Dems can learn from MAGA's strategies to defeat Trump: analysis

Women wearing MAGA hats attend the annual "March for Life" in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 23, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz

A year into Donald Trump's second presidency, Democrats have a long list of frustrations — from Trump's foreign and domestic policies to the loyalty he commands among GOP lawmakers to hard-right dominance of the U.S. Supreme Court. And Democatic strategists are having some intense debates over what it will take to get their party back into power at the national level.

Journalist/author Charles Duhigg offers some suggestions in an article published by The New Yorker on January 26 and lays out some things that strategically, they can learn from the MAGA movement.

"One can look at the MAGA movement and the Democratic Party through a similar lens," Duhigg explains. "Today's Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls. However, it's less talented at organizing — building the kinds of local infrastructure and disparate leaders that are needed to sustain a large and ideologically diverse coalition."

Duhigg continues, "MAGA, on the other hand, is great at organizing — after 2020, the movement launched the so-called Precinct Strategy, which encouraged thousands of people to run for leadership positions within their local Republican Party chapters, and to become poll workers. This is a reason Donald Trump is in the White House again — and liberal and conservative activists alike say that it will be hard for the Democrats to start consistently winning until they mimic some of MAGA's strategies."

Duhigg cites the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an evangelical Religious Right outfit founded by the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed in 2009, as an example of a group that is great at organizing.

"Nationwide, there are 3.1 million Faith & Freedom members, and in 2024, they encouraged neighbors to vote for Trump nearly 80 million times — an outreach three times larger than (former President Barack) Obama's record-setting effort," Duhigg notes. "The group's headquarters distributes money, as well as write-ups about the results of local experiments, to the various chapters. But it's up to local volunteers to decide which tactics to adopt and which issues to champion, as long as they align with the group's basic conservative values…. This kind of organizing is hardly the only reason that Trump won. But scholars who study both parties agree that in recent decades Republicans have created broad ideological coalitions — something that Democrats, who tend to have litmus tests on abortion, social justice, and numerous other topics, have often not achieved."

The journalist/author adds, "Conservatives have also built a media ecosystem that dwarfs Democratic messaging."

Read Charles Duhigg's full article for The New Yorker at this link (subscription required).

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