And now, here’s Abby…

The anger coursing through the Democratic Party, following Chuck Schumer’s tactical
surrender to Republicans on last week’s government funding bill, isn’t limited to furious Squad members, Bluesky luminaries, and activist group leaders. Sure, Schumer has his defenders, especially among Democrats who are well versed in procedure and the boomeranging consequences of shutdowns. But elsewhere across Capitol Hill, longtime donors are turning on traditional allies. Some staffers, I’m hearing, are unusually at odds with many of their bosses. Even House minority leader Hakeem
Jeffries refused to defend his Senate counterpart. Voters are lighting up Capitol Hill switchboards, wondering why Schumer didn’t use the filibuster, and why Democrats won’t fight.

What’s remarkable about this latest episode, though, is not just the intensity of the intraparty fight. It’s the division over tactics, rather than tribes (Hillary vs. Obama, Bernie vs. everybody) or policy (does one support or oppose
Medicare for All?). Sure, Democrats seemingly all agree that something must be done to oppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle the federal government, and push back against their disregard for congressional authority—but a party that has long prided itself on “governing” is now at a crossroads, and debating whether to channel its inner Tea Party and adopt “obstruction” instead. “What’s always held the party together since 2017 is
stop this guy, and there’s no way to stop him anymore,” said Tom Bowen, a Democratic consultant. “It’s unadulterated rage, because there’s nothing we can do. We’ve been primed for eight years to stop this guy, and we didn’t, and it just sucks.”

The funding fight crystallized the divide. House Democrats, led by Jeffries, argued that the party should not condone a partisan Republican funding bill that included cuts to healthcare, veterans’ benefits, and nutritional
assistance, and did not put any kind of leash on Musk. Instead, they argued, the party should have held strong, with Senate Democrats demanding concessions in exchange for ending a filibuster. Schumer, however, was never temperamentally inclined to kick sand in the gears. He countered that a shutdown would only play further into the hands of Trump and Musk, disrupt the livelihoods of more federal workers, and ultimately hurt incumbents at the ballot box.

He might be right, but recent
polls of party members—taken before the funding bill passed the Senate—show the Jeffries school ascendant, at least for now. As my partner Leigh Ann Caldwell noted over the weekend, nearly two-thirds of Democrats in a recent
NBC poll said they’d prefer that House Democrats stick to their positions than compromise with Trump to pass legislation. CNN found 57 percent of Democrats saying the party
should work to “stop the Republican agenda” rather than “work with Republicans.”

Adopting those tactics would shift Democrats into a very different—and for some, more uncomfortable—mode. In the recent past, Democrats found leverage in the minority by working with their Republican counterparts to outflank the far right. During the party’s other wilderness periods over the past 15 years, they could count on divisions among House Republicans to ensure their own votes would be
necessary, giving them leverage in negotiations. Occasional shutdown aside, this insulated the Senate from fielding purely partisan Republican spending bills.

That all changed last week, when Mike Johnson, with Trump as his whip, consolidated the entire House G.O.P. conference (sans Thomas Massie) behind a spending bill for the first time in recent memory. In keeping their micro-majority together, Republicans completely reset the calculus of power on
Capitol Hill, bypassing the Democratic minority entirely in the House and then steamrolling them in the Senate. To hear certain Democrats tell it now, Schumer’s capitulation robbed the party of its best point of leverage against Trump and Musk. 

Democrats I spoke to this week worry that the political friction will manifest on the campaign trail, too.
Ever since Citizens United allowed for unlimited corporate campaign spending, Democratic party leaders—including Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—optimized their campaign funding strategy to maximize efficiency. They created a system in which outside groups, campaign committees, and candidates worked together to secure the cheapest television rates possible for the
fall campaigns and to avoid any overlap in spending on the same races. This involved near constant communication within the party’s political class: members, donors, committee staffers, super PACs, and consultants, albeit within a complicated legal framework.

Alas, that delicate balance falls apart if its various actors lose trust in (or motivation to help) one another. There are calls that might not get made or returned. Hands that aren’t shaken at receptions. Member leadership PAC
checks to colleagues’ campaigns somehow get lost in the mail. Conversations aren’t had, and political intelligence isn’t shared.

