Chris Murphy makes his case to lead Democrats forward
Sen. Chris Murphy has made a name for himself as someone willing to chase bipartisan deals on some of Washington’s thorniest issues.
But weeks into President Donald Trump’s second administration, Murphy, D-Conn., has taken steps to put himself at the center of aggressive resistance to Trump — and to let his party’s rank and file know it. Murphy is spending heavily to advertise on social media platforms and is flooding the zone on television and podcasts, positioning himself as the tip of the spear of Democratic Party efforts to oppose Trump in Washington.
In an interview in his Capitol Hill office last week, Murphy embraced the idea that he’s on a new path after years pursuing a role as a Senate dealmaker and foreign policy expert. He argued his newfound push to oppose Trump is an imperative. And he bucked the idea that he’s essentially already mounting a shadow run for president — even as he acknowledged he’s looking to “build a movement all around this country” to mobilize against the “seizure of government by the billionaires and the destruction of our democracy.” It’s a theme he says his party needs to adopt to appeal once more to voters who decided they couldn’t back Democrats in 2024.
“This may look a little schizophrenic, having gone from spending two years writing big bipartisan deals on guns or on immigration to now being out front in trying to fight for the survival of the democracy and using really tough language about my Republican colleagues,” Murphy said, seated in the same spot where he records a majority of videos for his growing social media audience.
“When somebody is trying to grab power, when somebody is trying to destroy democracy, they benefit from people who are static, who refuse to be nimble,” he continued. “I mean, every Democrat could just continue to run in the same direction they’ve been running for the last 10 years. Or you could realize that this moment is different, that this threat is unique — and to me, you know, we don’t have another year to fight this attempt to destroy democracy. Our democracy might be gone in six months.”
Murphy is taking his new message to a variety of platforms, like the liberal “Pod Save America,” as well as hosts such as Brian Tyler Cohen and Mehdi Hasan; comedy hosts like Hasan Minhaj; legacy media outlets such as NBC News and The New York Times; and the conservative “Hugh Hewitt Show.”
And he spent more than $1 million on ads on Meta platforms in February alone, delivering his message directly to individuals. It’s more than he has spent on the likes of Facebook and Instagram in the last five years combined, a period that includes his 2024 re-election campaign, according to analysis by NBC News and the University of Pennsylvania Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies. Murphy’s aides said he has doubled his Instagram following during the last two months and seen a significant increase in engagement across platforms.
His ads have largely taken on the Trump administration’s early moves in Washington — attacking Trump and billionaire Elon Musk by claiming they are “illegally seizing power” and asking donors to help him bankroll a political movement to fight them.
“Chris needs your help right now to stand up and help build the kind of political operation across the country that we need to fight back against this hateful, destructive agenda from Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” an ad reads.
Murphy says in a video: “How can you help stop Donald Trump’s power grab? One of the things you can do is support people like me with a donation to make sure that we don’t have to spend time raising money, we can be fighting back against this illegal, unconstitutional power grab.”
But he’s not focused exclusively on Trump. Murphy also wants to lead the conversation about what has gone wrong for Democrats and how they can win again in the future.
“We have become the party of the status quo, when we’re not. We’re actually the party of change, the party of transferring power from powerful people to people who have no power,” he said. “I think that the traditional sort of political rules still apply. If we have people out on the streets protesting, if we’re overwhelming Republican town halls, if we’re lighting up the phone lines here, political gravity still exists.”
‘A debate happening within the Democratic Party’
Murphy just won re-election in the fall — and outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris in his state with a 19-point victory, having vastly outspent his Republican challenger. He won’t have to face Connecticut voters again until 2030, so he’s not crunched for time to raise cash. First elected to the Senate in 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, Murphy spent his first two terms in the Senate championing stronger gun laws. He eventually helped craft a historic bipartisan gun safety bill that President Joe Biden signed after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
More recently, Murphy was at the table with former independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, and Republican Sen. James Lankford, of Oklahoma, negotiating a bipartisan immigration deal that fell apart last year after painstaking, behind-closed-doors negotiations.
Now, Murphy told NBC News, the reason it seems like he’s trying to be everywhere is that he is.
“There’s definitely a debate happening inside the Democratic Party: Should you reserve power, sort of hold and wait and then jump out of the bushes when the moment is right? Or should you flood the zone, just like Donald Trump floods the zone? Should you be fighting every single day?” Murphy said.
“I’m of the school that you have to fight every day and that if you don’t, people aren’t going to think that it’s a red alert moment,” he continued.
Pressed about why he’s raising money for a political movement now, years from midterm or presidential election time, Murphy said that he wasn’t “shirking from this moment” and that he would “use those resources to try to help build up a movement and try to buttress mobilization all around the country.”
He pointed to the aggressive efforts rallying against the unsuccessful GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 to argue that the party’s posture of “resistance” can work. But he added that the “traditional political resistance to the billionaire takeover of government” needs to come in concert with an attempt to “rebuild the party.”
“If I and a handful of others [in the party] are going to step into leadership roles, then hopefully we’ll be able to do it in a way that helps push back against this corruption,” he said.
Murphy name-checked a handful of Democrats in Congress he believes “can go out there and lead a movement.” They include New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Texas’ Jasmine Crockett and Maryland’s Jamie Raskin in the House and New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith (who is retiring in 2026) in the Senate.
Murphy was cautious not to rebuke Democrats’ congressional leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, who Murphy said have “difficult jobs” because the party is so “diverse.”
Tracing Democrats’ problems to 2020
How Democrats decide to rebuild their party depends on their theory of the case. The party is grappling with whether November’s losses were thanks to unique forces — such as problems specific to Biden and his historic decision to step off the ticket months before Election Day — that don’t require Democrats to undergo a full-scale makeover or whether, in fact, the 2024 election shined a light on systemic issues with the Democratic Party’s brand that require a wholesale shift.
Since the days after the election, Murphy has made it clear he believes the latter description is closer to reality. He said the seeds of Democrats’ losses last year were sown before the Biden administration, pointing to the 2020 election. Democrats erred that year, Murphy said, by treating progressives such as Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as “a threat to the party.” And while Biden’s campaign found success that year pointing to the idea of restoring democracy as a closing message, Murphy said the time frame had the unintended effect of making it look like Democrats “were supporting this version of democracy,” which he described as one that’s slanted toward “corporate interests and billionaires.”
“If I have one critique of the 2020 election campaign,” Murphy said earlier in the interview, “it’s that the tent pole of that campaign was democracy, saving democracy, not breaking up concentrated economic power. And in retrospect, I think that was a mistake.”
He added: “That economic message, the message that speaks to a lot of things that Bernie Sanders talks about, is a unifying message in this country. And a lot of people in the Democratic Party tried to make it sound like Bernie was divisive, when, in fact, Bernie’s message, still to this day, speaks to a lot of folks that voted for Donald Trump, a lot of folks that we would love to have back in our camp.”
Taken together — the massive increase in spending on digital ads and fundraising, the media push, the focus on building a movement and diagnosing what has gone wrong with his party and how to fix it — Murphy sounds like someone eying a presidential bid in 2028. He brushed the idea aside when he was asked, saying, “Maybe part of the reason that some of my stuff and messaging is breaking through right now is because I don’t have that ambition.”
“I just wake up every day and say what I feel and I think, and it sort of feels to me that these days, authenticity is the only thing that matters in politics — that folks will actually let you make a lot of mistakes as long as they feel like they’re hearing you genuinely,’ he said.
Being president is “just not in my brain at all right now,” Murphy added. It “sounds like a pretty hard, miserable job.”
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