Back in May 2019, Joe Biden made a bold promise to voters in New Hampshire. If Donald Trump lost the White House, he said, Republicans would have a change of heart and start working with Democrats again. “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke,” Biden told reporters. “You will see an epiphany occur among many ofd my Republican friends.” He repeated the same prediction months later at a Washington fundraiser, insisting that Republican lawmakers were only sticking with Trump out of fear, not genuine loyalty.
But many Democrats and political observers were skeptical even then. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote: “I would wager that not even most Biden supporters believe this is true. Or Biden staffers. Or Republicans!”
At the same time, then-Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell made clear Republicans would strongly oppose a future Democratic president.
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The prediction that never came true
Biden did win in 2020, but the epiphany never arrived. Trump lost the election yet kept a firm grip on his party. And in 2024, he came back stronger and won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by a wide margin.
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg put it plainly: the Republican epiphany “did not happen.” She explained that Trump’s 2020 loss was largely driven by his handling of COVID-19 and it was not a broad rejection of him or his politics. “There were folks who never actually rejected that,” she said, according to NBC News. “It was not necessarily a rejection of Trump or Trumpism,” she added.
Former Senate Democratic leadership aide Adam Jentleson, a fervent real-time critic of Biden’s “epiphany” rhetoric, saw it as a close cousin of Obama’s ill-fated predictions that the GOP “fever” would break after he won re-election in 2012.
“There was a sense that Trump was an aberration,” he said. “Seeing him lose an election and fall out of favor and then reassert his control over the GOP and get re-elected that completely shattered any illusion that Republicans of sound conscience were going to rise up and take back their party.”
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Are Democrats moving away from compromise politics?
Trump’s second victory triggered a major shift in how Democratic voters want their party to behave. NBC News polling from March 2025 found that 65% of Democrats wanted their representatives in Congress to hold firm on their positions even at the cost of getting nothing done, Only 32% said they wanted Democrats to compromise with Trump on legislation. That is a complete reversal from April 2017, when 59% of Democrats preferred their leaders to compromise with Trump.
This new mood is also changing Democratic primary races. In New Jersey, progressive activist Analilia Mejia defeated the candidate supported by party leaders in a House special election. In Maine, outsider candidate Graham Platner became so strong in the Senate race that Gov. Janet Mills dropped out despite support from top Democratic leaders.
Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz, who named her firm “Fight Agency” after the 2024 Republican sweep, summed it up sharply: “Every elected official who believed that has either retired, lost or is about to lose,” as per NBC News.
Senator Chris Murphy said Democrats need to “fight fire with fire,” but warned that constantly attacking Republicans cannot be the party’s only strategy.
“It’s not just about punching MAGA in the mouth,” he said. “It’s about understanding there’s a lot of his base that actually does believe in things like a higher minimum wage and industrial policy.”
Murphy said Democrats also need to give voters a strong agenda and clear ideas for the future. He warned that winning elections without offering a bigger vision would be “a disaster” for the Democratic Party. “The biggest danger to our party is believing that winning the 2026 or the 2028 election is enough. We could score a temporary electoral victory but do nothing to make our movement more attractive to Trump voters,” as per NBC News.
