For much of the past decade, Democratic politics has revolved around opposing Donald J. Trump.
But as he prepares to return to the White House again on Monday, some Democrats are exploring a different approach: carefully calibrated stabs at the idea of coexistence.
In some of the nation’s most liberal bastions, mayors and state officials are emphasizing quality-of-life problems close to home — and insisting they want to work with the incoming administration.
On Capitol Hill, dozens of Democrats voted with Republicans to take a harder line on some undocumented immigrants, and Democratic senators released a video declaring that “we are not here because of who we are against.”
And prominent Democratic governors are highlighting areas of potential agreement, while also signaling that they have some policy red lines. As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan put it in a speech on Wednesday, “I won’t go looking for fights. I won’t back down from them, either.”
“My job is to try to collaborate and find common ground wherever I can,” Ms. Whitmer said in an interview after laying out her approach to Mr. Trump in remarks at the Detroit Auto Show. “There will be moments where we can’t, and I will have to be on the other side, but I’m not going into it with that mind-set.”
“People are exhausted,” added Ms. Whitmer, a leading Democrat from one of the nation’s most crucial battleground states — a place, she also noted, that both she and Mr. Trump have now won twice. “They want leaders who can solve problems and make their lives better.”
Taken together, a new and difficult Democratic balancing act is coming into view, as elected officials across the party try to show that they have heard the electorate’s demands for change, while grappling with where to oppose Mr. Trump and how to talk about him — if at all.
In tone and emphasis, it is a sharp departure from the brawling mood of resistance that characterized much of Democratic politics over the last eight years.
Partly, that is an acknowledgment of political reality: Republicans are set to control all of the levers of power in Washington, and Democratic officials across the country will need support from the federal government.
It also reflects how the anti-Trump fervor that was manifested in mass protests and shaped popular culture has given way to political disillusionment and burnout in left-leaning circles, at least for now.
And while Mr. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, some are grappling with the fact that he narrowly won it in November, in part by cutting into Democrats’ traditional constituencies. A Gallup poll last month found more Americans approving of Mr. Trump’s handling of his transition than at around the same time eight years earlier, though those numbers still significantly trailed other recent presidents-elect.
“By winning a second time and by winning the popular vote, Trump now has greater legitimacy than in 2016,” said Miro Weinberger, who during Mr. Trump’s first term was the mayor of Burlington in Vermont, a famously progressive state where Republicans made surprising gains in the fall. “That is causing deeper reflection this time about the ways in which Democratic governance is failing.”
Once he does, the policies he and the Republican Congress pursue may well prompt the kind of broad backlash that propelled Democrats to many of their victories over the last eight years and create new pressures on elected Democrats to oppose him wherever possible.
Honeymoon periods never last, and for Mr. Trump — an exceptionally polarizing leader in a closely divided country — it could be especially short.
Efforts to check Mr. Trump are also already underway from a range of Democratic state officials and advocacy groups, especially in blue states, while Democrats from more conservative areas, too, have cautioned against over-reading the election results.
“My takeaway is there is not a clear mandate, and that the people of eastern North Carolina, in particular, want us to come to Washington, D.C., and work for them,” said Representative Don Davis, a North Carolina Democrat who won a district that also supported Mr. Trump.
Democratic energy more broadly will not be dormant, lawmakers argue, if Republicans threaten the social safety net or target abortion rights. The far-reaching crackdowns on undocumented immigrants Mr. Trump has proposed also have the potential to create wrenching scenes with unpredictable political reactions.
“If this administration and Congress attempts to institute a nationwide abortion ban, you’re going to see that type of protest happen again,” said Representative Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat who won in a district Mr. Trump also captured in November. “I don’t think we’re moving into a period where everyone’s just going to, you know, sit back and let horrible policies like that be enacted.”
“It’s picking those areas where you have to hold firm, but without making it every single thing, a knee-jerk reaction to everything that comes out of the administration,” Ms. Lee added.
The fissures and dilemmas around how to do that are already coming into view, especially on the issue of immigration.
Last week, the House passed a bill targeting undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation, with support from Republicans and nearly 50 Democrats.
Representative Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat who opposed that measure, said he worried that some in his party were misreading the lessons from Mr. Trump’s re-election bid, which included a promise to carry out mass deportations.
“The first election, everyone thought it was just a fluke, and they felt like, you know, it wasn’t where the American people were at,” Mr. Frost said. “This time, there are a lot of Democrats that are worried that this wasn’t a fluke, and this is what people want, the most extreme parts of his agenda.”
He warned against that interpretation, arguing that many Americans simply voted for Mr. Trump “because he was effectively able to make this a referendum on how people feel about the economy.”
But Mr. Frost, who also described his party’s messaging challenges, insisted that he was not in Washington “to just resist.”
“Yes, we will be resisting and pushing back against parts of his agenda we disagree with, 100 percent,” he said. But he added that he would also look for areas of potential cooperation with Republicans, though he was skeptical of how much good-faith negotiating Republicans would be willing to do.
“I’m keeping an open mind for sure, but people can’t blame me for coming to the table with an eyebrow raised,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I’m not there to work.”
Representative Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat from a more competitive district, has in some ways laid out a similar approach toward Mr. Trump.
He offered to travel to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida home and private club, for negotiations concerning removing the state and local tax deduction cap. And he said in an interview that he would work with anyone, including Mr. Trump, to “make my community more affordable, more safe and more free.”
“If he’s doing anything counter to those goals, I will fight to the end of the earth,” Mr. Ryan pledged.
Just don’t call that resistance.
“I don’t think anybody in the real world thinks about it that way,” he said. “They’re thinking about their lives. They’re thinking about putting food on the table, a roof over their shoulder. They don’t want to hear the sloganeering.”
Misgivings about that r-word are not limited to House members from competitive districts.
In 2017, Rabbi Sharon Brous, the prominent leader of a synagogue in Los Angeles, addressed the Women’s March on Washington, describing the awakening of a “spirit of resistance.”
Eight years later, Republicans are on the cusp of fully controlling Washington, crises abound abroad, Rabbi Brous’s city is burning, and the political left, she said in an interview, has “become so fractious, differences of position and perspective have become almost existential.”
At a moment that demands new relationship-building and more local organizing, she suggested, the word “resistance” feels less resonant now.
“I don’t want to be lazy with language,” said Rabbi Brous, who gave an invocation at the Democratic National Convention last summer. “I want us to speak about what we’re actually trying to do, what we actually believe in, and where can we unite?”
For former Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who lost in November but outran Vice President Kamala Harris, the answer to that is clear: advocacy for working Americans, many of whom have drifted away from the Democratic Party.
“I’m not going to tell my former colleagues, ‘Resist,’ ‘Don’t resist,’ ‘Use the word resist,’” he said. “My mission is to make the Democratic Party the party of workers, like we used to be.”
He added: “If we start doing that and we make that contrast — ‘Who’s on your side?’ — you know, whatever the other things that party activists, party office holders do, is just less relevant.”
