Make damn sure and talk to all your friends about voting.

And for goodness sake, go out and talk to your neighbors and coworkers and fellow parishioners about why we need a Democratic Congress, just like the young people in Serbia and Brazil did. We win by organizing and talking to people we don’t usually talk to, not just by talking to all the people we already know agree with us.

Let’s do everything we can to fight the good fight. There are 11 Senate races and at least 15 congressional races still too close to call, along with scores of Governor, AG, and other statewide races; and probably hundreds of state legislative races.

Don’t forget that after Election Day is over, Republicans will probably try all kinds of bullshit to steal our votes, so be ready to do whatever it takes to make sure the results of this election are honored.

But with Election Day this close, while driving to your door-knocking assignment or in between your call times, we need to start thinking about what’s next. And that will require thinking about what has been happening these last couple of years.

Grand pronouncements and the real lessons of the 2026 election

Once the results are in next Tuesday night and Wednesday, and very likely even before, everyone in the political world will be making grand pronouncements about what it all means. Most of those pronouncements are being written already, but mine won’t be published until after the results come in. Most people will go to their respective corners to tell a completely predictable story based on their pre-existing view of the world.

I will be a part of these discussions, have been every post-election period since leaving the Clinton White House way back when. I will come into the discussion with my usual strongly held biases — that a populist, anti-establishment message works better than mushy establishment centrism; that working-class voters who live outside of big metro areas are at least as important swing voters as upper income suburbanites; that base and swing voters both respond strongly to an economic focused message; that strong field and social media organizing is more effective than spending all your money on TV, etc. Expect to hear all that post-election.

Hopefully, though, we can get everyone to look honestly at the important things that happened in the election, even while they spin the story however they were planning to spin it before. We have to be honest with each other if we are going to win in 2028. Whether this is the blue tsunami all of us are hoping for, or some good victories but something disappointingly more modest, we need to take a hard look at what worked and what didn’t.

Just as importantly, Democrats need to acknowledge that our best messenger, our best independent expenditure project, our best strategy, was Donald Trump out on the campaign trail. Our wins this year were because of the perfect storm of Donald Trump’s idiot policies and Donald Trump’s idiot messaging, like the ‘don’t worry about gas prices, the big oil companies are raking it in’ line.

What we have already learned

Without knowing the results yet, there are a couple of things 2026 has already shown us.

First, Democrats can compete even with all the billionaire, big corporate money going against them. Forty-six of the top 50 donors to politics have given exclusively or overwhelmingly to Republicans. The biggest donor by far, easily the biggest donor of all time in one political cycle, Elon Musk, is throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars and all his social media company’s might against us.

Yet somehow, Democrats are hanging in there. We are being badly outspent yet are still in the game, are right now favored, to win a majority in both the House and the Senate.

A side note here: for my entire 40-year career in national politics, I have heard from some Democrats that we can’t afford to be too tough in terms of taking on big money and corporate power, because we wouldn’t be able to raise the money we needed to raise to win. In this election, Democrats are showing that even with all the big money going against them, they can be competitive.

Second, we have learned that Democrats (and progressive populist Independents) can still compete with working-class voters and in rural America. We are currently competitive, running well enough with working-class voters in rural and midsize towns to have a solid chance in Senate and/or governor races in 10 red states: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. We are strongly competing in House races with far more rural turf than we ever thought possible. Nationwide, we are far more competitive with non-college White voters and with men than we have been in many years.

Third, we learned that a message tying rising prices to political and corporate corruption had the power to bring voters to the table- both base and swing voters. More and more Democrats figured this out as the campaign went on, and by the end I felt like I was seeing it in almost every ad and debate clip I was seeing. Long before politicians figured it out, voters have figured out the deep corruption that big money donors have poisoned our system with, and they were looking for us to speak to that corruption. Now it’s time to do something about it.

But aren’t Democratic gains just because Trump is so unpopular?

The answer is certainly partly yes. Democrats shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back for our strategic brilliance. Voters who used to be thought of as part of the Democratic base — Hispanics and young people, for example — should be considered swing voters, not solid base voters. Working-class Whites and non-urban voters came toward us, but still are highly skeptical of Democrats. The double haters who moved toward the Democrats are still double hating. And Donald Trump’s terrible policy decisions and horrendous messaging choices were far bigger factors than anything national Democrats did to win this election.

