In dozens of interviews at recent Democratic events, voters said their party leaders need to show a much greater sense of urgency — and develop a plan to stop Trump and Musk.

Democrats are turning up by the thousands at rallies across the country — showing the stirrings of a populist uprising against President Donald Trump’s drastic cuts to government agencies and demanding that their leaders fight harder to save programs that benefit the middle class.

The question now facing the party — which has been in the grips of an identity crisis since November — is whether it can harness that pulsating energy to slow Trump’s agenda at a time when they have so little power. There is no clear Democratic leader. The party’s popularity has crashed to historic lows in recent polls. And there is no consensus on how to win back working-class voters and younger voters who were crucial to Trump’s victory last year.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents mobbed a half-dozen Western state events held last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — with more than 30,000 people filling Denver’s Civic Center Park on Friday evening. At town halls organized by liberal activists and Democratic Party officials in the congressional districts of the most vulnerable Republicans, rank-and-file voters have decried the enormous influence of billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s top donor, as he vows to cut $1 trillion or more from the federal budget.

And at gatherings held by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in key California swing districts last weekend, questioners who took the microphone demanded that their party’s leaders do more to stop Trump and Musk from slashing programs that serve vulnerable populations such as veterans and Social Security beneficiaries. Many directed their fury at Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and eight other Senate Democrats, who cast the deciding votes earlier this month allowing passage of a Republican spending bill.

“I think it’s safe to say that many of our faith in the party has never been lower,” 28-year-old Democrat Josh Siegel told Khanna before a crowd of about 1,000 people at a town hall in the district of Rep. Ken Calvert (R-California) on Sunday. The one possible exception, Siegel said, was when Walter Mondale lost the presidential election in 1984 — “and I’m not that old.”

“We’re talking a lot about primary challengers, maybe small-dollar donors, grassroots organizing. That’s all great,” said Siegel, a video editor from Murrieta, California. But, he added, “the guardrails are off. I’m not confident we’re going to make it to 2028 with a normal democracy. Maybe not even 2026. … Are you guys prepared to do what it’s going to take?”

Khanna, who said he would carry that message of frustration back to Washington, lamented the limits of Democrats’ power in the House, where the GOP has a three-vote margin.

“You’re in one of the 20 districts where your activism, where your mobilization, could literally save millions of people from getting their health care cut or education cut,” Khanna told Siegel. “You can mobilize. Let’s get 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people so we take over this district. That is the only way we are going to do it.”

But pinning hope on a distant election has provided little comfort to Democratic voters who are watching Trump’s blitz of executive orders and his attacks on the judiciary with horror. In dozens of interviews at recent Democratic events, voters said their party leaders need to show a much greater sense of urgency — and have a plan to stop Trump and Musk’s mass layoffs of federal workers, the attempted shutdown of the Education Department, and potential cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.

“I want them to know that if they stand up, we’ll stand with them,” said Valerie Hicks, a retired social worker from Las Vegas who attended the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rally in North Las Vegas. “You won’t be out there on a cliff — and maybe you are, but sometimes the cliff is where you have to be.”

‘Playing by the old rules’

Two months into Trump’s presidency, Democrats nationally are in a combative mood and deeply unhappy with their leaders. In a CNN poll conducted earlier this month, only 29 percent of Americans said they approved of the Democratic Party, and 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said the party should primarily work to stop the GOP agenda, rather than trying to compromise to get Democratic ideas into legislation.

When asked to offer an assessment of the state of the Democratic Party at recent events, many attendees used words such as “weak” and “lame.” There was a broad agreement that it was time for the party’s “old guard” — namely Schumer and other Democrats who hold out hope for compromise with Republicans — to move on, as well as a sense that the party is not matching the speed and aggression of Trump’s tactics.

Mike Arnold, a 74-year-old Air Force veteran from Cathedral City, California, said he attended a Khanna event in Norco this past weekend, because he “got tired of screaming at the TV.”

Like Siegel, he said he isn’t sure the country will make it to Democratic elections in 2026. Trump, he said, is advancing an authoritarian agenda — bullying white-shoe law firms and universities and calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against him.

“The courts might not hold, and if the courts don’t hold, the only next thing is the military itself,” said Arnold. Democratic leaders, Arnold said, “have to be much more aggressive than they have been.”

“We are playing by the old rules, and they don’t abide by those,” he said of Trump and his allies. “It’s nice to be polite, and God knows we don’t want to fracture the country any more than it already is. But what is happening cannot stand.”

Brenda Balsiger, a 69-year-old Democrat from Tustin, California, said she turned out for a recent event in Republican Rep. Young Kim’s district in Anaheim because “it’s pathetic, what’s happening in our country right now.”

