Chris Murphy needs blue America to wake up

“I’m gonna be everywhere that there are ears and eyes because I worry that we are sleepwalking into autocracy,” the Connecticut senator told me on Oct. 1, about 12 hours into a standoff that is entering its fifth week. His message? “None of us have an obligation to vote for a budget that funds the destruction of democracy.”

He had been waiting all year for a moment like this. Democrats, who control no branches of government, have spent the last nine months watching Trump steamroll his way through Washington, powerless to do much but squabble about who’s to blame. The shutdown, however, presented an opportunity to fight — or, at least, show voters they have some fight left in them. It also might be their last window to exercise any leverage before the midterms. “I don’t know that we will get another chance,” Murphy said, “and our democracy might be functionally gone by next November.”

His colleagues had framed the stakes in less apocalyptic terms. The party’s official position is that the shutdown is about preserving health care subsidies for more than 22 million Americans who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Fine. Murphy could talk about that, too. But that wouldn’t stop him from making the case that, really, the shutdown is about everything. “It’s all the same story — it’s the story of corruption,” he said. “The cutting of people’s health care to fund tax cuts for billionaires is corruption. The destruction of free speech in this country is corruption.”

Murphy has spent more than half his life in elected office and a third of it in Congress. He won his first election to the Connecticut state legislature at 25, his U.S. House seat at 33, his Senate seat at 39. (He was late, according to a timeline Murphy wrote as a high school freshman, when he’d predicted he’d make it to the U.S. Senate by age 37.) The 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, weeks before his Senate swearing-in, set him on a high-profile crusade for stricter gun laws that nobody, regardless of their views, could dismiss as insincere. Press articles during the Obama era invariably described him as a rising star on a meteoric trajectory, and in 2016 he was briefly considered as a potential running mate for Hillary Clinton. That spring, he took Clinton’s primary opponent, Sanders, to task for his stance on whether gun manufacturers could be held liable for shooting deaths.

Things are different now, and so is Murphy. Back then, he still resembled his official Senate portrait: The baby-faced 39-year-old who looked every bit the former class president he is (flop of brown hair, half-Windsor knot, know-it-all smirk). He’s now 52, with salt-and-pepper in his beard, a metal screw to relieve nerve pain in his leg and some nice things to say about the ornery gentleman from Vermont. “I think Bernie at his best is somebody who opens up to folks who have more divergent views on multiple social issues,” Murphy told me in May, during the first of several interviews for this story.

In fact, he sounds a lot like Sanders these days. Murphy’s preached “pugilistic populism,” encouraging his colleagues to defeat special interests by “aggressively unrigging the economy” and “aggressively unrigging democracy.” He’s railed against “consolidated corporate power” and “concentrated economic power.” If you can unite the Americans who feel screwed, he told me, there’s “a coalition that’s there for the taking.” A scholar of his party’s recent failures, Murphy has looked back on his crusade against guns with some regret — not the bipartisan law that finally passed in 2022 after a decade of effort, but the notion of political litmus tests that Democrats had developed around certain issues. “We got caught in a trap,” he said, “building towards something by being so ideologically pure as a party.”

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself: Is Chris Murphy running for president? The answer is no, he is not. The answer also may be: Maybe? Let’s come back to that in a bit.

For now, let’s just recite the common wisdom: The Democrats have a communications problem, an image issue, a leadership crisis. Forty-nine percent of self-identifying Democrats surveyed in a June Reuters/Ipsos poll agreed that they were unsatisfied with party leadership, and 62 percent agreed with the statement that “the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people.” Fifteen percent of those who responded to an August Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey described their party as “weak” or “apathetic.” The appetite for disruption has gotten bad enough that earlier this year serious people in Washington were talking about how TV personality Stephen A. Smith, purveyor of histrionic sports takes, could hold the cure. In New York, Democratic voters have rallied to Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, over the objections of many establishment liberals there.

“Everyone is auditioning for first chair right now,” says Democratic consultant Caitlin Legacki, . Even those who aren’t laying groundwork for a presidential campaign are trying to figure out how to communicate with the voters they will need to turn things around. On that front, Democratic politicians have a problem: They are Democratic politicians.

Where does that leave a Connecticut senator who’s been on the Hill for nearly two decades?