Nonetheless, going forward, Democrats have a very big opportunity. Trump has broken his electoral coalition, and it won’t be easy to put back together. For many years, pundits have been sure that America is too polarized a country to have states and districts vote one way for a president and the other party for someone of the opposite. This election will likely prove them wrong.

Democrats need to build on the economically populist, anti-corruption, paychecks and prices message they won elections with this cycle. They need to continue to do organizing and social media with young people and Hispanics. They need to build on the rural and working-class outreach work outside of the usual suspect states and districts they did this time. And when we win a trifecta in 2028, we need to deliver major structural reform to Americans desperately looking for it.

We have the chance to make 2026 and 2028 realigning elections if we build on what we did this year, and then deliver — really deliver — big change in 2029.

Another story: I was in a doctor’s office the other day and heard one of the staff talking in very animated terms with other staff members there about how the president had taken away her and her son’s health care insurance. When she took me into the doctor’s office later, I asked her if she was voting and she said, “I’ve never voted before, usually just left that to my sister because she’s more interested in politics than me. You think it makes a difference if I vote?” So we had a good talk about the importance of voting and what is on the ballot this year.

Make no assumptions about who is voting. Even people you know who talk a lot about politics and issues, even the folks who are on social media all the time bitching about Trump, even the ones you see at rallies, might for whatever reason not get out and vote without a gentle push from their friends. I have noticed this especially in polling and focus groups I have seen about young people: because they are cynical about politics, they think more about social media commentary and demonstrations as their way to change things than they do about voting. Or maybe they aren’t focused on the fact that Election Day is coming up. Or maybe they’ve never voted before and are a little intimidated by the process. Maybe they are juggling three jobs and don’t feel like they have time. There are lots of reasons people don’t vote.

So whatever else you are doing to help in this year’s election (and thank you for everything you might have done so far), make damn sure that everyone you know who shares your political views is voting, and make sure everyone you know who might be on the fence gets a final talking-to from you about the election. Some people call this “relational organizing,” I just call it organizing. There are even great tools to help you organize your work like this one from Swipe Left.

And even if you are the sweetest, kindest, most affable person the rest of the year, don’t be afraid to be a little annoying this time of year. Most people you talk to will scoff and say “of course I’m voting.” That’s okay, better to be annoying than to let votes slip away.

One other note: while my focus here is on reminding like minded people to vote, work your persuasive skills as well. You almost certainly know people who are still wavering on who to vote for. Reach out to those friends and colleagues and neighbors as well. Talk to them about why you are voting for Democrats, and how important this election is. Answer their questions. (On these conversations, it is better to be less annoying.)

Nothing is more powerful in politics than hearing from people you know about issues, candidates, and campaigns. Don’t assume anything and don’t be shy. After all the money you have given, all the doors you have knocked on, or calls you have made, getting your own voters out may generate as many votes as anything you do.

But more than any specific biographical achievement, as significant as they were, was that no one ever fought the good fight for justice as hard or as brilliantly or as passionately as Becky Ogle. Every rally, every protest I ever went to with Becky was far more fun because of her joyful protests, including taking off her prosthetic leg and pounding it on the doors of corporations discriminating against people with disabilities. And she was one of the funniest people ever. She made working on serious, important issues fun, which is the best thing a good organizer can do.

Becky kept track of every disability rights group and leader in the country who knew how to organize. She could tell me the strengths and weaknesses of every group, locally and nationally, what they could bring to the fight.

A native of Tennessee, she had no use for DC elites who didn’t understand real people’s lives — what they needed from their government, how they talked, why they acted the way they did. People did what she asked them to do because they saw that she knew them and cared about them.

Becky was ill in one way or another much of her life, in and out of hospitals on a very regular basis. But somehow she never let that slow her down. Her fire and energy remained high through all her travails. Her spirit always remained strong.

It is always a blow to lose a warrior for justice. I will miss Becky Ogle for all of the rest of my life. Hopefully her love for the fight will now be felt by all of us touched by her great life.

To: Democrats and progressive leaders
From: Celinda Lake and Mike Lux
Re: Strategy for 2026 endgame

As we head into the final month of the 2026 election, the two of us wanted to make some final recommendations on endgame message and political strategy, both for persuadable voters and turnout targets.

