The Resistance of 2016 was also buoyed by a sense of hope—that Democrats, “reasonable” Republicans, or maybe Robert Mueller would come to the rescue. By contrast, the protest movement against Trump’s second term is navigating a sense that we all might be helpless in the face of what’s coming. “This DOGE business will get out of control,” as one sign put it at a Tesla Takedown protest I recently attended in Chicago. “It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
I had come to Lorain to see whether someone like Walz might be able to not only channel the movement’s righteous fury, but also convince a shaken public that resistance is not futile, as this rogue president would have it believe. “You’re deeply concerned about your country and you want to do something about it,” he said at the top of the town hall. “It might be a pain in the butt to park and get here and wait in line and come in here and sit in a chair or whatever,” he continued. But “it beats the hell out of doom-scrolling in a fetal position.”
If anybody could rally Democrats out of that dejected posture, perhaps it was “Coach Walz”—who seemed to exude the same jocularity and charisma he had at the beginning of Kamala Harris’s campaign. Part of that was, of course, owing to the venue: “Thank you for doing this in a high school,” the former teacher said. “The only other place I’m more comfortable is my living room.” But more than that, he was no longer in the middle of a run for office, and could speak more freely than he could during last fall’s high-stakes campaign.
As he spoke of the need for a more “positive, populist” agenda—like the one he has worked to implement in Minnesota—he acknowledged that Republican and Democratic leadership had contributed to the precarity in places like Lorain: “It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA,” noted Walz, who wore a United Auto Workers pin on the lapel of his navy suit. And while Democratic policies do better serve the middle and working classes, he said, his party doesn’t move fast enough or decisively enough: “I believe that when you get power, you should wield it,” Walz said. “You win elections not to bank political capital to win the next election—you win elections to burn political capital to improve lives as quickly as you can.”
But Democrats’ path to power has only gotten narrower in recent elections, as the national party relies on its urban centers of support and focuses its resources on a handful of swing states. Their 2024 defeat demonstrated, in stark terms, how flawed and unsustainable that strategy is: Harris lost every battleground, while Trump made gains in blue strongholds like New York, and among voting blocs that have traditionally favored Democrats. “We can’t expect to win presidential elections [when] we don’t show up places and then every four years we go to the same seven states that we were told [were] the ‘blue wall,’” Walz told the Ohio crowd. “It wasn’t a very good wall.”
It was refreshing to hear such a blunt assessment of the Democrats’ strategic failures—and a reminder that things weren’t always this way. Barack Obama won this state twice. In 2012, he defeated Mitt Romney in Lorain County—once a Democratic stronghold—by more than 15 points. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won it by a 10th of a percentage point. However, Trump has carried it the last two cycles: He beat Joe Biden—who campaigned as a strident “union man”—by more than two points here in 2020, and expanded his support in 2024 to nearly six points. That’s been the story of politics in Lorain, but it’s also the story of Ohio—and America more broadly—over the last decade: Blue to purple to red. Places where Democrats could win or at least compete not so long ago—Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Iowa—have been treated by the national party as lost causes, to the chagrin of local parties. “There’s real opportunity here,” Katie Seewer, press secretary of the Ohio Democratic Party, told me. “Ohio is very much worth investing in.”
New Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin—a Walz ally and fellow Minnesotan—has promised to turn things around and revive Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. “If we’re going to turn red states to purple states to blue states,” Martin told me in December, “you can’t ignore them.” It won’t be easy for them to recapture the territory they’ve ceded to Republicans. It will require the party, which still suffers from abysmal approval ratings, to build political infrastructure in places where you might find a yard sign like the one I saw on a back road a couple hours west of Lorain, that read: “Are you an American or a Democrat?” It also demands that they meaningfully address the disillusionment that has set in over places like Lorain, which a friend of mine in Cleveland described as a “Springsteen song” of a town.