Everywhere. Murphy has gone viral in the first months of Trump 2.0 as something of an interlocutor of the New Resistance. His content — often, simple straight-to-camera videos that lay out, in clear if cataclysmal terms, how the president is infringing upon democratic norms — has earned him more than $11 million in campaign contributions, a wild sum for a senator who cruised to reelection just last November. He has also attracted the ire of Trump, who called him “stupid,” a “lightweight” and “very unattractive (both inside and out!)” in a recent Truth Social post. Last April, Politico ranked Murphy among the “most shameless attention-seekers in Congress.” Which sounds like a knock against him, unless you read “attention-seekers” as attention-getters.

“He’s consistently shown up to be a leader. We need a lot more like him. And I don’t say that lightly,” says David Hogg, a liberal activist and Democratic Party antagonist, who got to know Murphy in the aftermath of a 2018 mass shooting at Hogg’s Florida high school. “There are a lot of politicians who suck. Chris is one of the good ones.”

“Chris Murphy has probably has been owning the moment more than anybody,” says Adam Green, a progressive operative.

And yet there’s still the question of whether this moment belongs to a guy like Murphy.

“We track all the 2028 candidates. Our code name for him is The Vestryman,’” says Stephen K. Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast and longtime MAGA mastermind.

Bannon gives Murphy credit for trying to reflect the demand for economic populism, but “he comes across as an earnest vestryman at some Episcopal church in New Canaan, Connecticut,” he says. “He comes across as that kind of stiff. When he grew the beard we were like ‘Oh my God, he’s really going for it.’”

The Obama era is over, and the Connecticut senator is no longer a Promising Young Democrat. Nor is he the outsider some voters seem to crave. His longstanding relationships and Washington experience, once marks of a seasoned legislator ready for the next step, may now seem like baggage. “It’s a lot easier for outsiders to throw elbows and make bombastic statements about how you’re going to fix it,” Legacki says, “than it is when you’ve been in the system for so long.”

Murphy’s attempt to solve that problem may hold clues for Democrats trying to navigate the wreckage of 2024. The insider has become trapped — in a powerless legislative minority, in a submissive legislative branch, in a politics of reactivity and triage and utter frustration. Can he find a way out?

Did you see the van?” Murphy asked me, gesturing to a vehicle parked outside a printing store in New Milford, Connecticut.

He meant the one with the Trump-Vance sticker slapped across the bumper.

It was a soggy morning in late May, and I joined Murphy on his “Walk Across Connecticut,” an annual tradition in which the senator treks from one part of the state to another, always by a different route. In the popular imagination, if it is imagined popularly at all, Connecticut — the nation’s third-smallest state by landmass — is the uptight, try-hard of New England, little more than a chain of country clubs and gridlock one must endure between Boston and New York. In reality, it contains multitudes. Hence the pilgrimage: Murphy likes to get out of Washington and reacquaint himself with his constituents in their natural habitat.

I met Murphy on a rural stretch of highway near the New York border. Occasionally the wooded areas along the road would open upon a small business, and Murphy, in his usual Senate Casual uniform of a quarter-zip pullover and sweat-stained UConn baseball cap, would pop in and chat with the people inside. The son of a convenience store owner complained about the covid-19 lockdowns and asked Murphy how to get a license to sell recreational marijuana. The proprietor of the printing shop told him she’s trying to move because the state’s cost of living is too high — especially since she can’t compete with corporations like VistaPrint or Staples. “The first thing out of her mouth was about the big online companies squeezing her,” Murphy told me afterward. “You can’t go anywhere without hearing people complain about how concentrated economic power is making their lives more miserable.”

He was hearing a lot of economic anxiety and processing it through his populist lens. A diner owner’s high electricity bill could be explained by the local energy monopoly. Low enrollment at a rural elementary school could be blamed on a shortage of affordable housing. “Not everybody’s obsessed with what’s happening in Washington,” the senator concluded.

That evening, 10 miles down the road, Murphy held a town hall in a packed auditorium at New Milford High School. The attendees might also have been economically anxious, but the most enthusiastic among them seemed obsessed with what’s happening in Washington.

“The Democrats keep bringing a plastic spork to a nuclear missile fight!” said Liz Webber, from Danbury. “When the cheating Cheeto is, you know, putting a cash register in the White House, Chuck Schumer sends a strongly worded email!”

The next morning, back on the road, Murphy allowed that, yes, some people did want to talk about the Senate minority leader and how Democrats were (or were not) reacting to what Trump’s been doing in (and to) Washington. “I get it,” he told me, “Like, people are very unhappy about their inability to stop Trump outside of the courts, and they’re naturally going to blame the leaders who are in charge.” And truth be told, Murphy also has notes for his fellow Senate Democrats. He thinks they too often lend a “bipartisan veneer” to Trump’s norm-breaking.

