The deep frustration that Democratic voters have with the party’s elected officials, which turned into fury after Senate Democrats last week cut a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown that didn’t include the Obamacare subsidies that Dems had previously demanded, has led to comparisons to the conservative Tea Party movement of the early 2010s. Democratic activists and voters, critics charge, need to lead a purge of the party’s leadership and many of its current officials, as the Republican rank and file did more than a decade ago.
I understand the frustration. Truly. But we don’t need a liberal version of the Tea Party. Instead, the Democratic Party should borrow from what it did from 2005 to 2008 and from 2017 to 2020, the last periods after the party lost presidential elections. Careful leadership changes, innovative policies, and yes, a few well-targeted primary challenges are the path Democrats took in those instances and should be repeated again—not the tear-it-all-down craziness of the Tea Party.
If not for James Comey sending a letter on the eve of the 2016 election reopening the investigation about Hillary Clinton’s use of email as secretary of state and fatally wounding her campaign, as well as Democrats insisting on pushing an 81-year-old Joe Biden as their candidate for most of the last election cycle, I doubt anyone would think of the Tea Party as a successful model to replicate. The Tea Party, the informal name given to the conservative protests and activism in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, wasn’t exactly the civil rights movement, in terms of discipline, strategy, and execution. It was scattershot, simplistic, and at times just outright stupid.
Let me remind you of the real story of the Tea Party. It started with an on-air rant by a cable television host. Once it became a political movement, Republican voters and super-right-wing members of Congress haphazardly tossed out prominent figures in the party, starting with Utah Senator Bob Bennett in 2010 and hitting a fever pitch when House Speaker John Boehner was essentially forced to resign from that post in 2015. Conservative voters squandered winnable seats and likely a Senate majority by nominating crazy candidates like Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, Nevada’s Sharron Angle, and Missouri’s Todd Akin, who infamously invented the phrase “legitimate rape.” There wasn’t much of a policy agenda beyond bizarre and unsuccessful efforts to get President Obama to stop the implementation of Obamacare, which was one of his signature programs.
The Tea Party seems successful now became Trump and advisers like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon turned the anti-government, antiestablishment, racist sentiments that animated the movement into something resembling a coherent political program, built around racist policies they implemented (the Muslim ban) and populist economist rhetoric that was largely fake (promises to bring back manufacturing jobs). And of course Trump won in 2016 and 2024.
What happened from 2005 to 2008 actually has better lessons for Democrats today. Then, as now, the party leadership had supported a foreign policy initiative that was initially opposed only by the party’s progressives but eventually viewed by most of the party as misguided and indefensible. (The Iraq War in the early 2000s; the strong backing of Israel’s policy in Gaza in recent years.) Then, as now, the party ignored the concerns of activists and insisted it was pursuing a smart electoral strategy—and then lost the presidential race. In the early 2000s, it was both backing the Iraq War and nominating John Kerry for president on the theory that swing voters would support Democrats if they seemed tough on national security issues. (Kerry is a veteran, which was emphasized constantly in his campaign.) In 2023–24, the supposed wisdom was pushing forward Biden despite his age, and then Harris’s over-the-top attempts to establish her security credentials, for instance by repeatedly pledging that the U.S. would maintain the “most lethal” military in the world.
How did Democrats recover back then? They found leaders that the base respected and could rally around, in part because those figures hadn’t been centrally involved in the mistakes of the past. Nancy Pelosi, who had voted against the Iraq War, became the House Democrats’ leader and the party’s most visible figure on Capitol Hill. (Pelosi hung on too long and eventually became the kind of establishment leader she had supplanted in her earlier years.)
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid had actually supported the war. But after Bush won a second term in 2004, Reid and Pelosi jointly ignored the D.C. pundit class, which suggested that the Democrats, led by a San Francisco liberal like Pelosi, were out of step with the country and needed to compromise with Bush. They fought Bush hard on things like his Social Security privatization scheme. You can see the obvious contrast with Schumer, who at the start of the year led Senate Democrats in trying to show they weren’t too oppositional to Trump.
Today, I love the idea being touted by some Democrats that Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen should supplant Schumer as the party’s Senate leader. Van Hollen is a longtime figure on Capitol Hill and not aggressively progressive or centrist. But he has met the moment, becoming outraged and impassioned by the mistakes of his own party in Gaza and the radicalism of the Trump administration. Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador to oppose the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García was a moment of courage and strength. If he had to cut a deal with Trump, the party base would trust him. Not Schumer.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is in a similar position vis-à-vis the base. He spent months taking shots at Zohran Mamdani, one of the few Democrats voters are really excited about, showing poor political judgment and further reducing his credibility with core voters. If someone who has been speaking presciently about the authoritarianism of Trump, such as Representative Jamie Raskin or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were to become the party’s leader in the House, Democrats would be better off.
