CNN
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On a Friday afternoon in downtown Philadelphia, dozens gather on the corner of South 2nd and Chestnut streets. A mix of retirees and fired federal workers, they are teeming with fury, but not just toward President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the early actions of the administration.
They are also acutely angry at a fellow Democrat: Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.
These people represent the roughly 73% of Democratic voters in a recent CNN/SSRS poll who say the party’s caucus in Congress is doing too little to oppose Trump. In their view, Fetterman and other Washington Democrats are enabling illegal firings across the federal workforce and the erosion of the rule of law.
“I understand the importance of bipartisanship in normal times. But these aren’t normal times,” said Robert Lipartito, a 69-year-old retired music librarian from Pennsport.
Lipartito argues the party needs to be more dogmatic and is not sympathetic to the needle that purple-state Democrats believe they must thread. “It’s not just a matter of trying to find consensus when someone is literally dismantling our institutions right before our eyes and turning on our allies. I mean, there’s no middle ground for that,” he said.
The group of protesters, organized by a local offshoot of Indivisible, a progressive movement created in 2016 after Trump first took the White House, marched from Fetterman’s Philadelphia field office to Independence National Historic Park chanting “Stand up for us” as people passing by honked and cheered.
“If we elected you, then you need to fight, you need to grow a spine and fight for us,” said 64-year-old Joyce Meder of Abington Township. Meder, dressed in a Fetterman costume, held a sign calling on her senator to hold a town hall to hear constituents’ concerns and to show up for votes.
Democrats have begun sounding the alarm over Republican plans to pay for extensions of tax cuts by slashing hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, possibly including cuts to Medicaid.
More immediately, the federal government will shut down Friday if Congress doesn’t pass funding legislation. Democrats are weighing whether they should help pass a GOP-drafted spending measure that they dislike or whether they should demand some concessions in exchange for their support.
Fetterman has always ruled out supporting a government shutdown as a mechanism to slow down the Trump agenda.
“That’s chaos. I’ll never vote for chaos. To burn the village down in order to save it … that’s one of our core responsibilities to keep the government running,” Fetterman told CNN.
It’s not just progressives who are peeved.
Longtime Philadelphia attorney Michelle Flamer describes herself as a centrist. Still, she feels compelled to protest her own party because the people she voted for, she says, should feel accountable to her. “In my view, our nation’s on fire and we are actually in a constitutional crisis now,” the 68-year-old said in an interview on her porch in West Philadelphia.
She was in disbelief when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wondered at a news conference last month how much power Democrats have in Trump’s Washington.
“I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have?” Jeffries asked. “Republicans have repeatedly lectured America. They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”
Jeffries was trying to indicate it was not on Democrats to bail out Speaker Mike Johnson on government spending negotiations since Republicans are in the majority. His message: Democrats would work with Johnson on a bipartisan basis, but conservatives must take responsibility for whatever materialized.
Some Democratic voters received Jeffries’ comment as party leaders prematurely conceding defeat.
“In the middle 1800s, if you look at Philadelphia, we had 20,000 free Black people living in Philadelphia at the time. They were very much engaged in Underground Railroad activities. How much power did they have?” Flamer said.
“But still these people persevered. It’s a matter of persistence,” added Flamer.
Many Democrats want more from their party. In nearby Clarion, local Democratic organizers are strategizing to find candidates to mount primary challenges against sitting Democrats they are failing them.
Their message? Fight harder. Gum up the works. Throw up every conceivable procedural roadblock. Stop confirming Trump’s nominees. And do a better job messaging to conservatives in rural America about how they too could be harmed by Trump’s policies.
“Well, they definitely need to be doing all of the procedural warfare. … Just everything they can do to obstruct anything that’s harmful to Americans,” said Kali McLaughlin, who lives with multiple sclerosis but still works to turn out voters in her rural community.
Aware of the unrest among the party faithful, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and Jeffries held a national call last week to lay out actions they are taking to address voter concerns.
“We have a plan and we understand that we need to execute it with the fierce urgency of now,” Jeffries said as he detailed a road map that included using the courts to stall Trump’s agenda and a messaging battle to persuade voters so Democrats can recapture the House.
The raw anger from Democratic voters isn’t just concentrated in urban centers. The outrage is palpable in rural America, too.
In her 30s, Bobbi Erickson is a funny and feisty cook at an elementary school in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.
In the two hours between the time she clocks out and when she gets her son off the bus after school, she volunteers by collecting signatures, organizing rallies and knocking on doors for local Democrats.
“There’s a war being waged in America, in rural Pennsylvania, and we’re fighting and we’re scrapping every single day to get volunteers, to get Democrats on the ballot, to get votes out. We’re scrapping every day, and if they would work half as hard as we do, I would have no complaints,” Erickson said.
She said cuts to Medicaid and nutritional assistance programs would decimate her community.
“We already don’t have hospitals. We already have places where you have to drive over an hour to get to a maternity ward. … We already don’t get the care that we need in these areas, and we need someone to fight for us,” Erickson said.
Her school is one of the thousands with a federally funded Head Start program, which provides child care and early education services to low-income families across America.
The program has been thrown into uncertainty since the Trump administration froze its federal funding, a decision that’s being litigated in federal court.
Erickson worked hard to get Fetterman elected in 2022, even dressing up as a broccoli in a Fetterman campaign video to poke fun at his rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“I think if he put in half the work I did to get him elected right now, I wouldn’t be showing up at his office and protesting him,” she said.
When CNN reached out to Fetterman to ask him about the discontent among some Democratic voters in his state, including over his support for confirming Attorney General Pam Bondi, he pushed back against the premise.
“There’s a lot of Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said, adding that he wouldn’t act like members of his party who held up signs during Trump’s recent address to Congress. “I’m not going to be one of those guys, but my values haven’t changed, and I’m going to be a reliable Democrat. I’m going to keep fighting for wins in Pennsylvania.”
Abigail Grimes-Haldiman of Elk County often joins Erickson knocking on doors. As a transgender woman, she feels the weight of this political moment but won’t cower, believing it is her “duty as a citizen” to canvass for causes and candidates aligned with her values. She grew up in a split political household, so she understands the complexity of coexisting with various ideological views. But when it comes to her own identity, she wishes Democrats would have more of a backbone.
“The Democrats have allowed the Republicans to take that narrative away from us and for us to be demonized to the point that everyone thinks there’s going to be a trans person that’s going to attack you on the corner when we’re less than one and a half percent of the population,” she said.
Frustrations like that are why some Democrats are training their ire on their own party.
“We’re the ones that put them in office, right?” McLaughlin said. “We’re kind of responsible for them. That’s who we should be going after.”
CNN’s Andrew Seger and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.
