You really think a stink shouldn’t be made?

Of course a stink should be made. But if you don't do it smartly, it will end up making things worse. Again, the ridiculous (and ridiculed) performance of House Dems during the Joint Session is a small-bore example of that. Voting down the CR, and triggering a shutdown, is a larger-scale appallingly self-destructive way to do it. Schumer realized that, and tried to save the Democrats from making that mistake.

What can they do? I don't know what will be effective, TBH, because I'm old. At least, old relative to the people they need to get to. They're bleeding support from voters that aren't especially engaged with politics and old media. People who read newspapers or watch political news on TV aren't the ones that you need to reach, for the most part. I like the way David Schor put it:

We used to live in this world where in order to get your message out there, you had to get people who write really well to absorb your message and put it out. And now, we’re in a world where anyone can make a video and if that video is appealing, it’ll get out there. And this is naturally bad for the left, simply because the people who write really well are a lot more left-wing than the overall population.

https://archive.ph/kaMSQ#selection-1177.0-1177.409

"Write" in this context isn't just books or newspapers - it's people who write for television as well, the folks who wrote the copy for Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw or whoever. Voters are less and less consuming information about politics (or society) that has been written. Less and less of the information that reaches them has passed through the brain of a person who is paid to write. So doing the sorts of things that would normally engage the "writer class" isn't going to work, because the viewers of content with writers are skewing old and Democratic already.

I don't know, personally, what creates a "stink" these days among the audience you need to reach. Doing something on the floor of the Congress that will be covered a lot by the political press is almost certainly not it, which is why the Joint Session antics failed so thoroughly. Flooding the town halls might be working - but again, I get my news from sources that appeal to an old phart like me, so I have no idea whether that's actually penetrating or not.