The Opportunity Election

This is an opportunity election. We have the opportunity to have a historically dominant election year, breaking into red states and districts in a way that we have not seen since the 2006-8 elections, and importantly, win elections in the states that were swing states for Clinton and Obama but have swung heavily Republican over the last 12 years: Iowa and Ohio.

However, for all the exciting polls all of us are seeing, we are not there yet. In the closing weeks, the Republicans will be spending massively and attacking aggressively, especially on culture war issues in social media. Democrats have to overcome the negative feelings about our party by both base voters and swing voters. We have to get young voters and other base voters to turn out and vote, and we have to show working-class swing voters we really are on their side.

The good news is that most base voters and swing voters respond strongly to the same set of economic issues. We believe the way to insure a big victory at the polls is a strong dose of economic populism- not just talking about affordability, but being specific who the villains are and how to solve the problem: by stopping the war in Iran which is driving up prices, by cracking down on price gouging and the corporate abuse of power, and by driving down health care and drug prices, forcing the utilities to lower their rates, and by raising wages so that people can afford what they need.

Base and swing voters are both driven by economic pressures and anti-establishment anger.

Neither base nor swing voters feel like Democrats have an economic plan that will help them cope with their increasingly economically stressed lives. Base voters are motivated to turn out against Trump, but without a strong sense that Democrats will actually fight to make their lives better, we will not get the truly extraordinary turnout that is still possible.

Democrats need a narrative arc that links a rigged economy to a rigged politics. This is more than just an affordability agenda or cost narrative. It is populist, putting Democrats clearly on the side of real change against a corrupt establishment. It provides us a structural analysis of how we got here.

Another critical factor for the end game message specifically relates to base voters, which is that we will need a powerful populist message to help us turn people out. The field and GOTV work historically being done by the 501c groups will be happening far less than usual because donors have not put money into this part of the ground game in the way they have done in the past.

Even if more money comes in the final weeks to do this work, all the groundwork not done earlier in the year will hurt our turnout efforts. This means we need an especially sharp message to motivate voters in the final weeks. Mushy, generic messages devoid of hard hitting stories about why things are so out of whack and how to solve those problems are not going to produce the turnout we need.

Voters that Democrats have considered part of their base in the past that moved away from us in 2024, especially young people, Latinos, and Black men, are moving back our way because of their anger at Trump. That is the good news. The threat is that the Republican social media infrastructure targeting these pockets of voters is still very strong, and Democrats need to not assume they are automatically with us — we need to keep inoculating them from attacks, and on working to make sure the ones supporting us get to the polls.

Swing voters, as they tend to be, are complicated. They live in every demographic cohort, but most of them are working-class people because, well, most voters are working-class people, and most higher educated professionals made up their minds about Trump long ago. Women over 50, Catholics (both white ethnic and Latino), and residents of rural areas and small and medium-sized working-class towns are the biggest groups of swing voters in this election.

Cultural touchstones matter to these voters, and culture war politics still have a bite. The culture war is the Republicans’ version of the populist narrative. It doesn’t have the power that it did in 2024, but it still helps them compete by energizing their base and gives pause to swing voters about Democrats. Prebuttal and inoculation strategies are really important, and not speaking down to folks is critical: we need to show these voters that we are not insensitive to their legitimate concerns.

However, in this moment especially, campaigns should keep laser focused on the fact that working-class families’ lives and attitudes are dominated by economic pressures. Working-class swing voters are cynical, angry, and deeply anti-powers-that-be — not only in terms of being anti-incumbent, but in terms of their anger at the billionaires and wealthy corporations they think are abusing their power.

Solutions vs General Rhetoric

There are many in the political world who argue that in these times, vibes matter more to voters than issues. We want to push back on that idea.

Because voters are so cynical, and because they are inundated with one ad after another, we believe they are rebelling against traditional generalized political rhetoric. Democrats need to connect specific acts of corruption to specific outcomes that hurt their own families, e.g. because the Republicans took money from Big Pharma, Medicare is still not negotiating enough on drug prices.

It’s not enough to say you will fight for the people; you need to say what specifically you are going to fight for. It’s not enough to talk about affordability, you have to name what and who are driving up costs, and how you are going to deal with those problems, e.g. big food companies are price gouging, and you are going to fight to abolish price gouging and force more competition in the food industry. You can’t just talk about the problems — people already know what the problems are; you have to talk about the solutions.