In August, Murphy had been the lone Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee to vote against all spending bills, a protest against what he reads as the president’s disrespect for the legislature’s independence. From Murphy’s perspective, Trump “doesn’t give a f--k” what lawmakers pass, as evidenced by the billions in congressionally-approved funds the president has refused to spend. This shutdown fight? Murphy had wanted to have it back in March, when the previous budget deal expired. Instead, Schumer and eight other Senate Democrats voted with Republicans to let a stopgap bill pass to keep the government open.

“I don’t get what we’re doing,” Murphy told me at one point, walking a gravelly highway shoulder between the Housatonic River and oncoming traffic. “We are signaling to people that everything is okay!” He brought up a bill, then under consideration, that would regulate the crypto industry — but would also exempt the president of the United States from certain ethics requirements. That was a notable carveout, since the president’s own meme coin, $TRUMP, has, according to a Forbes, added hundreds of millions of dollars to his estimated $7.3 billion net worth. The bill passed the following month, with the support of 18 Senate Democrats — which Murphy thought was 18 too many. “Like, there’s not going to be a government to regulate stablecoin two years from now!”

Murphy, for all his pugilistic populism, is still a politician. Trump overtook his party in part by personally insulting every powerful Republican he could find. Such is the privilege of the outsider. Murphy is a creature of the Senate, a place where getting stuff done means getting along with your colleagues. He misses his friend Kyrsten Sinema, the former Arizona congresswoman whose moderate machinations made her the bane of progressives. (“I think she was unfairly maligned,” Murphy told me. “Very few legislators were as prodigious as she was in a short amount of time.”) As vocal as he is about the current state of things, he’s disinclined to pull a Trump and go at Democratic leaders directly.

“Well, I mean, that would be good for you guys,” he said when I asked about taking that route. He seemed to dismiss the the desire for Democrat-on-Democrat violence as a media kink. “I haven’t necessarily called out people by name, right?” the senator continued, “and I think the question, like — is that necessary to build a real political movement, or is that necessary to help people, you know, drive clicks?”

When it comes to criticizing his colleagues, he prefers to do it on his own terms. Yes to gesturing broadly at insufficient levels of Trump panic, no to publicly railing against specific teammates. Like many Democrats, he did not call on Dianne Feinstein to retire as she deteriorated before everyone’s eyes. Then, of course, there’s the Joe Biden problem. Murphy said that the former president “no doubt” had suffered cognitive decline while in office — in April 2025. (He did not publicly ask Biden to drop out of the race last summer, and had defended him as “effective” while acknowledging that voters needed reassurance that he was up to the job.) Earlier this month, Murphy endorsed the reelection of Rep. John Larson, his 77-year-old Connecticut colleague who suffered a partial complex seizure on the House floor in February.

Democratic party leaders tend to “talk about how ‘we need generational change — but not him, not me,’” says Amanda Litman, the president and co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits millennial and Gen Z candidates to run for office. “Chris Murphy should publicly call on his colleagues to retire. It would be incredibly uncomfortable, but he should do it anyway.”

But where Murphy can go from here may not be about whom he can distance himself from. It’s about whom he can connect with.

I want two things for my birthday,” Murphy told a packed music hall in Phoenix on the day he turned 52. “The first thing I want is: I want at least two House seats in Arizona for the Democrats. And here’s the second thing that I want for my birthday — I want the Epstein files!”

It was August and Murphy was on the road again — this time at a political rally in the southwestern swing state, which Trump flipped to red last year. He had been inspired by the anti-billionaire road show Sanders had been staging with a coterie of youthful allies, most notably his millennial protégé, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). So Murphy had recruited his own band of next-generation Democrats to put on some shows of their own. “I just think part of our job description right now,” Murphy told me before he took the stage, “is to take this fight everywhere.”

One of his opening acts had been Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas), whose sharp tongue and knack for going viral have made her popular with liberal voters. The crowd in Phoenix had laughed and whooped their way through her speech, going practically feral when she said: “I’m sure that the president would argue I’m America’s nightmare — but I want to give him as many nightmares as possible.”

