Democrats allowing passage of Laken Riley was both bad policy and bad politics

Trump’s crisis governance is an opening for Democrats to think bigger

Congressional Democrats joined Republicans last month in an effort to hand Donald Trump the very first legislative victory of his second term on a xenophobic bill that is substantively flawed, morally indefensible, and represents a profound misreading of the 2024 election that has overtaken Beltway Democrats. Understanding the basics of that bill and what it signals about Congressional Democrats’ state of mind is crucial to plotting a path forward for the Democratic Party, especially as we watch Elon Musk’s lawless takeover of the federal government.

IMAGE VIA: WASHINGTON POST

The Laken Riley Act is what’s generally known in Washington as a “messaging bill”—a bill the majority party brings to the floor so they can make a statement on an issue that they believe is politically advantageous for them while putting the minority party on the defensive.

A messaging bill often passes the House on a party-line vote, potentially garnering support from a smattering of opposition-party outliers, then perishes in the Senate under a filibuster from the minority party. The Laken Riley Act, however, sailed through the House with the support of 46 Democrats and, in the Senate, 12 Democrats helped push it over the top—a clear and immediate sign of surrender to Trump that will invite a rash of similarly abhorrent legislation.

The danger posed by this opening salvo is bigger than one bill. If Democrats develop a habit of capitulating on bills aimed at dividing the party, eroding civil liberties, and targeting disenfranchised communities, it could further alienate the very voters Democrats need to engage as part of a broad coalition to beat back the authoritarian movement threatening our country.

As it stands, an estimated 19 million Biden 2020 voters sat out the election in 2024, particularly in bluer, more urban areas of the country, which is why Vice President Kamala Harris ultimately lost the popular vote by a hair to Trump. As Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO and a veteran Democratic strategist wrote in a Weekend Reading Substack post titled “How Trump ‘won,’”: “The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA.”

Although the question of why many previously anti-MAGA voters stayed home in November is a matter of some debate, that they stayed home is not. So Democrats are already fighting an uphill battle to engage a critical cohort of voters and motivate them to the polls. And perhaps predictably, congressional Democrats are already reverting to a playbook that hails from the ‘90s: Tacking center-right with Clinton-era fervor in the mistaken belief that the middle of the country has moved rightward when in actuality a decisive number of anti-MAGA voters simply didn’t get off the couch.

Voting in favor of the Laken Riley Act, for instance, is a complete misread of where the issue stands among the public and the pool of gettable voters for Democrats. Yes, immigration was a top issue for committed Trump voters, but as multiple post-election analyses have shown, the economy and the affordability crisis were the top issues driving the election. Once more, the public continues to support core Democratic values on immigration. Newly released tracking polls conducted last fall by BlueLabs for the Immigration Hub found that battleground state voters support a pathway to citizenship over mass deportation by a 20-point margin, 57%–37%. In the second wave of the surveys, conducted Oct. 20–Nov. 4, nearly two-thirds of voters (64%) preferred a "balanced approach" to immigration reforms that combined border security with protections for Dreamers and pathway to citizenship, while only 31% of voters preferred an enforcement-only approach. These findings are generally consistent with Gallup’s last year, where 70% preferred allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally a chance to become citizens if they met certain requirements over a period of time, while a 51% majority opposed deporting all immigrants here illegally back to their home countries.

What the polling demonstrates is that, while immigration and the Southern border was a top issue last fall, Trump’s prescriptive—mass deportations—was not broadly popular with voters. Yet many congressional Democrats are taking as an article faith the idea that Trump and MAGA Republicans have a broad mandate on the issue and folding instead of using a badly flawed GOP messaging bill as an opportunity to articulate an alternative, more broadly popular, vision. It was a particularly glaring course of action for a handful of battleground state Democratic Senators who recently won six-year terms and have plenty of time to make their case against MAGA’s extreme agenda on immigration and many more issues to come.

But the bottom line takeaway from the Laken Riley debacle is that Democrats’ swift and eager capitulation on the bill signals chaos among Democratic lawmakers, who have learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s win.

As we wrote last month, “the original sin” of the 2024 cycle was the broader failure across the Democratic Party and ecosystems, starting in 2022, to tell voters a strong, emotionally-resonant story about why their lives still feel so fraught even as the economy has improved and then provide them an alternative vision for the future. Failing to do that left voters open to Republicans’ status-threat appeals about immigrants and trans issues that kept all the have-nots arguing amongst themselves over the crumbs that are left to them by an economy that has sucked $50 trillion away from the bottom 90% of Americans.

But in order to provide voters with a vision for a world in which their lives can be more stable, sustainable and fulfilling, Democrats must start having a much bigger conversation about what’s needed to fix the scarcity economy that has kept roughly half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

To some extent, there’s a simple reason why Democrats have faltered on this count: Properly diagnosing the magnitude of the problem would require a radical reimagining of the political framework Washington politicians have been competing within for nearly half a century. The Reagan revolution of the ‘80s set the country on a course for governmental dysfunction, economic polarization, and the affordability crisis currently plaguing the nation. Democrats have been tinkering around the edges of Reagan’s trickle-down framework for decades, making significant but largely insufficient improvements to people’s quality of life through initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act, lower prescription drug prices, student loan forgiveness, and President Biden’s recently announced rule to keep the medical debt that haunts millions off their credit report. While all of these Democratic efforts have meaningfully improved the lives of millions of Americans, none of them have addressed the root causes of the country’s seemingly intractable wealth and security gap.

As Podhorzer told us in our 2025 podcast kickoff discussion, Democrats must aim to not merely win back working class Americans, but to actually offer them a seat at the table and empower them to help determine the course of their lives. Seeking to give real power to those who are struggling just to get by (let alone get ahead) so they can take an active role in creating their future is the antidote to the disengagement syndrome that overtook nearly 20 million voters last November. The missing millions appear to have concluded that the current system is so broken, it ultimately doesn’t matter who leads it—nothing will change for the better in their lives.

Now as Trump and his allies shred that system, Democrats have to do more than simply resist them for the sake of protecting a badly broken status-quo that has disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans. On one hand, Democrats must show voters that the only people benefitting from Trump’s demolition are him and his billionaire buddies. And on the other, Democrats must align themselves with the working class, championing systems that disrupt the scarcity mindset Republicans are fueling and empower workers’ collective strength.

America is at a crossroads that will lead to either further entrenchment of a ruling class or a revival of the collective. At the same time, Trump’s executive tyranny promises to plunge the country further into crisis. But moments of crisis also present opportunity. History is calling on Democrats to recognize that moment and rise up to offer voters a path to renewal and revitalization amid the dark helplessness and chaos that is overtaking the country.