Another key point: don’t just talk about affordability in terms of prices. People know that rolling back prices is not easy and will not happen overnight: they want their wages to go up, too. Make bigger paychecks a central part of your economic plan: a living minimum wage, better jobs, and making it easier to join unions, which are at an all time high in popularity. Voters want you to fight against corporate profiteering and price gouging, but they also believe that higher pay is central to them having a better life.

And be specific about who the villains are, too. Too many Democratic politicians shy away from naming the corporations abusing their power and making life more miserable for people, but the people being hammered by higher utility rates, higher gas prices, and jacked up grocery prices know who to blame, and when politicians are hesitant to name the those companies, they think those politicians may be bought off by them.

Tell voters your economic plan, and who you are going to fight for and against.

We think that Democrats as a party made a mistake earlier in this cycle in not creating and talking a lot about an economic plan for the next Congress if we win a majority. Americans are desperate for solutions for their economic problems. They know they don’t like what Trump and the Republicans have done, but they also don’t think Democrats have a plan to make things better.

The good news is that many outstanding Democratic candidates are talking about their economic plans, and we believe that the strength of our candidates and campaigns can carry us to victory.

Do not make the assumption, though, as you close this campaign that just because the working-class voters your campaign is talking to are angry at Trump and the Republicans for high prices and the war that they will automatically flock our way. Many of them are still angry at us, too.

Your campaigns need to show them that you have a plan — a specific plan — for getting us out of the mess we are in, and that you will stand up to the special interests and the establishment to fight for that plan — and for them. That doesn’t mean getting down into the weeds or using inside-the-Beltway talk about policies, but you need to be clear about how you will work to improve the economic stress they are under.

Don’t take anyone for granted in this election. This is an angry, cynical electorate, and they are being manipulated by social media disinformation.

We believe that the potential for a Democratic landslide is building, but we also believe that the deal is not done. The difference between this being a good year — one where we pick up just enough House seats to win a narrow majority and add a couple of Senate seats, but don’t regain control, versus a Democratic landslide where we pick up at least 20 House seats, half a dozen or more Senate seats, and several governor seats and state legislative chambers — is in whether Democrats finish strong.

Democrats need to show that they are fighting to improve working families’ lives. If they succeed in telling that story, this could be a year where our gains exceed 2006 and 2008, and where the gains go deeply into red turf.

Every once in a while you see a quote that really captures the point of view of your opposition really nicely. We got a doozy over the weekend.

In a Washington Post story with the headline “Major business group hits road to stamp out socialism,” we hear about about a political tour the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is launching to go out to more than 30 House and Senate districts across 20 states to preach the gospel of modern capitalism.

In the story, the Chamber president and CEO gives us this gem:

“As Americans feel challenges, they seem to look for other solutions. We can’t let that happen.”

God forbid we let people look for solutions to problems like not being able to afford their housing, utilities, health care, groceries, or filling up their gas tank; like wages that don’t keep up with inflation or allow us to live a good life; like the hundred different kinds of junk fees and hidden costs that nickel and dime us to death; or like the big corporate monopolies keeping farmers and small businesses from being able to earn a decent living.

The solution the Chamber of Commerce offers is don’t look for a solution, because apparently everything is just fine the way it is.

There is nothing wrong with fair market competition with lots of different competing companies and products, governed by rules of the road that everyone has to live by, with cops on the beat to make sure the cheaters and scammers go to jail. However, when companies start getting too big, too economically and politically powerful, and begin muscling out their competition, they corrupt the system and it stops working for consumers, working people, and the whole society.

Unfortunately, that is where the modern form of capitalism has devolved. Massive corporate conglomerates have almost all the power, including the power with their huge piles of cash to corrupt the politicians who are supposed to be overseeing them.

Because our corporate overlords are offering no solutions, that gives progressives a big opportunity, because we do have solutions:

• We can increase the minimum wage to $25 an hour.

• We can make labor unions much stronger, and make it easier for workers to organize them.

• We can aggressively enforce antitrust laws and break up the monopolies that are price gouging and crushing small and medium sized businesses.

• We can lower health care costs and make health care available to everyone.

• We can aggressively regulate Wall Street and Big Tech, especially the AI and crypto companies.

• We can help small local businesses flourish with a combination of small business loans; incubation and coaching resources; tax credits rewarding good practices like higher wages; and increased help in fighting monopolistic tactics.

