Democrats in the Trump era have learned the hard way that zombie establishment leadership is no match for an authoritarian takeover.
The lessons abound. Senate Minority Chuck Schumer capitulates to President Donald Trump and is incapable of leading an effective opposition. Liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court so fear enforcement of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause that they give Trump a pass. An infirm octogenarian president is permitted to campaign for reelection until he falls apart on live TV.
Few Democratic figures in Colorado have so vividly exemplified establishment fecklessness as U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, who’s up for reelection next year. As the Trump administration began populating Cabinet posts and other top administration openings with MAGA loyalists and quacks, Hickenlooper voted to confirm them at an unexpectedly high rate. At times he’s seemed oblivious to the scope of Trump’s lawlessness. He’s inclined to tout the good relationships he has with Republican colleagues even as they help Trump dismantle the very institutions they inhabit or oversee.
The Democratic base in former times often overlooked establishment habits. Not anymore. Now there’s backlash.
It came for party power brokers last month in New York City when Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race. It’s coming for moderate congressional candidates from Texas to Maine to California. And last week, when progressive Colorado state Sen. Julie Gonzales launched a campaign to claim his seat, it came for Hickenlooper.
Some observers have likened this phenomenon to the Tea Party movement on the right during the Obama administration when, prodded by an angry base, many far-right candidates stampeded moderate candidates in primaries throughout the country. In Colorado, a little known local prosecutor named Ken Buck, fueled by Tea Party energy, defeated establishment favorite Jane Norton, the former lieutenant governor, in the 2010 Colorado Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
But the comparison goes only so far. The Tea Party was preoccupied with reducing the size of government. Progressive Democrats want to save the government from obliteration.
Candidates like Gonzales come to the race with policy proposals. She pushes universal health care, affordable child care, renter protections and reproductive rights, for example. But these candidates — call them No Kings Democrats — are riding a wave of rage over administration behavior.
A new Pew study captures this tinderbox moment. Forty-four percent of Democrats “feel anger toward the federal government.” That’s the most anger the study has registered since it began in 1997, even more anger than Republicans felt during the Tea Party days.
The origin of the Tea Party was anger that Obama enacted relief for distressed homeowners in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. No Kings Democrats are angry about a lawless and inhumane immigration enforcement program, military troops deployed to American cities, stupendous corruption, a mad president given king-like powers, weaponization of federal law enforcement, anti-science demolition of public health functions, alienation of foreign allies and coddling of foreign enemies, and a hundred other outrages.
Hickenlooper has come face-to-face with that anger during appearances this year with constituents around the state. But, given his record, it’s hard for him to effectively represent their frustrations. Gonzales, on the other hand, has participated in anti-Trump protests and is fluent in the language of resistance.
In recent decades, primary challengers very rarely win against a sitting U.S. senator, as Newsline reporter Chase Woodruff noted in a report about Gonzales’ campaign launch. Challengers unseated Senate incumbents just eight times since 1980, and the last such victory occurred in 2012.
But Gonzales’ supporters might be encouraged by some other numbers: The Democratic Party has never had a lower favorability rating in at least the last three decades, and just one-fifth of Democrats themselves, viewing officeholders as “spineless” and willing to “roll right over” for Trump, have a positive view of their party.
“What sort of party do we want to be?” Gonzales said in an interview with Woodruff. “Do we want to send back John Hickenlooper, a go-along-to-get-along incrementalist, or do we want to send a proven legislator, with a track record of taking on big fights against a well-funded corporate lobby, who’s gotten s*** done?”
Quentin Young is the editor of Colorado Newsline. This commentary is republished from Colorado Newsline under a Creative Commons license. Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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