“I’m sure Donald Trump wishes it was old news, but it’s bringing it up again to mark the dreadful anniversary of the first attempted coup d’etat in American political history, at least presidential history, bears a harsh reminder,” Democratic strategist Brad Bannon told the Washington Examiner.

“I think Jeffries’ idea is a stroke of genius,” he said. 

But not all in the party agree with this sentiment. 

A Democratic staffer told the Washington Examiner, “Democrats ran on ‘Donald Trump is bad for democracy’ in 2024, and while true voters decided affordability and cost of living were more important, I worry that putting too much focus on something that happened five years ago, however horrific, distracts from the issues that everyday Americans are focused on right now.”

The staffer added that it’s not an “inherently bad idea,” but he does not “know if it’s going to resonate with anyone outside of Washington.” 

Others believe the success of the effort will stem from the motives behind the hearing and the expected outcome.

“It all depends on what the goals of the hearing are,” Sammy Kanter, CEO of Democratic political strategy company Girl and the Gov, told the Washington Examiner. “Is it to put facts on the record? Is it to bring eyes and ears back to a critical change point for people on Trump and the GOP? Is it to create a sense of pushback against the admin or underscore a contrast? There’s a laundry list of possible goals that goes beyond these, of course — the benefit analysis, regardless, depends on which of the goals they’re trying to achieve.”

After a year of deep division between the parties in the House, Jeffries said the GOP has tried to “rewrite history” in the years following the riot.

“We will examine ongoing threats to free and fair elections posed by an out-of-control Trump administration, expose the election deniers who hold high-level positions of significance in the executive branch and detail the threats to public safety posed by the hundreds of violent felons who were pardoned on the President’s first day in office,” Jeffries wrote of the hearing’s priorities in the letter. 

“I think it’s a good idea, because it reminds Americans of the chaos that Donald Trump has created and his threat to democratic institutions,” Bannon said. 

Exit polling from the 2024 election showed that many voters for former Vice President Kamala Harris ranked “threat to democracy” as an important matter. An election analysis from the law firm Kelley Drye concluded that voters who said democracy was their top issue voted around 80% for Harris compared to 18% for Trump. 

While “threat to democracy” ranked high in exit polls from 2024, the matter skewed to the left. Democrats are fighting to appeal to voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in an effort to flip the House or the Senate to break up Trump’s trifecta in the last two years of his second term. 

The matter surged after the president made massive, controversial, blanket pardons at the beginning of his second term for many Jan. 6 defendants, charged with taking part in the 2021 insurrection of the Capitol.

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House Democrats formed a panel after the Jan. 6 riots to investigate and attempt to prosecute people connected to the event. The panel was joined by two dissident Republicans, former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney massively lost her next primary, while Kinzinger retired before he could face a challenge.

The panel sought to garner public support for prosecuting the president and his associates in a series of hearings in 2022 with the help of former Trump allies.