• We can provide families far more resources for child care and elder care.

• We can save and enhance Social Security by taxing the wealthy at the same rate on Social Security taxes as working people.

  
  

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The Challenge Ahead of Us

Our big business opposition makes life easier for us when they tell people to stop looking for solutions for the havoc the current economic system is wreaking in their lives. However, the challenges in front of us are still big. The crazy piles of money being spent on elections, lobbying, and PR are high hurdles to overcome every day. The law-breaking, authoritarian fascists running our government will do anything to stay in power.

And voters, even though they are economic populists and with us on most issues, remain skeptical about the role of government, and have mixed feelings about many different issues. A New York Times piece talks about this dynamic: voters don’t line up in neat ideological groups. They are with the progressive movement on some issues, not so much on others.

The other thing is that on many issues, a lot of voters are genuinely torn. On immigration, many voters want a strong, secure border and the deportation of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. At the same time, they sympathize with immigrant families, don’t want to deport people who have lived here for decades and built businesses and families, and don’t want ICE rampaging through neighborhoods shooting people. Their tendency is to trust the police and prosecutors, but they don’t want people’s right to a fair trial taken away. They don’t like the idea of people born as boys playing girls sports, but don’t want kids bullied and demonized either.

This is why they are called swing voters.

The answer is not mushy moderation, or carefully treading around issues so that it looks like you don’t believe in anything.

To reach the voters we need to reach, we must listen to their concerns and have genuine dialogue about why we believe what we believe — and always, always pivot back to the idea that we are going to fight the wealthy and powerful on their behalf.

That combination is the formula for turning a good Democratic year into a great one, and turning 2026 and 2028 into a realignment.

That line has been quoted a million times since the movie came out. It captures a cold blooded, tougher than nails attitude that modern capitalism loves. Probably not coincidentally, “The Godfather” came out in the early 1970s, at about the same time of the circulation of the infamous Powell Memo to corporate leaders about building a pro-corporate political and intellectual infrastructure. It’s also when economist Milton Friedman’s declared that a business’ only obligation is to shareholder profits.

We can see where this philosophy has led us — into an economic marketplace dominated by massive monopolistic companies seeking to control more and more of not only the economy, but government and society.

Democrats over the last half century have too often been reluctant to challenge this economic system. Some Democrats have even embraced parts of this crony capitalism, supporting trade deals that corporate America loved even though they screwed over workers, bailing out banks that got too big to fail, but not working folks losing their homes, and walking away from antitrust enforcement.

The combination of giant predatory corporations and this soulless profits-before-people philosophy has created the greatest income inequality and concentration of wealth that our country has ever seen. Most Americans are feeling the impact, and getting angrier and angrier about it.

This poll from Navigator is just the latest in a long line of polls I have either seen or helped conduct myself showing the intense anger at corporate abuse of power. Elected officials ‘allowing waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars’ tied ‘protecting monopolies and large corporations that limit competition and price gouge consumers’ as being the top reason voters think inflation is happening.

The third ranked reason is election officials ‘allowing lobbyists and special interests to have more influence than ordinary people.’ Oil and gas companies, drug and health insurance companies, and Big Tech are seen as being the most involved in corruption. The poll also reports that “cracking down on price gouging and prosecuting corporate fraud are seen as the most effective ways to address corruption and lower costs.”

This anger is not new, but it has intensified over the many polls I have seen, as inflation is outpacing wage increases, and families are being hit at every turn by higher costs: groceries, gas prices, utility prices, housing costs, and junk fees from corporations in every industry.

It’s not about being anti-business, it’s about reining in corporate power.

Even with all this passion from voters, Democrats remain wary of being too hard on corporate America. Some of this is because of corporate contributions and/or the fear of wealthy super-PACs coming after them, but that is not all that is going on. Democrats don’t want to be seen as anti-business because of the complicated feelings Americans have about business as their employers, and providers of useful goods and services.

Here’s what the polling shows as the most effective way to talk about what is going on:

1. Champion small business as pillars of the community and an engine for economic growth. As much as they despise the corporate abuse of power and influence over our government, voters love small business. They see locally owned businesses as pillars of the community and essential to rebuilding healthy local economies. Democrats too often just pay lip service to small business, but we should be fully embracing a platform of helping small businesses to grow, and protecting them from the monopolistic practices of the biggest companies.

