As Ground Shifts, ‘Flailing’ Democrats Struggle to Find Footing in Diversity Fight

The Democratic Party is having an identity crisis about identity politics.

Just weeks into the Trump administration, Democrats are grappling with how to stand up for diversity and defend marginalized groups that have come under assault from the White House, without allowing their party to be defined or marginalized by those fights.

President Trump has pushed to make D.E.I. — diversity, equity and inclusion — a dirty word, racing to unravel diversity programs across the federal government at remarkable speed and claiming, baselessly, that D.E.I. efforts caused the fatal crash between a helicopter and a jet over the Potomac River.

At the same time, he has made a series of aggressive moves against transgender rights, including calling gender care for trans youths “chemical and surgical mutilation,” ordering transgender women in federal prisons to be transferred to men’s prisons and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

But Democrats are struggling to marshal an effective response. They are debating, publicly and privately, when to push back, how to push back and what, exactly, to push back on.

Some are saying that almost no instances of discrimination — especially rank racism — should go unanswered. Others are pressing the party to be more selective and engage only in cultural battles that are winnable. And still others are urging the party to avoid identity politics altogether — even when Republicans seem to be opening themselves up to a fierce counterattack.

“The party is flailing,” said Rashad Robinson, who recently stepped aside after years of leading Color of Change, a progressive civil-rights group.

For years, Democrats believed that they held the moral and political high ground in defending the value of a diverse and multicultural America. Mr. Trump’s exploitation of racial grievances, they assumed, would inevitably lead him to a demographic dead end, by capping his appeal to the growing nonwhite population. But the 2024 election upended those assumptions, as Mr. Trump not only won the White House but also sharply improved his standing among nonwhite voters.

Now, Democrats are in an anxious period of reassessment.

Mr. Robinson urged his party not to “give up on identifying and eliminating discrimination, any more than we can give up on getting lead out of water.” But he argued that Democrats needed to recalibrate their arguments about diversity to focus on demonstrating the practical benefits of having people of color in the room for key decisions.

“If we make the case simply through a moral lens, we will lose,” Mr. Robinson said. “Right now, we have to make the business case.”

Democrats say they feel pressure to settle on a countermessage as the Trump administration expands its offensive daily, pressing federal workers to excise gender-identifying pronouns, halting D.E.I.-related contracts, placing workers on administrative leave and ending some federal recognition of Black History Month.

Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat who is among those making the most full-throated case for D.E.I., offered a tart explanation for why it had led to white backlash: “The only people that are crying are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out by people that have historically had to work so much harder,” she said on CNN this week.

Others want the party to view identity politics as a minefield, and avoid it as much as possible.

“I grew up a white, working-class kid and joined the Democratic Party as a teenager because the Republicans were a bunch of rich jamokes,” Peter Ragone, a veteran Democratic strategist, said, using an old colloquialism for a fool. “I thought that working-class whites, Blacks and Latinos had a better chance in America when we fought together for good jobs, health care and equal rights. Somehow, we made ourselves the jamokes to most of America. It breaks my heart.”

A split in the party

Just how far the party is from consensus was apparent during the recent election of the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which devolved at times into almost a caricature of left-wing litmus tests on inclusivity. Candidates were asked to pledge to expand transgender representation, add a new Muslim caucus and affirm that racism and misogyny had contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat.

Last Saturday, the departing D.N.C. chairman, Jaime Harrison, labored to explain the party’s dizzyingly complex gender-parity provisions: “Our rules specify that when we have a gender nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female and the remaining six officers must be gender-balanced.”

Republicans gleefully circulated clips of the moment to portray Democrats as hopelessly obtuse.

Evidence abounds that the party’s brand is seen as out of touch with the country’s concerns. Voters in a recent New York Times and Ipsos poll said they believed the two most important issues to the Democratic Party were abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. policy — neither of which were among the five most important issues to voters overall.

Some Democrats argue it is essential to protect diversity, equity and inclusion programs not only on the merits — to elevate qualified people who might otherwise be left behind — but also to combat the racism, sexism and transphobia that they say suffuse the anti-D.E.I. movement.

“They believe in their white supremacy,” said Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who has been the target of repeated bigoted attacks. “The pendulum swings — whether we’re going to have progress or regress — and I think it is up to us as Democrats to continue to fight for progress.”

Yet others believe the party must be more selective in its battles.

