, I think, where the House and the Senate have some sort of melding of the minds early to say, we do not want a shut. That is not what's going to happen. How can we own the messaging early on? Are we going to say, like, we are the party that will never, you know, put government workers out of a job the way that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing? Something to sort of coalesce a message earlier. And instead, it was just this chain of what felt like missteps. I also think we should talk about shutdown politics for a moment too, because they're bad policy and they have never achieved the political outcome that the party that was

driving the shutdown wanted to have. And I also think that if a shutdown is just going to be a political fight, it needs to be clear what it's about. Like there was the shutdown about the wall. There was a shutdown about repealing Obamacare. And Chuck Schumer, I think, looked at this and said, look, this is just the shutdown because Democrats don't like the way Donald Trump is running the government. Like it's easy to get into a shutdown. How are they going to get out of that mess? Right. And I think that was ultimately Schumer's point, which he made in a podcast interview

with the New York Times, which was it's possible that the shutdown just wouldn't end, that the Trump administration would reopen the limited parts of government that they wanted to reopen, and that the shutdown would just go on and Musk and Trump would win. That was Schumer's argument. I don't know that he persuaded all those House Democrats who are outraged and I don't know that he persuaded necessarily people out in the country because from what I'm hearing people outside of Washington are also frustrated with Washington Democrats. I mean so much of the last couple months Democrats have faced question after question from their supporters, why can't you do more? And you know to that like I mean, so much of the last couple months, Democrats have faced question after question

from their supporters. Why can't you do more? And, you know, to that, like Democrats said, we would love to. Elections have consequences and we lost. And the party that loses, the party in the minority, has very few things that they can do. All right. We are going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment. And we're back. And there's an old joke in Washington, Democrats in disarray. But this is something that is being seen outside of Washington too. We've talked about Republicans holding hot town halls and then deciding not to hold town

halls. Democrats are also holding town halls. What are they hearing? Yeah, Democrats are holding town halls and then deciding not to hold town halls. Democrats are also holding town halls. What are they hearing? Yeah, Democrats are holding town halls this week. What's interesting, I think, is I heard a lot last week at the conference about we're going to go to GOP districts. We're going to fill the void because GOP members had been told, you know, after a couple spicy town halls with constituents, maybe don't go. And so a couple folks that I talked to, including Maxwell Frost of Florida, said, you know, we're going to seize this

opportunity as Democrats to fill the void, show up in these GOP districts. You know, the week is early, but there have been a lot less of that than I anticipated happening. You know, I wonder if part of that is because of this like kind of muddied message. I think that Democrats are going to get an earful in all directions when they have town halls this week. Yeah, and I think one of the things that's hard to know this early, because I think and we've probably all seen them, there has been some viral moments at town halls in recent weeks. I think mostly by Republican lawmakers where there's a lot of crowds and they're being booed down. And the thing that we just don't know yet

is how organic is this and how targeted is it? And having covered a bunch of town halls in the past, sometimes you go to a Republican district and there's an organization from Democratic groups to make a bunch of people show up, but they're still just Democrats who are never gonna vote for them anyway, which is different than swing voters or Republican voters

being so mad about something that they're showing up. And I would say the election where we saw that most acutely was in 2010 with the Tea Party wave, where there was this really authentic anger wave across the country that the Republican Party was able to capitalize on. I think that the Democratic Party sees the seeds of the potential of that to happen for a couple of reasons. One, as you noted, Tam, like Donald Trump's actually not that popular. And last week in his polling averages, his unfavorability rating actually rose above his favorability rating for the first time since he took office, which was done within eight weeks. I mean, that was a pretty quick turn before his

unfavorables went up. And he won on an economic message. He's making a lot of decisions about the economy that are giving people on ease. And of course, there is his tax cut fight on the hill where Republicans are at least considering cuts to entitlement programs like Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts. Historically, the Democratic Party has seen as being more supportive of protecting programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. So you can see the ingredients, right, for how this could be capitalized upon. I think the counterpoint to this is the Democratic Party brand is still pretty bad. Like, voters can be angry and voters can not like what's happening in Washington. I think that the challenge that the Democratic Party has is making people make that connection

