WASHINGTON — There may be no second acts in American lives, but American politics is full of sequels. And 15 years after they starred in an electoral bloodbath, Democrats who faced tea party-filled town halls in the past say they’re watching a party-swapping reboot unfold today.

“There are some eerie similarities,” said Chris Carney, a Democrat whose Pennsylvania seat was one of 63 his party lost in the House in 2010.

In recent months, Republican lawmakers have been heckled and booed in some of the reddest parts of the country by constituents demanding they do more to oppose President Donald Trump’s moves to raise tariffs, fire federal workers, cut cancer research and pursue a “big, beautiful bill” that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, could kick 11 million people off their health insurance and add $2.4 trillion to the national debt.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa went viral last week when an audience member challenged her defense of the proposed Medicaid cuts by shouting, “People will die!”

“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst replied, eliciting groans from the crowd. Ernst later doubled down, releasing a sarcastic video on social media.

The clips reminded Carney of his own town halls back in 2009, when constituents, including many in his own party, came out to voice their displeasure with the stimulus bill that Congress rushed into law during President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office and Democratic proposals to institute a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gases and expand health care coverage. “Seeing this happen to Republicans now, it’s really interesting,” said Carney, who these days works as a senior policy adviser at Nossaman. “I guess history does repeat itself occasionally.”

Then, as now, lawmakers suggested to media that they were taking the flak in stride, unconcerned with what it might portend for their reelection chances: Speaker Mike Johnson called town hall hecklers “professional protesters,” echoing how Nancy Pelosi waved off the tea party as “astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America.”

But back in 2010, the Democrats who brushed off the blowback were either lying to the press or to themselves, said Earl Pomeroy, the last Democrat to represent North Dakota in the House. “You could feel a level of public concern that doesn’t usually present itself,” he said.

And Pomeroy suspects the same is true of Republicans like Ernst and Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who blamed his own hecklers on “Democrat operatives.”

“The party in power that laughs away or shrugs away overwhelming public response against the program will pay dues in the next election,” said Pomeroy, who landed at Alston & Bird after his defeat. “But ultimately, there’s a reckoning. And that’s Election Day 2026.”

If there’s a difference between 2010 and now, Carney and Pomeroy said, it’s what power the parties are willing to sacrifice.

Carney said he had no regrets trading his seat to get millions more Americans insured. “When I took that vote, I looked at one of my colleagues and I said, ‘I’m not going to come back. I’m not going to get reelected because of this vote.’”

Pomeroy doubted some Republicans would feel the same about the reconciliation bill the House passed last month. “Is it worth losing the seat over getting tax cuts to wealthy people and taking (health care) coverage away from poor people?” he asked.

Don’t call it complacency

There’s a kernel of truth in lawmakers’ skepticism, then and now. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed a torrent of corporate spending that flowed to Republican campaigns and right-wing groups, including many tea party affiliates. Today, some of the larger protests in the second Trump era have been organized by established progressive organizations, like Indivisible or local Democratic Party groups.

But a nascent grassroots movement receiving some support from establishment figures shouldn’t be confused with synthetic activism, said Zack Space, an Ohio Democrat who lost in 2010 after two terms. “There’s no question that many members of Congress who ended up losing their seats in 2010 did not fully appreciate the gravity of all that, until sometime (that summer). I’m probably one of them,” he said.

“There are some direct parallels between what happened then and what’s happening now,” said Space, who now runs a consulting and advocacy firm in Ohio. Democrats thought voters would come to support the Affordable Care Act once they realized it wouldn’t lead to death panels or be as disruptive to existing health care plans as some Republicans said — and they eventually did, but only well after 2010. Similarly, the National Republican Congressional Committee released a memo in May urging members to go on the offense with their messaging on the reconciliation bill.

Space was one of many Democrats who initially misread the protester-filled room. “There was a lot of — I don’t want to call it complacency, and I’m not sure I want to call it denial — but just a failure to really recognize the way that things were moving from a political, cultural perspective across the country, until it was just too late to do anything about it,” he said.

As unpleasant as facing down an angry crowd can be in the moment, the subsequent media coverage can be even more brutal, with clips of hecklers racking up millions of views. But skipping town halls, as many Republicans have done reportedly at the urging of NRCC chair Richard Hudson, may ultimately be worse, said Space. “That could be a mistake. I mean, I did not avoid it,” he said. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons I saw it coming by the summertime.”

The only real commonality that Democrats today have with Republicans in 2009 is how unpopular they are, said Guy Harrison, the NRCC’s executive director at the time, recalling a Time magazine cover featuring a GOP elephant and the title “Endangered Species.”

Recent polls asking voters which generic candidate they’d favor in the midterms give Democrats a slight edge: 3 points in an Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday. But similar polls conducted the year before Democrats gained 40 House seats in the 2018 midterms showed leads closer to 7 points.

Harrison, who’s now a partner at a political consulting shop, also argued that Democrats don’t have nearly as many soft targets heading into 2026 as the GOP did in 2010. Back then, Democrats represented 48 districts that Sen. John McCain carried in the 2008 presidential election. Today, there are just three Republicans in seats that Kamala Harris carried in 2024.

“We were going through a coalition shift at that point, and most of those seats that we won back then, we still own today,” Harrison said, adding that the GOP quickly revamped its flagging brand by recruiting fresh faces to run in 2010. “The Democrats (today) are looking at state representatives and state senators.”

Tea party, but for the left?

In time, the tea party transformed the Republican Party, paving the way for Trump’s right-wing populism. Space thinks today’s protesters might similarly guide Democrats out of their current state of despair. “The solution to the Democratic Party’s problems, associated with a lack of leadership at this moment in time, is likely to come from outside the party, much the same way that Trump eventually came from outside the party,” he said.

Rachel Blum has her doubts. The professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of “How the Tea Party Captured the GOP” doesn’t see a similar party takeover in the offing.

The tea party was an intraparty revolution — many participants were already local GOP activists, and their disagreements with Republican leadership weren’t ideological so much as strategic or tactical. After the initial flurry of Tax Day protests in 2009, they set about changing the GOP from the inside, taking over state party organizations and primarying moderates. Historically, left-wing activists have shown more interest in critiquing Democrats from afar rather than transforming it from within, Blum said. “That limits the amount of change that can be demanded from that party,” she said.

Moreover, it’s unclear how cohesive today’s outraged citizens are. Some of the town hall attendees have prefaced their heckles by saying they’re Republicans, and Democrats are generally less ideologically unified than Republicans overall, Blum said: “It seems to make them less vulnerable to a movement lining up with a group of organized party activists to completely take over the party.”

_____

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.