2. Praise the businesses that are doing right by their employees and the community. Businesses that are paying their employees good wages and giving them good benefits (especially those with unions who have a good relationship with the union), contributing to social services and the arts in the local area, and not cooperating with some of the worst aspects of the Trump regime like ICE should be lauded for all the good they are doing.

3. Make it clear that what you are fighting against on their behalf is corporate concentration of power and abuse of power. Democrats do not need to hold back on their attacks on corporate monopolies, corporate price gouging, and corporations exploiting their workers or trying to bust unions. The polling is clear: people are mad as hell, and they want politicians who will fight for them. If voters know you support small business and the businesses that are good community members, they will have no problem with you going all out populist in blaming bad corporate actors for what they are doing to people.
   

Focus on the Tech Titans

Big Tech is in the news right now. The bill to clear the way for crypto to have a free hand at taking over most of the financial industry just died an ugly death in the Senate because Trump and other crypto scammers got too greedy. Even Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (along with 22 state AGs) is saying Amazon is screwing millions of small businesses.

The fight over data centers has exploded nationwide to become arguably one of the biggest issues in the 2026 election. AI execs are saying that their Frankenstein creation may be too dangerous to control soon and could wipeout humanity. More and more news articles exposing the total creepiness of the tech oligarchs are coming out, like this one in the Times. And there is a big, controversial documentary coming soon on Elon Musk from acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney.

Democrats: you literally cannot go too far in terms of telling the story about how tech oligarchs are hurting our communities. These people are comic book villains, every bit as bad as Enron execs, Bernie Madoff, and the 2008 robosigning scammers. They are the Epstein class personified (many of them in fact had close ties to Epstein). And everyone knows who they are – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are household names. You should be talking about them every day on the campaign trail, using the pictures taken of them at the Trump inaugural. There is no downside to being a champion of the working class willing to fight for them against these scumbags.

Don’t Be Shy

Democrats need to be talking about business on the campaign trail. Talk about small business and good guy companies in your state as the heroes of the story that you will fight for, and the Epstein Class of corporate CEOs who abuse their enormous wealth and power as the people you will be fighting against. Don’t pull back; don’t be mealy mouthed in telling this story.

One quick anecdote: when pollsters were running dial tests during President Biden’s second State of the Union speech, tracking what voters were thinking about what he was saying while he said it, he was mostly getting a great response. The dial was on the positive side for pretty much the whole speech, except for one time: when he had a couple of sentences praising some big corporations for some good initiative they had done. Voters were apparently too mad at corporate America to give them credit for some nice thing they had sponsored.

Democrats do not need to hold back. Voters are pissed off at corporations abusing their enormous power. We have a chance for a genuine realignment over the course of the 2026 and 2028 elections, if only Democrats seize the moment.

The passing of Dolly Parton, one of our era’s most beloved people by just about everyone, has been a good reminder of how powerful simple human kindness is. She supported the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote a song that talked about accepting gays and lesbians in her family, praised drag queens, and appeared in a feminist movie about sexist bosses oppressing the women who worked for him, and was as beloved by conservative Republicans as she was by everyone else. Dolly had shown too much kindness and love to too many people for anyone to attack her.

Dolly’s human decency reminded me of a story from my family. My brother David was a Methodist minister in the Nebraska Conference for 40 years prior to his retirement. There was a big fight in the Methodist Church over the marriage equality issue nationally for many years, but it had flared up especially hot in Nebraska in the late 1990s because a minister in Omaha officiated a lesbian marriage service, which was still against church rules. My brother was unlucky enough to be the head of the Nebraska Conference’s Judiciary Committee, so he had to be right in the middle of the fight..

David at the time was the minister at the North Platte Methodist church. North Platte has both the strong conservatism of a western Nebraska town combined with an intense blue collar culture coming from being a railroad town, so gay marriage in the 1990s wasn’t what you would call a popular issue with the congregants at his church. But David gave a sermon one Sunday, which I was lucky enough to be there for, telling people why he was in favor of marriage equality. I have always been proud of him for the courage it took to give that sermon.

Being the curious political person I am, I asked a lot of the churchgoers that Sunday what they thought of the sermon. A small number said they agreed with David on the issue, but mostly what I heard was some version of “I’m not sure I agreed with your brother, but I didn’t mind what he said. He is such a good man…” Then they would tell me about David being there for their family when someone died or got sick or went through some terrible thing in their life. Because he had been there for them, they were willing to listen to what he said and still wanted him to be their minister.