in their brain that they want to go back to that party that they just rejected. Yeah. On the Medicaid front, I think that is going to end up being sort of like the rallying issue. But today, House Democrats like all over the country and some form of another are doing these like Medicaid day of action thing. So I think to Sue's point, it's a sign like we're gonna see a lot more of that. The other thing I was gonna say is what's interesting to me is I keep asking Democrats

in Congress, like who is the leader of the Democratic Party and who's like the figurehead. And people have said they have a lot of confidence in Jeffries. But I think the bigger takeaway that I'm getting from Democrats is like, you know, a national figure may not be what we need in this moment, because the risks are so great. And the Democratic Party has a lot of lessons to learn, I think, about reaching working class voters, reaching people who feel like they've been forgotten, who feel like the Democratic Party is elitist. And so like rallying around one person for the next year and a half might not be the best course of action. And so what Democrats have

been telling me is we are those people. House members are those people. We need to make the case in our districts super locally. We need to make the case in our districts super locally. We need to recruit people who are not politicians. I talked to Jason Crowe from Colorado who's tasked with recruiting for the next cycle. And he's like, I want people who have jobs, who know what it is to miss a mortgage payment, who are invested in their community and people know and respect them. Although I have to say that I think Democrats have been largely quiet since the election.

We're seeing in recent weeks they're getting louder and louder and louder. But one of the Democratic surrogates out there campaigning is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He's already started traveling the country. And I think that Democrats are finding that where they have maybe lost their footing and cultural fights and cultural issues, the battle right now in American politics, I could make an argument, is economic populism. Who's going to fight for the working man? And I think the Republican Party has been growing their working class coalition that was traditionally within the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders has been consistent on this message in his entire political

career saying, that's a mistake. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, is going to join him on a tour of Western states. So you're starting to see the formulations of a plan. Well, and the fascinating thing is this week I was talking to a Democratic consultant who is let's say from the Biden wing of the party. And he was praising Bernie Sanders and Bernie's message because he says that Senator Sanders is talking about tax cuts for the millionaires and the billionaires. And the message actually does resonate with voters. And what is Trump's big mission for this year but to pass an extension of tax cuts that would largely benefit the wealthy, though he is trying to add some things like no taxes on Social Security income and some other things that would help lower income Americans. I

want to zoom out a bit because there are some early proxy battles that are coming up. This is definitely an off, off year. We are just out of a presidential election. Congressional midterms aren't coming until the end of next year. But there is a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin and there are also a couple of special elections coming up. Yeah I think on April 1st we'll start to see the first test of that. Like off your elections are a great test. They don't tell you everything but they start to tell you something about how the country's feeling and I think Wisconsin's probably the purest battle because it's a swing state.

It's a competitive race. There's millions of dollars of outside money going in. And I think the court right now currently has a liberal tilt. So there's I think the liberal candidate would be seen as sort of the incumbent party. So that's obviously one we're watching. I think that not exactly races that I would say we're watching for competitiveness, but there's two House special elections in Florida for the seats that were held by former Congressman Matt Gates and former Congressman Mike Waltz.

Now, look, these are Republican districts. Republicans are going to win this seat. But I do think that these are test cases where Democrats I talked to say, like, we're going to look at the margins. Like, are Democrats showing up even in elections that don't really matter? Because the best thing an angry voter can do is vote, right? And then one I would put on the radar that I'm watching as it develops is Elise Stefanik's seat in upstate New York. She's still in Congress. They have to wait till those Florida seats

are filled before she can leave. Again, that's a seat that will heavily favor Republicans, but it was an area that not too long ago supported Barack Obama. It has a lot of swing white working class voters. And I think that the Democratic Party is already trying to see if they can make it a fight there. And that's going to be one that I think, if it does become a race, is going to be sort of the center of the political universe this summer.

And just to go back to Wisconsin, what really makes it interesting is that Elon Musk has invested in that state Supreme Court race and is trying to link that race to President Trump's brewing battle with the judiciary. Yeah. Although also, we should note his influence too, because he's also really unpopular right now.

And he has been an ongoing democratic gift by saying things in interviews about how entitlements are what we really need to go after, and we really got to cut money in these things. And he has the benefit of not being a politician and not ever having to face voters but also speaking for the party so I think he has the potential to cause a lot of headaches for Republicans who obviously want his money but maybe not his message. All right well that is where we're going to leave it for today. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Barbara Sprint, I cover Congress. And I'm Susan Davis, I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.