Democrats recalibrate on Jan. 6 messaging ahead of midterms

WASHINGTON — In 2024, Democrats campaigned on a message that democracy was at risk by highlighting the harrowing Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.

The warning, however, didn’t land with voters who were focused more on the cost of living than high-minded appeals about the rule of law and the fate of democracy.

Now, five years after the attack, the campaign dynamics of Jan. 6 have shifted in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

For instance, Democrat Robin Peguero, who worked as an investigator for the congressional Jan. 6 committee, says he seldom hears about the Capitol assault when he’s on the campaign trail in a South Florida district.

“The largest issue on people’s minds is the economy,” said Peguero, who is challenging Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar in the 27th District.

Following a series of stinging losses in 2024, Democrats are signaling that they intend to frame the riot — and Republican efforts to sanitize it and Trump’s pardoning of nearly all Jan. 6 defendants — as part of a larger narrative about political corruption and the president’s efforts to aggressively wield power to push his agenda.

But the cost of living, the expiration of health care subsidies and other economic concerns will remain the party’s focus in its quest to reclaim the House majority.

“We can’t ignore that it happened, and we can’t ignore why it happened,” said Brian Lemek, executive director of Defend the Vote, a political action committee that backs Democratic congressional candidates. “But we don’t need to relitigate all that all the time. We need to focus on what people care about today.”

Marking the anniversary

House Democrats will mark the fifth anniversary of the attack with an informal hearing Tuesday meant to bring attention to “ongoing threats to free and fair elections posed by an out-of-control Trump administration,’’ House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter to colleagues last week. The meeting will feature remarks from those who were at the Capitol that day and suffered lasting trauma, as well as from rioters who have since denounced Trump.

But even as the solemn milestone approached, Jeffries tied his message to the economy. He noted that Trump had pledged to address rising costs on the first day of his second term. Instead, the New York Democrat wrote, the president “issued blanket pardons and commutations to the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6th attack, including hundreds of violent felons who brutally assaulted law enforcement officers.’’

Trump and his GOP allies have sought to downplay the Jan. 6 attack, and some conservatives have spread falsehoods about the day, recasting those arrested as “political prisoners.”

Last fall, Speaker Mike Johnson gave the green light to a select subcommittee to continue a Republican-led reinvestigation of the events around the Jan. 6 attack. The panel, led by Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, has yet to hold a hearing.

While the anniversary has thrust the violence of the day back into the headlines, Democrats seeking to bolster their brand say they’ll keep the focus on kitchen table economic issues.

“The midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on who is going to lower costs and help improve the lives of everyday Americans,’’ said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The assault on the Capitol was part of Democrat Rebecca Cooke’s campaign message when she ran against Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in a purple district in western Wisconsin in 2024, and it’s a theme she has continued to strike as she once again seeks to unseat him.

Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL who was first elected in 2022, attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but has said he never entered Capitol grounds or the building. He later expressed regret over his attendance at the rally if it caused people to believe he endorsed the violence that day.

“Derrick Van Orden attended the January 6 Stop the Steal rally and refuses to hold town halls,’’ Cooke posted on social media last year. “I believe in showing up, answering questions, and respecting democracy.”

But the message is secondary to her main campaign theme, which is centered on a working-class populism and highlights her background growing up on a dairy farm and working as a server.

Diverging priorities

While concerns about democracy and fair elections continue to rank high among Democrats, those issues have found less traction with Republican voters.

An Economist/YouGov poll released in July found that 89 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independent voters viewed Jan. 6 as “a violent insurrection.’’ (Meanwhile, 51 percent of Republicans and 24 percent of independents saw it as “legitimate political discourse.”)

“Trump’s reelection made it really clear [that voters] were able to overlook that violent assault on our democracy to improve their day to day lives,’’ Lemek said.

But some Democrats say there’s room in their 2026 messaging for a corruption angle that includes invoking the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump “did whatever the hell he wants, and he’s going to try to do that for the next three years,’’ Lemek said. Democrats “need to put some blocks in place to prevent him from causing any more damage. “

Peguero, the Harvard-educated son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador, is a former homicide prosecutor whose résumé includes a stint as an investigator for the bipartisan select committee that investigated the Capitol riot.

“We did a lot of work on the committee to look into what happened in the lead-up to it [and] the signs that the intelligence community missed,” he said in an interview. “Then the first thing that the president did was to pardon carte blanche every single person, regardless of how violent their history might have been, regardless of how violent their crime might have been on that day. And we’ve seen, unfortunately, some of the folks who have been pardoned get into trouble again.”

Peguero said he sees a direct line from Trump’s decision to grant clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants to his hard-line immigration policies, which have ensnared American citizens as well as immigrants living here legally.

“We’re seeing a complete lack of due process when it comes to immigration,’’ he said. “People in positions of power are taking advantage of that power and using it for corrupt reasons. I think folks are very, very concerned about that.”