The Democratic Party is still figuring out how to meet this moment.

And we spoke to three Democrats, all launching first-time bids for national office in 2026 about what they think their party needs to do to win.

STATE SEN. MALLORY MCMORROW (D-MI): I'm Mallory McMorrow.

I'm from Royal Oak, Michigan, and I'm running for United States Senate.

JAKE RAKOV (D), California Congressional Candidate: My name is Jake Rakov.

I am -- live in Studio City, and I'm running for the 32nd Congressional District in California.

KAT ABUGHAZALEH (D), Illinois Congressional Candidate: I'm Kat Abughazaleh.

I'm from Chicago, and I'm running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois.

MALLORY MCMORROW: It is not enough to say Democrats are not in power right now, but just vote for us hard enough in the midterms.

People want to see that you feel what they're feeling, that you feel the fear and anxiety and frustration and anger.

KAT ABUGHAZALEH: Every single authoritarian movement thrives when the opposition party refuses to actually stand up to them.

Anyone that's taken a middle school history class knows that appeasement isn't effective.

JAKE RAKOV: My opponent, Brad Sherman, has been in office for almost 30 years.

He's in his 15th term.

He was elected in 1996, when I was 8 years old.

I think people who have been in power for that long and have so checked out of the district as he has is why we got Trump twice.

And so I'm running against him to bring a new generation to Congress to actually show those people who left our party that we are still a party of progress and still a party that's going to work for them.

KAT ABUGHAZALEH: A lot of Congress didn't grow up with school shooting drills.

They don't worry about out-of-pocket expenses.

They probably own their homes.

And that's not the case for most of Gen Z. MALLORY MCMORROW: The idea that you can't afford to buy a house, that you don't have job security, that you may not have health care, that you may not be able to afford the things that came easier to our parents is a reality for me.

That means that I respond very differently than perhaps some members of my party who have been in office for many more years, who have come up in a very different time.

KAT ABUGHAZALEH: And that the strategy is to stand back, hands off until 2026 and hope enough people get hurt that they will vote Democrat in the midterms, that's not only morally repugnant.

You are banking on people being hurt by this administration.

But it's also stupid, because you're letting Trump dismantle this country.

JAKE RAKOV: We all knew he was going to be a chaotic, he was going to be unstable, he was going to do power grabs.

And to see how slowly they were to respond in the first few months, I think, upset a lot of our base and a lot of other Democratic voters who looked around and said, what are you doing?

Do something.

Do anything.

MALLORY MCMORROW: This is about approach.

Are you somebody who fights or are you somebody who sits back?

Are you active or are you passive?

Do you have the ability to break through, meet people where they are and talk to people in a real, human way?

And that is my lane.

I know how to break through.

I know how to communicate with people.

JAKE RAKOV: We have to have these conversations in our safest districts.

We have to be able to fight amongst ourselves and have this discussion as Democrats where we know we're going to talk to our base and be strongest before we can even go into a swing district and hope of converting people and bringing back in people into the party that left us.

KAT ABUGHAZALEH: Democrats need to stop reacting to Republicans and just get back to basic humanity.

We should all be agreeing, both parties, that the baseline is housing, groceries and health care with money left over.

It's just common sense that, in the richest country in the world, in what many consider the greatest country in the world, that we should be taking care of our citizens.