The Killing of Alex Pretti Put Democracy Back on the Ballot
Minneapolis has convinced Democrats that the election can’t just be about affordability.
ARIZONA SEN. RUBEN GALLEGO was scrolling on his phone on Saturday, entertaining himself as he caught a flight back from an official trip to Taiwan. It was a relatively unremarkable travel day, until a video popped into his feed of 37-year-old Alex Pretti being gunned down by federal agents in Minneapolis. Gallego was horrified.
“I was shocked,” Gallego said. “It made me think back to my time in Iraq, when it was drilled into us over and over again to always try and de-escalate situations first.”
California Rep. Ro Khanna told me he was at home and “winced” when he saw the video, growing angrier as more details emerged.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker found out about the killing from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, before the news broke widely. The two connected on the phone before the footage went viral, with Walz warning Pritzker that the images were harrowing. An hour and a half later, Pritzker was in a TV studio getting ready to appear on CNN and MSNOW to talk about Pretti’s death.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s staff showed him the video in his office. They said he was viscerally enraged.
Democratic officials are accustomed to being shocked and riled by the news in the Trump era. But the raw response many felt to Pretti’s murder was substantively, emotionally different. Nothing else in Trump’s second term—not the Epstein files, or the DOGE cuts, or the raid on Caracas—has elicited this type of outrage from the party.
“It struck a nerve about the overreach of federal power in a way that I have not seen in my time in Congress,” Khanna told me Tuesday, the day after he traveled to Minneapolis to meet with protesters.
Why the killing of Pretti would have such a profound impact is, on its face, painfully obvious. The video of a protester being shot and killed by officers of the state was jarring for even the most hardened observer. But the moment also touched on a larger, more fundamental question that confounds the party: Is Donald Trump’s presidency something that can be (and must be) endured before things can return to normal—or is American democracy truly in peril?
For years, Democrats have struggled with this debate. It has impacted decisions to approve Trump appointees and votes to fund the government. Operatives have wrestled with how much to emphasize democracy issues during campaigns. Lawmakers have grappled with what kind of legislation they should prioritize—economic stimulus or “Trump-proofing” government reforms. And, for a period, a consensus appeared to be hardening around the idea that democracy and the threats to it simply weren’t good political fodder.
But Pretti’s killing and the lies peddled by the Trump administration in the immediate aftermath have altered that calculus. They’ve led Democrats to conclude that they can no longer dance around constitutional violations or the degradation of civil liberties and democratic norms.
“The horrifying nature of this tragic catastrophe—that Alex Pretti was killed almost like execution-style—it’s the purest demonstration of how our constitutional rights are to protect us from an overpowered government,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, told me. “This is a kind of seminal event. It’s a historic event—like people remember Kent State.”
HOW CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS RESPOND to Pretti’s killing will provide an early indication of just how seminal the moment was for them. Already Senate Democrats—including those who voted to keep the government open just a few months ago—have vowed not to fund the Department of Homeland Security without concessions from the GOP on reforming the department, making a partial government shutdown at the end of the week increasingly likely. Democrats in the House who voted to pass the DHS funding last week, meanwhile, began distancing themselves from it.
“I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” New York Rep. Tom Suozzi said in a statement. “I hear the anger from many of my constituents, and I take responsibility for that.”
Several Democratic officials followed Khanna’s lead in visiting Minnesota: Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton visited the state this week. Others told me that they believed that Pretti’s death, coming so soon after the similarly horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent earlier this month, had snapped swing voters into action over basic civil liberties being violated.
That’s a significant shift from where Democrats were a little over a year ago, when party leaders had concluded that the Biden administration’s warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy appealed only to an elite audience, and that a narrow focus on affordability was the path back to power. And it was underscored by Sen. Jon Ossoff, perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Democrat this cycle, who didn’t hold back when talking about Pretti on Monday in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“My opponents have a clear choice: do they stand with Trump or with Americans’ Constitutional rights?” Ossoff said. “I challenge each of them to condemn and demand an end to the Trump administration chaos that is undermining Americans’ core civil liberties.”
Will arguments like this work? Substacker Matt Yglesias noted this week that “The central paradox of our time is that the single most important issue on the table—Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and the conservative movement’s indulgence of those aspirations—is by almost all accounts a political loser.”
BUT THERE’S NOW AN EMERGING BELIEF among Democrats that voters can be pissed off and motivated by two things at once—namely, the cost of living and Trump’s blatant disregard for the Constitution. In fact, they believe that the connection between the two creates a vulnerability for Trump, that there is a perception among voters that Trump is distracted by his pet projects—from turning ICE into his paramilitary plaything, to gilding the White House in gauche gold leaf—rather than focusing on bringing down the costs of groceries, health care, and housing. Fundamentally, it is all part of the same story.
“The challenge right now [for Democratic officials] is to understand that this is not about immigration policy,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, arguing that the visceral shock caused by the video of Pretti’s brutal killing transcended questions about what a fair immigration system should look like.
“For a lot of people, democracy was kind of a theoretical concept. . . . The visualization of it just became much, much more vivid,” she said. “The public has moved very far, very fast here.”
As much as Democratic leaders have responded to the moment, there were some officials I spoke with who said they still feared that the party would not go far enough. Some said they were frustrated that more party leaders had not traveled to Minnesota in solidarity with protesters.
And some strategists were still a bit squeamish about the efficacy of “democracy” as a political argument. Instead they suggested that “civil liberties” was a better phrase for the party to use. But even this set still believed that voters were open to messages that they weren’t just a year—or even a month ago.
“When we talked about democracy’s degradation and undermining, we talked about the prosecution or threatening prosecution of people like Adam Schiff, the tampering with elections, the intimidation of people on the Fed. And most Americans thought, ‘Well, this doesn’t affect me. This affects an elite group of politicians and public servants and bureaucrats,’” Khanna told me. “Now they’re saying, ‘Wow, they’re shooting nurses, they’re shooting moms. Okay, this is something that has instilled fear in me. They’re coming after my life, my families, my communities.’”
Khanna didn’t go so far as to say that democracy has become a kitchen-table issue, but, he offered, “It’s no longer an abstract issue.”
