Reactionary Political Extremism Backfires

Some history of why we're here, with some free advice

A little less than a year away from the 2026 midterms, polling shows that Democrats stand to benefit from voters’ discontent with the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. Of course, fortunes can always change—or, apparently, be changed through mid-cycle redistricting—but Democrats have an opportunity to seize on the frustrations that voters are showing. What would bolster their electoral fortunes is to listen to the concerns of independent voters. That doesn’t mean independents are with Democrats on every issue. It also doesn’t mean that independents hand Democrats a majority that they’re endorsing everything Democrats want.¹ Democrats have to, for lack of a better way of putting it, ignore being defined by their most extreme, reactionary voices as a response to the actions of the Trump administration.

Political extremism from one political party often elicits a response of political extremism from the other. This has defined American politics since the election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. Not long after Obama won, in February 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli called for a “tea party” to push back against the nascent Obama administration’s bailout for the auto industry, as well as the bailouts for the mortgage industry in the fall of 2008. Santelli’s rant helped launch the Tea Party movement, which contributed to Republicans winning 63 House seats and six Senate seats in the 2010 midterm election.

The last six years of Obama’s presidency were marked by frequent clashes with congressional Republicans, from the attempts to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act,² to the debt limit debate that led to the passage of the Bipartisan Control Act, to the 2013 government shutdown, to immigration and DREAMers, to Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Obama—America’s first Black president—was the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The one most of us likely remember is the conspiracy theory about Obama’s birth certificate,³ but there were so many others. Some of those include the “Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy theory, the supposed FEMA camps, and the Benghazi cover-up conspiracy theory.⁴ These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.⁵

Of course, President Obama’s time in office was marked by a slow recovery from the Great Recession. Annual real gross domestic product (GDP) didn’t see a significant bounce back during the recovery.⁶ The highest annual growth rate was 2.95 percent in 2015.⁷ The unemployment rate didn’t return to pre-Great Recession levels until November 2016.⁸ Real GDP didn’t surpass its pre-recession level until the fourth quarter of 2010. Although the economy had recovered, some people still struggled to make ends meet. There was frustration. There was also skepticism going into the 2016 presidential election.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Had Trump run for the Republican nomination in 2012, he likely would’ve faced off against President Obama. Depending on the poll, Trump was in the top two or three candidates, usually behind the eventual winner of the nomination, Mitt Romney. For example, a Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll conducted in April 2011 found him trailing Romney by 4 points and tied with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. He was the favorite of Tea Partiers and very conservative primary voters. Gallup had Trump tied for first with Huckabee in another poll that month, 3 points ahead of Romney. Ultimately, Trump didn’t run.

Trump benefited from several different things when he ran in 2016. He was a businessman who starred in a reality television show. Although the economy had recovered, the pace of the recovery opened the door for his economic views. His approach to politics was brash, and he eschewed political correctness. He employed populist rhetoric, and he often appealed to the worst in his supporters. It’s also true that in some way, Trump was a reaction to President Obama.⁹ It also helped that his opponent in the election was Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s 2016 campaign rewired American politics by normalizing a level of incendiary rhetoric that once would’ve ended a candidacy before it began. He didn’t merely bend norms; he detonated them. He cast immigrants as existential threats, branded political rivals with schoolyard epithets, and treated truth as an optional accessory to grievance. What made it dangerous wasn’t just the bombast, but the strategic purpose behind it. He sought to inflame resentment to consolidate a movement defined more by identity and outrage than by policy or governing philosophy.

But it didn’t end there. Trump was embroiled in a number of controversies or scandals. Where does one even begin? From his handling of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to his restrictionst immigration policy and family separation, everything Trump did predictably elicited a reaction from progressives. The Democratic Party moved further to the left because of the energy of its voters and activists. Trump’s norm-breaking presidency acted as an accelerant, pushing Democrats to recalibrate their ambitions on health care, climate, immigration, and structural reforms in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

The result was a Democratic Party increasingly animated by movements demanding sweeping action—Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, abolition of ICE—even if its elected leadership never fully embraced those maximalist demands. The shift didn’t produce ideological uniformity, but it did reset the boundaries of the party’s internal debate, making bolder progressive ideas a permanent fixture of its political identity.

Although Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats often came across as out of touch when it came to inflation and affordability. Democrats may have performed relatively well, considering historical trends, during the 2022 midterm elections, but questions remained about President Biden’s age, how the party would handle the issues of policing and crime, and whether the party should move to the center or drift further to the left. Democrats were aided in the 2022 midterms by the Supreme Court’s holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022).

President Biden’s age was a lingering issue throughout the 2024 presidential election, but immigration and the cost of living hounded Democrats. Republicans, though, didn’t just double down during the 2024 campaign; they sharpened the edges of a coalition already built on grievance and cultural wars. The party’s center of gravity moved unmistakably right as immigration hawks set the rhetorical pace, economic nationalism eclipsed traditional market-driven fiscal conservatism, and the so-called “MAGA movement” tightened its grip on the party’s identity.

What made the shift striking wasn’t a formal platform rewrite but the unmistakable recalibration of incentives. Candidates learned quickly that the safest place to stand was where the base’s distrust of institutions, elites, and compromise ran hottest. In a cycle defined by inflation anxiety and cultural exhaustion, Republicans leaned harder into confrontation than persuasion, wagering that ideological escalation—not restraint—was the most reliable currency in the modern conservative marketplace.