Murphy had followed in khakis and a plaid shirt, looking more like a New England dad than ever. “I gotta make sure that I never, ever, ever again agree to follow Jasmine Crockett onstage,” he said. (The senator’s line about wanting the Epstein files for his birthday drew laughs, but not quite the reaction Crockett had inspired.)

Murphy is an admirer of many of the party’s younger prospects. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is “almost everything we need at this moment — she is authentic, she is unafraid, she is different, and she fundamentally understands the size and the scope of the threat.” The senator sees some of Zohran Mamdani’s proposals for New York City as “not entirely realistic,” but also recognizes that voters like politicians who talk about solving big problems with big solutions — no matter how bracing the democratic socialism of it all might be to normie Democrats. “I obviously get uncomfortable with some of the way that he talks,” the senator says, “but I also think that if somebody doesn’t make you a little uncomfortable today, they don’t look real.”

Does Murphy look real?

All in the eye of the beholder, of course, but here’s the view from up close: Murphy has his talking points and knows when what he’s saying won’t make for a sharp quote. He is charismatic, but not charming; his message is cerebral, his delivery serious, his face often twisted into a scowl.

“He tries to do that angry thing, and he’s not an angry guy,” Bannon says. “Oh, The Vestryman is gonna be angry? C’mon.”

Still, this does work for some Democrats — especially the ones who are, like Murphy, outraged and very online. He writes his own posts and films most of his own videos — from his Senate office, from his kitchen table, from the streets of D.C. — in a way that conveys real-time fury at furious moments. He might be unable to transcend his articulate angry dad vibe, but he doesn’t lapse into cringe. “So many Democrats sound like they’re auditioning for Hamilton,” says Dan Pfeiffer, a co-host of Pod Save America and former adviser to President Barack Obama, but Murphy doesn’t. Pfeiffer also credits the senator for not attempting to convey his arguments via TikTok dances.

Alex Bruesewitz, the 28-year-old consultant who helps run Trump’s social media, says Murphy’s content is terrible. “He’s too close to the camera,” Bruesewitz says. “No one wants to see his mug that up close and personal.”

Counterpoint: Murphy’s content is actually good, according to 28-year-old Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida), Congress’s only Gen Z lawmaker. “There’s always this question of, like, ‘What are we going to focus on? Trump’s doing so much,’” says Frost, who has co-hosted four town halls with the senator this year. Murphy has a gift for telling a simple story about what the president is doing and why: Trump is a billionaire overseeing a billionaire-led takeover of the American government. “You would see it click for people,” Frost says.

Words of affirmation is a love language for some liberal voters; others respond to acts of service. Which is not something every Democrat is well-positioned to do.

Lately, the ramparts of resistance are mostly being erected in blue states and blue cities, where local officials can tangibly stand up to Trump. Think Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker telling Trump to buzz off when he sent the National Guard to Chicago, or Newsom’s attempt to neutralize the Trump-backed congressional redistricting in red states with a Democratic gerrymandering effort of his own. Some Democrats want to see their leaders put their bodies where their mouths are — like Frost did when he showed up at Alligator Alcatraz, an immigrant detention center in Florida, demanding answers about what happens inside.

“Americans don’t want leaders in a moment of crisis who write strongly-worded letters,” Hogg told me. “They want people in the streets with them. They want people in El Salvador. They want people who are showing up at these detention centers.”

Hasan Piker, a lefty Twitch streamer whom Democrats see as in touch with the sort of young, online men they’ve been losing, doesn’t buy Murphy’s shtick. His favorite Chris in the Senate is Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who flew to El Salvador earlier this year to visit Kilmar Abrego García, an undocumented constituent whom the administration had illegally deported and imprisoned there. “He’s an establishment Democrat doing the right thing for his constituents — and I’ve seen him take bolder stances on Israel as well,” Piker told me, referring to Van Hollen. “It seems more organic than what I’ve seen from Chris Murphy.” (When I shared Piker’s thoughts with Van Hollen, who’s been friends with Murphy since 2006, the Maryland senator said: “Both Chrises are very much on the same page here.”)

On the cost-of-living front, “I have not seen anything from Chris Murphy other than a vague gesturing of beginning to commit to economic populism,” Piker says. Meanwhile, longtime Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett thinks Murphy’s demise-of-democracy arguments are “kindling to the progressive fire” and don’t speak to regular people. “If you’re talking about democracy, even if you mean it or are making fair points, this is not outreach to moderates or people struggling to pay bills,” Bartlett says.