Brianna Wu, a transgender woman and Democratic strategist who ran for Congress in 2018, said activists had overreached in recent years in pushing an extreme view of transgender rights. She blamed party leaders for embracing positions — like around participation in girls’ sports — that turn off voters, and said this had aided Republican efforts to roll back transgender rights more broadly.

“It doesn’t help marginalized people to not be able to win elections,” Ms. Wu said. “The purpose of the Democratic Party is to win elections. We don’t need to be babysitting the emotional state of activists.”

Shifting political terrain

The politics of inclusion have markedly shifted in the last five years.

The energetic resistance movement that emerged to oppose Mr. Trump’s 2016 election — and that delivered Democrats the House in a 2018 landslide — made progressive aspirations for racial and gender equity seem more within reach.

The #MeToo movement ousted abusive men from power, and even ideas as expansive as reparations for slavery were no longer dismissed by the party’s mainstream but deemed worthy of study. By early 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr., a lifelong moderate, pledged to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court and to pick a woman as his vice president.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accelerated the focus on systemic racism. Once elected, Mr. Biden made racial progress a rhetorical cornerstone of his agenda, trumpeting investments in historically Black colleges, an expansion of loans to Black-owned small businesses and the diversity of his judicial appointments.

But Republicans soon tapped into a backlash, turning a once-obscure academic concept, critical race theory, into a rallying cry against what they portrayed as reverse discrimination, and laying the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s more aggressive push against diversity-related efforts.

“The party has always adopted a tone and tenor of tolerance,” said Rahm Emanuel, the longtime Democratic operative and former White House chief of staff. “In the last four or five years, it went from tolerance and acceptance to advocacy. And the corresponding response has been rejection.”

Ms. Harris, as the Democratic nominee, rarely talked about her chance to become the first female, first Black female and first South Asian president. But her campaign continued to emphasize race and gender, including with ethnic outreach like an “Opportunity Agenda for Latino Men” in the race’s closing weeks.

It did not work. Exit polling showed Mr. Trump won a majority of Latino men.

Mr. Trump and the Republicans, by comparison, put cultural fights at the forefront of their campaigns, with some of the most devastating G.O.P. ads casting Democrats as more focused on transgender rights than on Americans’ economic struggles.

Now that Mr. Trump is in office, his overwhelm-the-opposition strategy — rolling back measures on race, D.E.I. and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in lightning-quick succession — has left Democrats gasping for air.

Some of the most forceful pushback has actually come from outside the traditional political arena.

“D.E.I. is not a threat,” the artist Alicia Keys declared at the Grammy Awards on Sunday. “It’s a gift.”

And the ESPN sportscaster Stephen A. Smith, who has mused about running for president, mounted his own D.E.I. defense on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program by mocking Pete Hegseth’s qualifications.

“When you are a weekend host on Fox News, and now you’re the defense secretary of the United States overseeing 3.5 million people, that is not qualified!” he said.

The challenge for Democrats is that the party may not be unanimous in disagreeing with Mr. Trump’s attacks on D.E.I., according to Hakeem Jefferson, a Stanford professor who studies the role of identity in American politics.

“Not everyone in the Democratic Party disagrees with the arguments from, quote, the other side, when it comes to these issues,” he said. “This is the thing about liberalism in this country. It often falls apart when race and identities are implicated.”

Some Black leaders in Congress have urged confronting Mr. Trump as a racist, to a point.

“We can’t let that go,” said Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, “but it is not our only message.”

James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist who has been outspoken against what he has called the more “woke” elements of his party, said it was critical for Democrats to avoid a lecturing tone.

“It’s easy to say the country is just misogynist and racist,” he said. But he also pointed to Elissa Slotkin, Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen and Ruben Gallego, Democrats who won Senate races in 2024 in states Mr. Trump carried. “We’re not going to stop nominating females, we’re not going to stop nominating nonwhites.”

At a recent forum held during the race for D.N.C. chair, only one long-shot candidate, Faiz Shakir, a former Bernie Sanders campaign manager, disagreed with the ideas of including another seat for a transgender person in the party’s leadership structure and of creating a Muslim caucus.

Mr. Shakir said a number of D.N.C. members quietly pulled him aside to thank him for speaking up, though he won only two votes in the chairmanship race, including his own.

“We’re splintering ourselves from our collective power,” he said in an interview. “Because, in lieu of us talking about program and mission — the things that we actually want to accomplish — we pat each other on the head because we feel like we’ve already accomplished something by breaking ourselves off and sitting in a corner by our identity.”