Perhaps I should’ve expected the meeting to devolve into chaos. It was predictable, especially if you subscribe to the essential maxim that any room containing several dozen women of a certain age and Summer Shandy on tap is bound to get a little rowdy. Unfortunately, the chair of the Ohio Democrats did not see it coming.
Kathleen Clyde, the state party leader, was standing on a small stage at a bar in the Cleveland suburbs, having just finished delivering what was supposed to be a stirring call to action to a group of local Democratic activists. Her tone, however, had not conveyed any particular sense of passion about the upcoming midterms. The ladies in the audience did not seem impressed. And now—oh, no—it was time for questions.
“What are we going to do differently?” one woman asked, pointing out that the Democrats’ brand is terrible. Eventually, the microphone was abandoned, and another woman asked: “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?” A third woman chimed in, a little frantically: “What can we do?!”
Clyde’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t expected friendly fire. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!” But the women smelled weakness, and now, several of them were shouting at once. “How are you going to do that?” one demanded. “It has to be more specific!” From the back, an older woman offered: “We need smart!” Clyde assured the group that the party’s message was smart, and it was going to resonate in November. But moments later, she was off the stage and hightailing it back to Columbus.
Afterward, one of the attendees joked in a group chat that she had witnessed a murder. Actually, what she’d witnessed was a tidy encapsulation of the broader tension at play in her party: Ahead of the midterms, the base is raring to go. But it’s also demanding a reckoning from its highest ranks that hasn’t come. “The party needs to be able to answer tough questions,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of the group at the bar, told me. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump.”
It’s a dynamic that has some Democrats chewing their cuticles, despite a fairly promising political landscape for their party. These Democrats expect, of course, that many of their candidates will perform well in November. But they worry that victory will paint a too-cheery gloss over the party’s bigger issues—and prolong the time it takes to solve them.
Let’s back up. The women at that Ohio bar were veterans of political activism. They launched GRR, short for Grass Roots Resistance, roughly a week after Donald Trump won his first election, one of hundreds of activist groups to do so. In 2020, I wrote about the women’s evolution from passive or occasional voters to active party organizers. GRR helped flip a state House seat from red to blue, the only such success in Ohio that year.
In the past decade, GRR has ballooned from a dozen women to more than 200, and is now large enough to fill a party room at the back of a suburban bar. One GRR member I interviewed in 2020, who was then leading a school-levy campaign, is now president of the local school board. At each GRR meeting, there is a table for new-member sign-up sheets, a table for the petition du jour, and a table for snacks. Attendees show up half an hour early for “W(h)ine time,” an opportunity to vent about the latest affront to democracy from Trump or state Republicans. Newcomers receive a button that reads I survived my 1st GRR meeting, and it won’t be my last! and introduce themselves onstage in a ritual known as the “GRRgin Sacrifice.” At the meeting where Clyde spoke, eight new GRRgins were initiated.
Right now, the group is campaigning for one of its longtime members, who is running for the state House. The women are also volunteering for Sherrod Brown’s U.S. Senate bid and for Amy Acton, who is running for Ohio governor. Next month, group leaders will unveil GRR’s week-by-week plan of action for the midterms. Enthusiasm inside GRR has never been higher. “This year feels like 2018 on steroids,” Shaw said.
[Read: Sherrod Brown is grinding it out]
But GRR is not unique. Across America, the Democrats’ cup runneth over with activist spirit. Indivisible, the national network of activist groups, says that it now has about 2,800 confirmed active chapters—more than double what it had before the 2024 election. The number of people getting involved during Trump’s second term as president “is dramatically higher” than it was in his first, Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the group, told me. Similarly, about 80,000 people signed up to run for office through Run for Something in 2025, more than the number who did during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the group told me. Red, Wine & Blue, a group that launched in 2019 to activate swing voters in the suburbs, has welcomed 200,000 new members after Trump’s second inauguration—a faster rate of growth than in either the 2020 or 2022 cycles. Organizers of the third “No Kings” protest, held in March, say they had 8 million participants, which would make it the largest single-day protest in American history.
But the tenor of all of this grassroots activism is angrier and more desperate than it was in 2018, the last time a midterm election was held while Trump was in the White House. “In 2018, there was a top-down resistance,” Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, told me. “That hasn’t felt true this time.” Instead, the base has led the way. And base voters are furious—partly at Trump, but also at their own leaders.
Impatience is growing among volunteers and donors “about the cultural sclerosis” inside Democratic organizations, Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, told me. “The question we hear over and over is, What are Democrats doing differently than in 2024 to make sure we win?”
This is, of course, the million-dollar question—and there has been no genuine institutional attempt to answer it. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has demonstrated an almost impressive inability to reassure and reinvigorate his party after its devastating losses in the 2024 election. Only after a sustained bullying campaign led, in part, by the Pod Save America hosts did Martin release the promised 2024 autopsy. The result? A half-finished report with few clear conclusions.
[From the March issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]
There are other, more existential items that Democrats have yet to address. The first is their brand, which multiple party strategists described to me as “in the toilet.” A poll from earlier this year presented Democrats with the discomfiting revelation that among the American public, their party is more popular than Iran—but less popular than AI. Another challenge facing Democrats is that their leaders are reviled but, for some reason, still sticking around. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, is poised to return as majority leader if Democrats win back the Senate, even though he is more passionately disliked than Trump, according to some polling.
Still, the consensus at the moment suggests that things are going to go pretty well for Democrats in November. They will probably win back the House. If they’re lucky in Ohio, North Carolina, Maine, and Alaska, they might even win back the Senate. But none of those wins can be attributed to some new, inspiring message—or to the party having undergone some fundamental evolution. Victory is expected, mainly, because the alternative is worse: Trump is a historically unpopular president who has embroiled the country in a new Middle Eastern conflict, the results of which are rising costs and, for many, a general sense of precariousness.
“Are we gonna win a bunch of seats in November? Yes. Do we have the enthusiasm to carry that forward into ’28? Yes,” Kelly Dietrich, the founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, told me. “Do we have the infrastructure we need to do that? No.” Dietrich has proposed a “Democratic Innovation Fund” for investing in state and local elections even in off-year election cycles. He also points to conservative groups such as Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute as models for building trust and the party’s volunteer base beyond the federal level. If Democrats invested in similar “long-term brand-building outside the party,” he said, “people would understand who we are.”
[Read: My disorienting weekend with the women of Turning Point]
Last year, Radjy’s group, Swing Left, started its own brand-building operation called Ground Truth, a year-round canvassing program that uses AI to summarize and transmit voter concerns back to the party. The excitement about the midterms is wonderful, Radjy told me. But “we need to ask ourselves: Are we building something durable, or is it all a house of sand?” she said. “Are we going to wake up in June 2027 and say, Oh shit, now we gotta go build this stuff?”
When I reached out to Clyde, the Ohio Democrats chair, to ask about her experience at the GRR meeting, and about what specific lessons Democrats have learned since 2024, her office sent back a statement that did not directly address any of my questions. “Ohio Democrats are laser-focused on lowering costs, protecting Ohioans’ freedoms, and getting our state and country back on track,” the statement attributed to Clyde stated. “Ohioans of all political backgrounds are getting involved with our Democratic candidates because of the strength of their winning message.”
There was more, but none of it acknowledged the Democrats’ broader problems—or any of the related concerns that the ladies of GRR had brought up at the meeting. When I texted Shaw to ask what she made of Clyde’s response, she replied immediately with a GIF of Liz Lemon rolling her eyes.
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