“I want new leadership. I want Chuck Schumer out,” she said. When asked who should lead the Democratic Party, Balsiger said she’s a “big fan” of Ocasio-Cortez: “I don’t think she’s as polarizing as she used to be. She speaks her mind. She’s young, and we just blew it on the messaging. We weren’t listening out in the communities” in 2024.

Luis Huerta, a 32-year-old federal employee, did not vote in November but showed up for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s recent event in North Las Vegas because he can’t understand why Democrats haven’t done more to stop Musk from wielding his chainsaw on the federal workforce.

The country is facing “the complete destruction of American values,” he said, and he fears soon “laws won’t matter.” Huerta said Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez “are showing their support for the common folk, the working class, and speaking up against billionaires who do not have our best interest at heart.”

For Huerta and many other Democrats, Sanders’s message about the corrupting influence of money in politics has suddenly taken on new resonance as they watch Musk and other wealthy donors exert their influence over Trump in the White House.

“We didn’t listen [to Sanders] the first time, so now we have to regroup,” said 79-year-old Barbara Peirce, a Democratic-leaning independent from Lake Elsinore, California, referring to the senator’s previous run for president.

“There is no leader” of the Democratic Party, Peirce said. “We’ll acknowledge who the leader is when we see that they’re willing to be as angry as we are.”

‘A bigger tent’

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have encouraged crowds on their Fighting Oligarchy tour to build a movement of working people to oppose Trump, while emphasizing that anyone is welcome to join them, even if they don’t want a Democratic identifier next to their name.

In an interview last week, Sanders said the rallies are intended to get people engaged “to combat Trump’s authoritarianism, combat oligarchy, combat the kind of economy that has worked for the rich and get involved in the political process.”

“We’re going to be mounting an effort to get people to run either as independents or as progressive Democrats,” he said, “but to demand that there’s a transformation of the Democratic Party — that it finally opens its doors to the working class of this country and that it is not simply a top-down party coming from Washington, D.C.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who was recently elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the energy at the rallies illustrates the Democratic Party’s opportunity to broaden its appeal.

“Some people would disbelieve Bernie in the past when he would talk about billionaires privately running the government, but now you have the richest man on the planet bragging publicly about controlling the government,” said Casar, who joined Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez on their tour in Tucson.

He argued in an interview that the Democratic Party should seize the moment to sever ties with its own corporate and billionaire interests. “This kind of message offers an opportunity to reshape the Democratic Party into a party that is a bigger tent — that can hold more voters — and that can deliver a lot more for working people,” Casar said.

Democratic Party leaders argue that they are doing everything they can to fight Trump’s agenda. Democratic attorneys general, along with unions and civil rights groups, have filed about 120 lawsuits thus far. They have succeeded in at least temporarily halting some of Trump and Musk’s actions — including an attempted freeze on federal grants and loans and the efforts of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing Americans’ sensitive data at the Social Security Administration and other agencies.

In the face of the backlash against Schumer, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) has repeatedly noted that every member of his caucus, except one, voted against the Republican budget. In a “call to action” for Democratic activists on Monday night, Jeffries argued that Trump’s numbers “are collapsing in real time.”

“We are going to keep pressing the case on the economy, on health care, on taxes; press the case as it relates to the assault on our democracy and the American way of life — and we are going to do it in every possible form,” Jeffries said.

Ken Martin, who was elected as chair of the Democratic National Committee six weeks ago, has described his mission as fighting back against “Trump’s war on working people.”

He has embarked on his “organizing everywhere” tour to show that the party is focused on fielding candidates and winning offices up and down the ballot in all 50 states, including local nonpartisan offices that the party has not previously contested. The DNC — in partnership with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Association of State Democratic Committees — has held 60 town halls in GOP districts in recent weeks and is about halfway to its goal of holding at least one in every state.

While acknowledging the anger, Martin argues that the party has been aggressive in its litigation strategy against Trump and pointed to the six-figure investments the party made in upcoming special elections in Wisconsin and Florida.

“The power we have right now is to use our voices to start having conversations with voters about the stakes of what we’re seeing right now and to move public sentiment,” Martin said. “We don’t have a lot of power legislatively right now, but what we need to do is win.”

Khanna, who partnered with Democratic groups such as MoveOn, Indivisible and the Working Families Party to hold his three town halls on Sunday, said it’s clear that the “old guard” of the party is out of touch with the base and ought to be spending more time interacting with voters instead of donors.

“There’s this chance to bring rebuild the Democratic Party, to reset the Democratic Party, to bring the Democratic Party back to its roots,” Khanna said, describing that ethos as one inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the drive for “economic dignity and security for people” and “health care for everyone as a guaranteed right.”

“Unlike FDR, who put the billionaires of his time in the task of building things, Trump has put the billionaires in charge of dismantling government,” Khanna said. “This gives us a chance to say we actually have the vision of how we are going to build this country.”