Where exactly Democrats sit in this current cycle of reactive politics is anyone’s guess. Sure, the 2025 wins in New Jersey and Virginia show that voters will still reward center-left candidates who project steadiness and competence. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger didn’t win by promising ideological revolutions; they won by sounding like grown-ups. However, campaign rhetoric is cheap. The real test will come once they’re governing with Democratic majorities next year. That’s when we’ll see whether the party learned anything from a decade of electoral lessons or whether it’s still chasing applause from the loudest, least representative corners of its coalition.

Because Democrats have made this mistake before. In the Trump era, the party’s instinct to sprint leftward was understandable, but it was also self-defeating. Independent voters weren’t begging for a progressive catechism. Looking back at some of the polling from the time, we can see that independents just wanted normalcy. Democrats indulged their activist wing enough to let the right define the party for them. The result was a muddled identity, and it emboldened Republicans who were only too happy to caricature Democrats as reckless ideologues.

This is how Democrats wound up trapped by slogans they never explicitly endorsed. “Abolish ICE” and “defund the police” weren’t mainstream Democratic positions.¹⁰ Still, the party hesitated to shut them down with clarity and discipline. In politics, hesitation is permission. Republicans seized the opening and plastered those slogans onto every Democrat in every competitive race. I can’t tell you how many ads I saw from the Republican Senate campaigns and the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Georgia against Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff that tried to tie them to the messages coming from the far left.¹¹ Instead of drawing a bright line, the party let the noise fill the vacuum. Voters noticed. A party that can’t police its own brand will eventually have it policed for them.

Let me give you a more recent example of the minds of independent voters. In 2024, Trump’s ads weaponized Democrats’ approach to transgender policy issues, turning complex questions of rights and public accommodations into a liability.¹² However, public polling shows that independents aren’t aligned with the far left of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by a recent Economist/YouGov survey. When asked which bathroom transgender people should use, 47 percent of independents say the bathroom of their assigned sex at birth. Only 26 percent of independents say the bathroom of their current gender identity. Granted, 26 percent of independents aren’t sure. There’s no majority here. Another question asked was about transwomen on women’s sports teams. Independents were solidly against this notion. Only 14 percent of independents say that transwomen should be able to play on women’s sports teams while 64 percent said they should not be allowed.

I don’t say this to pick on transgender people. I don’t like the political punching down we’ve seen on one of the most vulnerable groups in the country. We need a real debate on public accommodations for transgender Americans—one rooted in dignity and evidence, not demagoguery. However, there’s also a political reality Democrats have to acknowledge, and that reality is that cultural acceleration can backfire. When policy moves faster than public consensus, voters sometimes recoil. Because these debates are often framed under the broad “LGBTQ” umbrella, the aggressive campaign against transgender rights has, at the margins, softened the public’s once-solid consensus around same-sex marriage. That doesn’t mean support has collapsed—it hasn’t—but the coalition that protected it has become more fragile.

Democrats won the White House in 2020 but hemorrhaged working-class voters across demographics and lost a swath of House seats in districts that should have been safe. Voters who lean left on healthcare and climate still expect a sense of order, restraint, and seriousness. Democrats forfeited that perception when they allowed cable news and social media to substitute for strategy. If they want to avoid a repeat in 2026, they need less moral theater and more governing sobriety. This means recognizing that independents may not view Democrats as the alternative, but they may not necessarily see them as the solution.

1. That’s a mistake Trump and Republicans are currently making.

2. The number of attempts to repeal or defund all or part of the Affordable Care Act ranges from around 50 to more than 70. If you look only at repeal or defund, it’s fewer than ten. I counted those attempts several years ago after being asked by my then-boss for the number.

3. It’s still humorous that President Obama mocked Trump about this conspiracy theory the night before the raid that killed Obama bin Laden. Trump had repeatedly and widely spread the conspiracy theory about Obama’s birth certificate.

4. Obviously, what happened in Benghazi was very real and very serious. There were failures, and no one should deny that. I’m referring to the myth of the “stand down” order.

5. I recall hearing people tell me that Obama was going to run for a third term and that he would impose Sharia law in the United States.

6. To replicate how I see these numbers, click the link, go to “Edit Graph,” choose “Percent Change from Year Ago” from the “Units” drop-down box, and change the frequency to “Annual.”

7. To be clear, this is only slightly below the highest annual GDP growth during Trump’s first term. In 2018, the economy grew by 2.97 percent. Although Obama wasn’t president when the Great Recession started, the contraction in the economy was deeper than the COVID-19 pandemic.

8. Officially, the Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. The unemployment rate in November 2007 was 4.7 percent.

9. I’m not blaming Obama for that. As I’ve already noted, Obama was our first Black president. He had a name that wasn’t uniquely American. Also not his fault. There were people in the voting public who didn’t like either of these things. I believe that at least some of the opposition to Obama and the rise of Trump stemmed from this. I leave it to you to decide whether I’m right or wrong.

10. I don’t have access to this anymore, but I do recall a poll that FreedomWorks did in the summer of 2020 showing that there was support for reinvesting some law enforcement dollars into community programs in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. I recall this because a Member asked what we had on the “defund the police” narrative. The Member was in disbelief when I told him that result. It stuck in my mind because the Member didn’t understand how concerned people were about policing. Obviously, that concern eventually waned as crime became a problem in 2020.

11. Ultimately, Warnock and Ossoff won those races, but Republicans were able to swing Georgia back to red in 2022 statewide races.

12. That approach didn’t work so well for Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia in 2025, showing diminishing returns on the topic, particularly in an economy that appears to be struggling.