And then, of course, there’s the ultimate expression of infighting: primaries. Democrats have long held the belief that primaries drain money, talent, and energy away from general election campaigning—that is, from beating Republicans. Unlike today’s Republican party, wherein Trump (and now Musk) wield primaries as a routine threat, Democrat-on-Democrat violence
is historically rare. It is difficult to defeat a House Democratic incumbent (A.O.C.’s victory over Joe Crowley notwithstanding), and nearly impossible to bring down a Senate Democratic incumbent (the late Arlen Specter was the last one…). Particularly in competitive seats and districts, party leaders have
worked together to keep candidates they believe will lose a seat out of the race.

Yet the current flare of anger directed at Schumer, paired with the party’s emergent generational warfare, might be creating a new permission structure for insurgent Democrats. Indeed, the norms against challenging incumbents
have been slipping for a while. Back in late 2012, Cory Booker enraged many New Jersey Democratic elders when he announced his campaign for a Senate seat already held by Frank Lautenberg, who had yet to announce whether he would run for reelection. Lautenberg died a few weeks later, but Booker had committed a severe breach in
protocol and was the subject of sore feelings for months among those who believed he had unnecessarily forced the issue on an old man. Katie Porter’s similar move was less incendiary in early 2023, when the California congresswoman announced her run for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat, even though California’s then-89-year-old senator had yet to announce her own plans. Patience with Feinstein was already running out, but even then, Porter’s move
was still considered a little gauche.

That’s all changed. Perhaps the hottest campaign gossip in Dem circles is the future of Dick Durbin’s Senate seat in Illinois. Durbin, 80, hasn’t announced whether he will retire at the end of this term, but there’s a frenzy of activity below the surface, as generations of up-and-coming Illinois Democrats have coveted this seat. I’m told that such Dems are “all banging at his door”: making calls, hiring staff that
appear geared toward Senate campaigns, and engaging in fundraising disproportionate to their current offices. Now, none of this maneuvering is raising a single eyebrow. Meanwhile, the primary threats are flying elsewhere, most notably in the movement to draft A.O.C. to challenge Schumer in 2028. Schumer is a D.S.C.C. chairman at heart, which means his instincts are about protecting his incumbents. And it’s likely not a coincidence that Durbin was the only in-cycle senator to vote to advance the
bill on the floor.

Bowen, the consultant, sees value in competitive primaries. “Brush fires like this allow something else to grow,” he said. “The party doesn’t have the identity it needs to win yet. This is where it comes from. It comes from the primary fights.”

Dems are taking further blows in their weakest hour—namely, the deaths of two members in the last two
weeks: Sylvester Turner, a 70-year-old freshman, and 77-year-old Raúl Grijalva, who was forced to relinquish his ranking membership on the Natural Resources Committee late last year. While both men are sincerely grieved by Democrats, the losses also eased the passage of the Republican spending bill through the House last week.

A much-respected former Democratic member told me that any member over 70 should see the writing on the wall. “People dying in
office, members losing their brainpower in office, being out of touch—A.I., crypto, social media, etcetera—out of it, not with it … It’s time to go,” this person said. This logic should apply to recruitment, too, the former member added, arguing that people over 60 shouldn’t run for Congress for the first time and the party should prioritize recruiting people in their thirties and forties. “By the time you get really good at this job, you need several terms,” this person explained. “It’s not an
ageist thing. … We need people with fight in them … who understand these times, especially with social media.”

At the same time, Democrats are fairly confident they’ll take back the House majority next term, and all those senior members will be on the cusp of getting back committee and subcommittee gavels. It’s an unvirtuous cycle that will simultaneously make it harder for them to retire and likely generate more primaries.

Still, I’ve detected some gallows
optimism in Democratic circles. Democrats, after all, have lived through a Trump administration before, and they know that the next Trump controversy could well have a uniting effect that will make their colleagues and constituents forget their current tensions. “We have to move on,” a former Democratic chief told me, hopefully.

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