Over a decade ago, conservatives reformed the GOP from the inside out in a way that presaged the rise of Trump. Will liberals find a way to their own uprising?
There is a rumbling coming from deep inside the Democratic Party. Right past the party's most recognizable faces and Congressional leaders, below than the despair and ennui over President Donald Trump's decisive victory, outraged liberals are beginning to grumble — in group chats and podcasts, on X and BlueSky — about how to intervene against the party they have called home for decades and which, they believe, has failed its voters so spectacularly over the past year.
Fed up with the party leadership's response to Trump's swift upending of the federal bureaucracy and administrative state, Democratic voters are preparing for their own watershed moment as they chart a path to take matters into their own hands—much like conservatives did some 16 years ago when they took aim at mainstream Republicans in the wake of the global financial crisis, birthing what became known as the Tea Party movement.
Fueled by their opposition to government bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis, the Tea Party gained significant momentum after the Democratic-controlled Senate and House passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Conservatives saw their Republican leaders as not doing enough to fight then-President Barack Obama's liberal policies. What began as a grassroots movement would go onto upend the GOP, reshape conservatives in the U.S. and ultimately, pave the way for Trump's rise in 2016.
Now, it's Democrats who are in need of their own grassroots shakeup.
"You have a lot of outrage among the base voters, and not many places to channel it through just yet," Lakshya Jain, a political data analyst and co-founder of the election-modeling website Split Ticket, told Newsweek.
"I think there is a real risk of Democrats being hit with a Tea Party-esque insurgency in 2026. Not in terms of a 'burn it all down with lunatics' mentality, but more of a 'our lawmakers are badly out of sync with our base,'" Jain wrote on X last week.
Liberals are growing increasingly frustrated by their leaders, who some see as coming across "tone deaf" and failing to meet the moment of Trump's swift upending of federal bureaucracy in his first three weeks in office.
That frustration manifested itself in the online response to a video clip that circulated last week showing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the party's top elected official, leading chants of "We will win!" months after suffering one of the biggest Democratic losses in decades. Many progressives expressed puzzlement at how the party had failed to conduct a proper autopsy on the last election cycle.
"Democrats, can you please stop f---ing trotting Schumer out there?" Jon Stewart said during Tuesday's episode of "The Daily Show."
"I don't dislike Schumer, but as the visual representative of the democratic party, we are f---ed," Mark Horvath, a housing advocate, wrote in a post responding to the clip.
Sick and tired, some Democrats are beginning to entertain ideas of abandoning the party as they know it in favor of finding a new way of getting their voices heard. And if the party fails to grasp how deep the groundswell of support for younger leaders with a more coherent message against Trump, whispers of drafting primary challengers have already begun.
"It's going to happen a lot quicker than most leaders within the party are prepared for, because things are not okay," Brad Bauman, principal at the Raben Group and the former executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told Newsweek. "The conversations that I'm having with people are, 'Do we save the infrastructure that we have, or do we build something new?'"
When Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, many progressives cheered. They saw it as a sign that the Democratic Party, for once, was listening to their voters and not their strategists, who wanted Harris to play to swing voters with a more centrist pick like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
The appeal to left-leaning voters was why the Harris-Walz ticket "started winning when they started calling Republicans weird, and lost when they pivoted to centrist bland messaging," author Andrew Hickey said on Bluesky.
Other users on the left-leaning platform echoed those remarks, arguing it was their embrace of anti-Trump Republicans that slowed the pair's momentum.
"He had the right idea to just call them f---ing weirdos and they made him stop," one user said of Walz.
Democratic voters are also still licking their wounds over the lack of action from their leaders over Trump's attempts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, especially since Republicans broadcast the ideas in a nearly 900-page detailed plan ahead of the election.
"Project 2025 was known about for years. So, why wasn't anyone thinking, 'Well just in case he wins, here's our plan to stop it'?" Democratic strategist Keith Edwards asked. "Donald Trump is not a new idea, and [Democrats] certainly had a roadmap for what he wanted to do when in office. For some reason, it seems like our leadership has been surprised that he's doing what he said he was going to do."
As one user on Bluesky pointed out, "If only they had laid out a plan, a project if you will, of what they would do if he took office in 2025. Imagine if they published it and Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and everyone that opposed him told you about the plan before the election."
"If our elected leaders are not prepared to step up, show up and show the American people what we stand for, then they need to get out of the way and let another group of folks do it," Bauman said.
On Tuesday, Reform DNC, a group whose stated mission is to "revitalize the Democratic party, empower its members, and create a party that truly represents the people's interests," told users on Bluesky: "Every single Democrat that is outraged right now needs to start participating in your local Democratic clubs and committees. The people in charge no longer understand the urgency of now. Too many think if they wait it out they'll come back to power. ACT NOW. GET INVOLVED NOW."
Douglas Reyes-Ceron, a freelance photographer, argued that the more Democrats "flail in this moment," the more it's guaranteed that its voters bite back.
"Trump 1.0 gave us AOC in 2018," Reyes-Ceron wrote on Bluesky. "Trump 2.0 is going to get people that make the Dems *wish* they had given AOC leadership (and the Dems deserve it to be clear)."
Asked how long before the Democratic base turns on its elected officials, Bauman responded: "They have no time. Flat out."
"The Democratic Party needs to be able to fundamentally address its strategic and fundamental issues, while at the same time mount a real resistance to the slow-motion coup we're watching Elon Musk and Donald Trump perpetuate on our government right now," he said. "We simply don't have the time to do one and then the other. We have to be able to do both at the same time."
Edwards told Newsweek that efforts are already beginning. "There are definitely very talented, well-connected Democrats who understand the problem and are figuring out a way to fix it," he said.
One of the biggest issues Edwards has with the party is their unwillingness to leave the "narrative of institutions" behind in favor of telling real human stories that are unfolding as a result of Trump's policies.
"We need to be the defender of people, not the defender of institutions," he said. "Unfortunately, no one cares that some federal employees are going to get fired. No one cares that [Trump's] not going through whatever [legislative] process they need to go through to make this stuff happen."
He urged his party to engage with more social media content that's already being put out there about the consequences of Trump's actions. In the wake of the president's sweeping and legally tenuous halt on federal funds, some moms have taken to TikTok to share videos of themselves crying over concerns that they no longer have food stamps to provide for their children.
Edwards is demanding to know why Democrats aren't using these "compelling" stories that can cut through the noise.
"Republicans have figured out that it's not really about the doing, it's about the people that it's being done to, whether that be true or not," Edwards said. "They've made a great bit of success by speaking people's hearts. Democrats are so brainy, and I love that about us, but people respond when you speak to their heart, not when you speak to their brain."
Jain, of Split Ticket, said it will be difficult for the current state of affairs not to trigger an uprising within the party because its leaders can't give their voters what they're demanding, solely based on the fact that they have little power in Congress. So, they have no choice but to let "that type of anger then manifest itself."
"The election is over, they lost, and as a liberal myself, that sucks, but we lost," Jain said. "It's hard because there's a whole a bunch of infighting in the party. It was a close loss. It's like, 'Well, if you voted for her, we wouldn't be here' or 'If she was a better candidate, we wouldn't be here.'"
"Until you go back and forth on that 20 rounds, the net result is that the voter base wants to see concrete actions taken," he said. "But there isn't any concrete action to be taken, aside from lawsuits, because, again, [the Democrats] control nothing."