How Senate Democrats Got Their Mojo Back

Senate Democrats faced intense intraparty backlash last year after they worked with Republicans to fund the government without extracting concessions, such as an extension of lapsed federal health insurance subsidies.

Those tactics unleashed a wave of anger directed at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and centrist members of his caucus, which has continued to reverberate in messy and contested Democratic Senate primaries across the country.

But now, many on the left are giving Senate Democrats credit for uniting over the past six months against congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump.

Democrats have stood firm against giving tens of billions in new funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, two agencies on the frontline of Trump’s immigration crackdown. They have also threatened to shut down a key intelligence gathering tool over Trump’s decision to tap Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to lead the nation’s intelligence agencies. And they’ve held fast against providing funding for Trump’s war against Iran and have forced repeated votes in the Senate to end hostilities.

“It’s a little harder to make the argument that we’re feckless,” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, Democrats’ chief deputy whip, said in an interview with NOTUS.

“I think they’ve found more of their spine,” added Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), a prominent progressive and potential 2028 presidential contender who has called for Schumer’s ouster as leader.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), another top progressive who has been critical of Democrats’ strategy, agreed, telling NOTUS that “by and large, Democrats have done a good job in standing up to this unconstitutional activity.”

The fight over a $70 billion immigration enforcement package that passed the Senate on a Republican-only vote last week is the most recent example of how Democrats are winning — even as they lose votes.

Democrats forced Republicans to spend months getting on the immigration legislation, tying up the floor in the process. They made it even harder by highlighting Trump’s demands for a White House ballroom and his push to compensate his allies who believe they’ve been “victimized” by the federal government.

A number of vulnerable Republican incumbents on the ballot in November — including Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio, and Ashley Moody of Florida — felt pressure. They wound up voting for some Democratic amendments that would have shuttered or curtailed the fund, a sign of the party’s anxiety about what critics have dubbed a “political slush fund” for Trump allies.

Afterward, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said his party’s refusal to ban the “victimization” fund in law would hurt its chances of holding the Senate in November. Tillis is retiring at the end of this Congress.

“In my opinion, last week’s vote was a net loss for in-cycle members,” Tillis wrote in a fiery email to his colleagues on Monday. “I am not diminishing the importance of funding DHS, but the ‘gain’ from that will not offset the ‘pain’ we’ve created in key races.”

John Cornyn, another departing Republican senator from Texas, also said he was very worried about keeping the Senate, blaming in part Trump’s inability to focus on kitchen table issues.

“From what I’m seeing, a lot of races that shouldn’t be in play, are in play, and you know, Texas is one example of that,” he said Thursday.

Top Democrats, meanwhile, said they hoped that their handling of the fight over ICE funding would help reverse the deeply negative views many Democratic voters hold about their elected officials and pave the way for a blue wave in November.

“If the standard is, did you stop Donald Trump? That’s a little much to ask, given that they control all the levers of the government,” said Schatz. “But we’re well-positioned going forward, and we’ve notched a few small but meaningful wins.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), a progressive who has criticised party leaders, agreed saying, “the DHS fight was an important one, because people saw us have a backbone.”

Democrats are extending their partisan approach to the fiscal 2027 spending bills, now being drafted in the Senate.

Republicans were forced to cancel multiple markups of the annual bills over the past few weeks after failing to reach a top-line spending agreement. Democrats say they won’t back Trump’s push for new defense dollars to continue the war in Iran, a position popular with the party’s progressive base. The dispute has some senators predicting another government shutdown later this year.

“Chuck’s going to shut her down right before the election, because they think if they flip one or both [legislative] houses, they can get a better deal afterwards, which is probably true,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) told NOTUS.

Meanwhile, immigrant advocates believe another test for Senate Democrats is coming soon on a bill that passed in the House last month with a wide bipartisan margin: the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. The measure would crack down on organized retail and supply chain theft, but critics are calling it a “trojan horse” that would give the Trump administration new powers to surveil and crack down on immigrants. The bill has a number of Senate Democratic sponsors, including Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

“Don’t take the bait,” warned Insha Rahman, the president of advocacy group Vera Institute of Justice, in an interview with NOTUS. “Democrats need to go on offense and have their own plan for immigration.”

Rahman said it’s “exactly the same” situation Democrats faced after some of them voted for the Laken Riley Act early on in Trump’s second term as president. That law mandated the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with certain crimes, but some Democrats have since walked back their support or said they regretted voting for it.

For now, however, Democrats are getting good marks from some of their most vocal progressive critics as well as calls for more action.

Andrew O’Neill, national advocacy director of Indivisible, a progressive organizing group, praised Democrats in a statement for opposing more immigration funding, saying they proved that “people-powered organizing can make a real difference.”

O’Neill added, “The next test for Democrats is if they’ll actually hold these agencies accountable for their many abuses, and claw back every single cent from this slush fund for Trump’s cruelty.”