The period after the 2026 elections is a logical time for Democrats to reassess their congressional leadership and perhaps replace Schumer and Jeffries. They don’t need a Tea Party–style immediate dismissal of Schumer, unless Senate Democrats are ready to unify behind a new person, which doesn’t appear to be the case.
Back in the early 2000s, it was ideal that one of the Democrats considering a presidential bid, Obama, had opposed the Iraq War and not been part of the D.C. establishment that had failed to restrain Bush. I am not sure who is the party’s best candidate now, but it’s great news that the two Democrats most closely tied to the Biden administration (Harris and Pete Buttigieg) clearly aren’t going to waltz to the nomination. And both Harris and Buttigieg have hinted that they think Biden’s Gaza policy and his initial decision to run in 2024 were mistakes—suggesting they already know that the party’s voters are mad about those moves and want their anger acknowledged.
But again, Obama was not Trump, who had no experience in government, maturity, or judgment. The Tea Party analogy falls flat there too.
Two things happened from 2017 to 2020 that Democrats should repeat today: real policy innovations, and a few primary challenges. Some people I respect are calling for sweeping out large numbers of congressional Democrats. TNR contributor Meredith Shiner encouraged a primary challenge against every congressional Democrat earlier this year; Run for Something’s Amanda Litman says all Democrats over age 70 up for reelection should retire.
I get those impulses. But I have a hard time embracing any idea that in the long term would remove some of the best members of Congress (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) and potentially bring in duds who happen to be under age 70. What we need is akin to 2018 and 2020. There were more primaries. They swept into office members of Congress such as Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who were more media savvy and oppositional to Trump than their predecessors. A targeted approach yielded important gains.
Pelosi has opted to retire. If Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn, the other eightysomethings who led the party with her for two decades, don’t soon announce that they are stepping aside, they deserve primaries. They’ve had their time. The bigger issue is the Senate. There is a chance, however small, that the Democrats will control the Senate, House, and presidency in 2029. If so, they’ll need to go really big then: get rid of the filibuster and pursue policies like making D.C. a state. Anyone who might stand in the way must be primaried. Delaware’s Chris Coons, Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, Rhode Island Jack’s Reed, and Virginia’s Mark Warner are up for reelection next year and occasionally like to brag about their bipartisan reputations and friendships among Republicans. We need primary challenges to them—either replacing them or forcing them to pledge to fight hard for real democracy reforms in 2029.
In 2028, some of the ringleaders of last week’s deal, including Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, and New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, are up for reelection. Those are swing states, so this is tricky. It’s imperative in the next few years to identify Democrats who are moderate enough to win elections in those states but who are likely to embrace a reform agenda on Capitol Hill, even if they fudge that on the campaign trail to seem more centrist. For example, Conor Lamb, who lost the 2022 Pennsylvania U.S. Senate primary to Fetterman, had a centrist voting record on Capitol Hill but would likely embrace filibuster reforms in a way that Fetterman would not.
So my call is not to primary everyone but to primary the right people.
Finally, 2017–2020 was a real time of policy innovation for Democrats. Think tanks such as the Roosevelt Institute called for a real break with neoliberal policies that hadn’t addressed rising income inequality. The Black Lives Matter movement pushed economic justice but also much-needed changes to policing and other policies that left deep racial inequality still in place. The presidential campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders fixated on the growing political power of billionaires and how that was a threat to democracy.
Biden’s presidency was an electoral failure because of some combination of his age, worldwide anti-incumbent sentiment, and inflation. But there were some important policy innovations during his tenure that sprang from that 2017–2020 period, from a sustained effort to reduce student debt to Lina Khan’s moves at the Federal Trade Commission to fight monopolies and protect consumers.
So unlike the Tea Party, this is a time for Democrats to start deciding which policies they could actually implement in office. Affordability, of course, but also addressing questions of rising authoritarianism, out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and billionaires taking over social and traditional media.
I can’t describe 2005–2008 and 2017–2020 in a two-word phrase. But Democrats need an Obama-Pelosi-Warren-ization of the party, not a Tea Party. That’s a good thing. The path to a Democratic renewal has been blazed by admirable people who pushed smart policies—and are around today to offer advice and counsel.