A Democratic Party still searching for a response to President Donald Trump is homing in on a midterm message: Trump, with the blessing of congressional Republicans, is running the economy into the ground.
Global financial markets spiraled this week after Trump doled out sweeping tariffs on foreign trading partners using a formula that economics experts bashed as nonsensical. Investors have borne the brunt of the fallout, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average still plummeting on Friday after a day of major losses on Thursday.
Democrats have struggled to unify on party messaging after losing the White House in November. But lawmakers and strategists say Trump’s “Liberation Day” gives the party an opening to whack the president and his party on what has traditionally been his strong suit: the economy.
Democrats immediately latched onto the fallout of Trump’s economic policies — and the lack of real efforts from Republican electeds to stop it — saying they plan to use the economic chaos as a tool to rally their base in preparation for next year’s midterms.
“I think that the party as a whole needs to be screaming from the rooftops,” Alejandro Verdin, a Chicago-based Democratic strategist, said of his party’s response to Trump’s economic policies.
The push comes amid early signs of a favorable midterm environment for Democrats. Just this week, Democratic-backed Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford overwhelmingly beat her Trump-endorsed opponent to preserve that court’s liberal majority. And though they lost both races, Democrats overperformed in two deep-red Florida House districts.
Democrats are hoping to make the anti-tariff messaging stick beyond just the president, attacking congressional Republicans — who, at least for now, have made clear they have no intention of crossing Trump from Capitol Hill — for what they call complacency while Trump rattles the American economy and global trade.
“Every single one of the House Republicans and Senate Republicans supporting this kind of reckless approach, this unnecessary trade war, need to be thrown out of office and held accountable for the pain that they are intentionally inflicting on the American people,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Thursday.
Republicans have dismissed the notion that the first two days of economic turmoil following Trump’s tariffs will reverberate over 18 months from now, arguing that Democrats’ agitation over Trump’s tariffs is misplaced and insisting that the economic policy reflects the president’s commitment to working Americans.
“Once upon a time, Democrats backed the American worker — now, they’re all in to support Beijing. President Trump and Republicans are committed to putting American workers and jobs first,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Emily Tuttle said.
But less than a week into Trump’s new economic world order, Democratic strategists predict it will weaken Republicans on the economy, an issue the GOP hammered Democrats with in 2024.
“Democrats have an opportunity to say that Republicans lied to you,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster and senior vice president of Whitman Insight Strategies, said. “They told you that they would lower the price of all of these goods, they’ve done the opposite, and it’s time for a change.”
Trump has long made strength on the economy a key part of his political identity, promising during his 2024 campaign to supercharge the economy and hammering his Democratic opponents on their performance, blasting then-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for skyrocketing grocery prices under their stewardship.
But tariffs could be a vulnerability. A national Marquette Law School poll from March, before the tariffs went into effect, found that 58 percent of poll respondents said that tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy. But Democrats face a popularity problem, too: 62 percent of respondents had either a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the party.
Yasmin Radjy, executive director of progressive organizing group Swing Left, said that the organization plans to ensure there are “electoral costs” for congressional Republicans “rubber-stamping” Trump’s “dangerous economic agenda.”
“While Trump is wreaking havoc on the economy, congressional Republicans are standing idly by,” Radjy said. “From our vantage point, that’s not only unacceptable, but that’s actually something that is critical to spotlight.”
Democrats argue their party has an opportunity in key battleground states to show what an alternative would look like.
“It’s going to hit all of the states — it’s going to hit working families the hardest,” said Lauren Chou, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which focuses on state legislative races. “Costs are going to go up. But the difference that you see is that Democrats are proactively trying to mitigate the disaster that’s coming by passing legislation to make life easier for working families, whereas Republicans are burying their heads in the sand.”
That work, Chou said, is already paying off. She attributed recent Democratic wins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Iowa “to the fact that Democrats are actually addressing the things voters want to see happen.”
But Democratic strategists warn that the party needs to have a proactive message about how they will run the economy, and not just anti-Trump attacks — particularly after Americans showed they were willing to forgive Trump for past mistakes and reelected him in 2024.
“It can’t just be chaos, chaos, chaos — we have to offer a real solution,” Verdin said.
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