Opinion | 20 Years Ago, Democrats Found a Way Out of the Wilderness. They Can Again.

President Trump is misreading his mandate. He ran on lowering the cost of living, but the price of eggs is going up and he is plotting to increase health care premiums. He disavowed Project 2025, but seems to be implementing it page by page.

Twenty years ago, another Republican president in a similar position — elected with a margin of victory similar to Mr. Trump’s, and starting his term with a similar (though slightly better) approval rating — misread his mandate, too.

In early 2005, Democrats were lost and reeling from defeat. But Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi didn’t just sit back — they assembled a battle plan and carried it out with great discipline. Democrats soon found their footing, took back both houses of Congress in the midterms and set themselves up for a dominant victory in the next presidential election. George W. Bush slunk out of office as one of the least popular presidents in modern history.

In 2025, we can comeback if we follow their model, which means prioritizing smart, winnable fights — and always with an eye toward winning back power.

Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi’s strategy rallied the party around a clearly defined set of Democratic priorities, especially protecting entitlements like Social Security from cuts and privatization. This created a clear contrast with Republicans over issues where the average voter was aligned with the Democrats and channeled grass-roots energy into fights with Republicans over issues that enjoyed broad support among the public.

Raising the profile of popular fights while lowering it for unpopular ones carried over to the 2008 primary, which focused on favorable issues for Democrats including health care, ending tax giveaways to corporations and cleaning up corruption in Washington — and helped deliver the most dominant general-election performance by either party in this century.

It is worth remembering that, like today, Democrats were deeply demoralized after losing to Mr. Bush in 2004. He took credit for a strong economy and campaigned on culture war issues like same-sex marriage and his stewardship of the Iraq war to win re-election. He barely talked about entitlement reform on the trail. Yet after his victory, he declared that he was going to use his “political capital” to privatize Social Security.

This was not what voters thought they were getting, and Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi seized on that disconnect. In early 2005 they announced that no Democrat would support Social Security privatization. In the Senate, Mr. Reid set up a first-of-its-kind communications war room as Mr. Bush barnstormed the country promoting his plan.

Mr. Bush was enjoying a honeymoon period, and Democrats were under pressure to propose their own plan for changing Social Security. But Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had confidence — based on both polls and experience — that drawing a hard line on preserving the program was popular. They also knew that it was an issue core to the Democratic identity, and something that everyone in the party — from Bernie Sanders to the moderate Max Baucus of Montana — could get behind. It reminded voters why they liked Democrats in the first place.

Crucially, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi allowed their members leeway to work with Republicans on other issues, like reauthorizing the Patriot Act. This flexibility showed voters that Democrats were willing to be bipartisan and solve problems. From a strategic perspective, it also isolated Social Security as the main flashpoint.

In contrast, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Democrats took up every progressive cause with zeal, and the party’s platform shifted as a result. The “protest every issue, everywhere” efforts of 2017-20 contributed energy toward successful midterm elections in 2018, but the party ended up veering too far left on too many issues. Though Joe Biden won a squeaker in 2020, Democrats on the whole underperformed, and the positions taken in the hothouse of the 2020 primary came back to haunt Kamala Harris in 2024.

The party needs to internalize the idea that what we choose to fight on now will shape not just the 2026 midterms, but the 2028 presidential race as well.

The budget fights that will consume most of this year present the perfect opportunity to implement the Reid-Pelosi playbook. Yet again, protecting entitlements is Democrats’ strongest issue. Recent polling shows that messages about protecting the United States Agency for International Development or rolling back cuts from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiative are weak, resonating with few voters outside the Democratic base. By contrast, a message about protecting core safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts draws 68 percent support from all voters.

Whenever Republicans need Democrats’ votes — whether it’s to keep the government open or to raise the debt ceiling — Democrats should respond with clear, popular demands: promise to protect core social safety net programs like Social Security, or promise not to jack up health care premiums to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

But discipline requires more than just focusing on winning issues — it also means avoiding performative displays on issues where we are far to the left of public opinion, since these episodes tend to go viral and crowd out our more effective messaging. Take foreign aid: This is simply not an issue the public prioritizes, and images of liberals protesting outside government buildings will only feed the perception of Democrats as out of touch.

The best way to restore foreign aid is for Democrats to win back power. Party leaders should tell activists: If you want to restore foreign aid, protest Mr. Trump’s plan to slash the safety net.

It is also not too early for Democrats to start shaping their approach to candidate recruitment for 2026. Again, the Reid-Pelosi playbook is instructive. They used the disciplined focus on party priorities to build a big tent and recruited candidates whose stances reflected their districts.

These candidates agreed on core issues but diverged on others where there was less unanimity across the party. Representative Heath Shuler was pro-gun and anti-abortion. Representative Gabby Giffords was an immigration hawk. Senator Bob Casey was anti-abortion. But they all wanted to protect Social Security.

Instead of imposing litmus tests, “what makes a Democrat a Democrat” should be answered with “supporting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” Otherwise, candidates should be evaluated by how well they are matched to their districts and states, not progressive orthodoxy.

The most effective way to stop Mr. Trump is to win back power. If you sit anywhere on the left side of the spectrum — from the center-left to the far left — the issues you care about most will be best served by Democrats winning.

They probably wouldn’t have admitted it, but Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi were guided by a dictum later articulated by their archnemesis, Mitch McConnell: “Winners make policy and losers go home.”

Adam Jentleson is a former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”

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