The challenge for Murphy may be convincing people that he’s as devoutly committed to the needs of angry, disillusioned voters as he was to gun control. Especially if he wants to be president.

Does he?

“So, who do you think should run for president in 2028?” I asked, very smoothly, over lunch in Phoenix before the rally.

“Ask it a different way?” Murphy laughed. “I don’t think there’s going to be any shortage of candidates,” he said, equally smoothly. He seemed to understand what I was really asking, but ultimately he sidestepped both the question I’d asked and the question I hadn’t.

“I actually don’t think that my perspective on this is bullshit,” he said. His line on this has been that there may not even be a democracy by 2028, let alone a fair and free election. Better to focus on preserving the republic. I’d also heard him say that any jockeying among Democrats — to be a presidential candidate or some undefined Leader Of The Party — would undermine the common cause required to defeat Trumpism.

“I genuinely believe that the most important thing I can do right now is to try to raise my party’s level of urgency,” he said at lunch. The question of what comes next for him “will kind of take care of itself.”

He took a sip of Diet Coke. I said nothing.

“You don’t buy it,” Murphy said.

I reminded him that my question had been who should run for president — not whether he should.

“Yeah, I think that that’s, um …”

Murphy paused for several seconds.

“That job is a beast,” he said finally. “I mean, the job of running is. And having the job. You have to, you know — you have to know that you want to do both in your soul and in your gut.”

The question of what motivates Murphy has stalked him throughout his career. Early on, his success outpaced his sense of purpose. “Making waves, being known — wearing your passions on your sleeve — is generally a precondition for success in elected office,” he wrote in his 2020 book, noting that “the driving, personal connection to a cause or an issue that drove many of my colleagues had eluded me.”

Until Sandy Hook. The senator can draw a throughline from the political crisis that he spent most of his Senate career trying to solve and the one he’s trying to solve now. It has to do with alienation. He became curious about what motivates lone gunmen to commit acts of mass murder. “I spent way too much of my life thinking about Adam Lanza,” Murphy says, referring to the 20-year-old who shot and killed his mother, then 20 kids and six adults at the school, then himself. “It was so easy for him to withdraw, because he could withdraw into technology, he could withdraw into these ready-made online communities.”

Murphy’s 2020 book, “The Violence Inside Us,” explored the origins of American violence, in part, through the lens of the fraying social fabric of modern life. He started paying attention to the work of Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, the “Red Scare” podcasters, trying to understand the so-called “new right” critiques of economic growth and technological progress as advancements that only benefit elites. These days, Murphy thinks a lot about consumption and how it’s a poor salve for what’s really ailing us: a lack of community.

“Somebody once told me, whether it’s true or not, that the highest levels of happiness that anybody ever reports are after two events: sex, and dinner with friends,” Murphy told me in May, as we strolled through the wilderness. “And if you sort of think about it, that makes sense, right? You know, if you really think about what makes you happiest, it’s communion.” Lately, he says, he’s been trying be a better friend. More vulnerable, more available, more connected.

In November, a week after Murphy won his third Senate term, he and his wife, with whom he shares two sons, announced their separation. Earlier this year, Semafor reported that he was dating Tara McGowan, the founder and publisher of the “pro-democracy” digital media company Courier Newsroom. Both declined to comment. (“I mean, I don’t know — is that, like, a relevant question?” Murphy said when I asked about it earlier this month.) They are no longer seeing each other.

More than one Democrat privately mused to me about whether Murphy’s current journey is just a guy working out his midlife crisis in public.

“It’s an interesting observation from people who don’t know me,” Murphy told me in October. “I mean, listen, obviously I’ve gone through a lot in the last year. There’s no doubt that I’ve gone through some really hard life changes. Honestly, I actually don’t know whether that has anything to do with some of the filter coming off the way that I talk. I think that’s very possible.”

Growing older can have benefits. Even for a politician.

“I think maybe it naturally comes with age that you start to see things more clearly,” he said.

On Oct. 18, throngs of protesters turned out in Washington for a “No Kings” rally near the U.S. Capitol. Murphy was there, in his quarter-zip and UConn ball cap, looking and sounding like the politician he’s become, 18 years after coming to Congress. “We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover,” he declared. “We are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover.”

Affirmative cheers rippled through the crowd.

American democracy can still be saved, Murphy went on, “but no one’s riding to our rescue. And I just want to be clear with you about that today.” Not the mainstream media, not the oligarchs, and certainly not any Republicans.

“It is up to us to save us.”