What Democrats Can Do Now

What if Democrats learned how to tell a story, the way Republicans do?

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On February 22, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student was murdered while jogging on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. She was found in Oconee Forest Park near Lake Herrick, having suffered blunt-force trauma and asphyxiation. Her death sparked national attention because her killer, José Antonio Ibarra, was a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and had prior arrests. Ibarra was arrested at the scene, charged with multiple felony counts and was convicted by a judge last year.

During the 2024 campaign, Republicans heavily leveraged Riley’s tragic death to amplify their hardline immigration agenda. Donald Trump repeatedly invoked her murder in campaign speeches, portraying it as a direct consequence of the Biden administration’s “open border” policies and using it as a rallying cry across battleground states like Georgia. Two weeks after Riley’s death, Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Joe Biden’s State of the Union Speech by demanding that the president “say her name.” GOP lawmakers introduced and passed the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of theft or violent crimes. The legislation, which received bipartisan support, was framed as a necessary response to what Republicans described as systemic failures in immigration enforcement.

Fox News and other MAGA outlets highlighted Riley’s case to evoke public fear and justify expanded ICE powers. For Republicans, Riley’s story became both a symbol of policy failure and a powerful tool to mobilize voters and push sweeping detention legislation.

In short, Republicans are really good at story telling. As The New Yorker noted, the strategy to politicize Riley’s death resembled past GOP messaging tactics, including the Willie Horton ads during the Bush-Dukakis campaign. During Trump’s first campaign for the White House, he and other Republicans used the horrific death of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who was fatally shot in 2015 in San Francisco, to push back against sanctuary cities and for harsher border policies. Steinle’s killer, José Inez García Zárate, was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had been deported at least five times prior to her death.

In the Riley and Steinle cases, Republicans did not talk about the millions of undocumented immigrants who were living in the United States — nameless, faceless numbers to most voters. They found murderers who had taken the lives of two young, pretty American woman in their prime and made their cases the poster child for everything wrong with Democratic immigration policy.

Today, Congress is on the cusp of sending legislation to the president that will irrevocably harm the lives of countless Americans. Up to 17 million of them will lose access to healthcare if the Big Beautiful Bill is enacted, including children and seniors. 17 million is a huge number, almost too big to wrap your mind around. 17 million is a nameless and faceless number.

But what if Democrats learned how to tell a story, the way Republicans do? My friend and Over It! co-host

JoJoFromJerz

recently mentioned to me that Riley is a great example of storytelling in service of a policy agenda. And yet Democrats simply cannot bring themselves to get away from the numbers and find a living, breathing example to hold up as an example of who will be irretrievably harmed by this bill.

There are certainly enough examples of children with serious developmental disabilities who rely on Medicaid to thrive. There are enough examples of seniors who rely on Medicaid to treat their dementia in a nursing home and of their children, who now fear that they will have to care for their aging parents without having the resources to do it properly. There are enough veterans who will go hungry because their food assistance will be drastically cut and rural residents who need to live close to a hospital that will shutter as a result of these cuts.

Why have Democrats not put a face to this cruel law? We do not have to wait for its enactment, or for its worst provisions to take effect in 2027. The threat to people is now — as they fear for their children, their parents and themselves, as they try to figure out where to come up with the money to make up a gap that, for most, is an unbridgeable chasm.

In the years after World War II, most people did not grasp the horror of the Holocaust. Then, a book that would eventually be called The Diary of Anne Frank was published, first in Dutch in 1947 and then in English in 1952. It marked a significant turning point in Holocaust awareness. The diary offered a deeply personal and relatable account of persecution, shifting public understanding from abstract concepts of genocide to the lived experience of a teenage girl in hiding. It humanized the victims of the Holocaust in ways that raw numbers never could.

That is the power of story telling. Republicans learned it really well and have ridden it to unprecedented power. It’s time Democratic leaders put away the white boards and the academic recitations. It’s time they take their own faces off television and social media and put forward the people whose lives will be damaged by this brutal legislation instead. It’s time they learn to tell the story of how this bill will devastate Americans, one person at a time.