That decency reminds me as well of my consulting partner Heather Booth. Heather is a legendary organizer, coalition builder, and progressive movement leader, but one of her greatest assets is her decency. People want to follow Heather’s lead not only because she is smart and skilled, but because they love her. She pulls people together more skillfully than anyone I know because she recognizes everyone’s humanity. And she is the first to call you on your birthday, the first to call when she hears you are sick or have had a loved one die, the first to offer help when you are struggling.

When I was about five years old, I had figured out that there was no Santa Claus who flew around with reindeer in a sleigh. There was a girl in my class that I was mad at, so I told her that Santa didn’t exist. When my mom heard this story, that was the angriest she ever got at me. She told me that cruelty was the greatest sin there was, and that kindness was the most important virtue. And that was how my mom lived every day of her life.

Those of us who care about politics and policy debates would do well to think about people like Dolly Parton, Heather Booth, my brother, and my mom. What they teach is that the power is not all about winning the debate, being clever on social media, or raising the most money. We all need to remember to build community, to help people who are lonely and not doing so well. Being kind is at least as important as being clever, in politics and in life.

We have a long way to go and many hurdles to overcome before Election Day, and then likely after as Republicans try to scramble to invalidate election returns. Trump’s team of authoritarian fascists is looking under every slimy rock for ways to cheat on an election that looks bad for them. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and a hundred other right-wing billionaires are going to spend billions of dollars to try to win this election, so that nobody in DC ever does any oversight on their attempts to control the world.

Aside from Republican shenanigans, there are the Democratic Party’s on-going, every election weaknesses: we spend too much on TV and not enough on organizing and organic social media; we have not built the kind of media and social media infrastructure the other side has; party leaders have failed to unify us around an economic platform that could excite people outside the Beltway (especially the working-class voters we need).

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So yes, there are certainly a lot of obstacles to victory. But even with all those very real hurdles, something is going on out there this year. I spend a lot of time reviewing polling in the Senate races, and yes, we are in good position in the state everyone is watching. Democratic candidates are either ahead or in the margin of error (depending on the poll) in Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Michigan, Texas, and Alaska. If we win them all, we control the Senate with an extra seat to spare.

But even beyond those most highly targeted races that everyone is looking at, there are a bunch of very red states that the polls tell us we have a shot in. There are at least two recent public polls showing Democratic Senate candidates within the margin of error, tied, or even ahead in Iowa, Kansas, and Arkansas. In Mississippi, there is a poll showing Scott Colom, the Democratic Senate candidate, down only six, so just outside the margin of error. He is an impressive candidate raising a lot of money and building a strong field organization on the ground. And in Nebraska and South Dakota, there are working-class Independents who are running even in the polls — against Republican incumbents, with no Democrat on the ballot to divide the vote.

The candidates in all these races are really appealing and impressive, mixing compelling biographies and a strong populist message with campaigns doing great work in social media and on the ground. They are talking about real things that happened to them, like Hallie Shoffner from Arkansas speaking passionately about having to give up her 5th generation family farm because the farm economy is so bad. Or Dan Osborn in Nebraska recounting getting fired after he led his union’s successful strike. Or Adam Hamilton in Kansas describing what it was like to build a small Methodist church from the ground up and turn it into the biggest Methodist church in America, and about how being a minister has taught him how to solve problems and bring people together.

What It All Means

Think about the stats mentioned in this article for a minute. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won Maine in the last two elections, the only one of these states won both times. Biden and Ossoff won six years ago in Georgia, and Harris came relatively close there. Biden and a Democratic Senate candidate won Michigan, and Harris almost won it. Though Biden and Harris lost North Carolina, both were competitive in the state.

So four states with big Senate races were at least competitive for Dems in the last two presidential elections. But every other state listed here — Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas — were all massive blowouts for the Republicans in the presidential races in 2020 and 2024. Let’s take out Ohio and Alaska, where we have strong candidates who have won statewide elections within the last decade, and who competed very well in the statewide elections they lost in 2024. The other seven states — let me repeat that, seven states — have not been states where Democrats have had even a ghost of a chance in the last several elections. And the polling right now is showing them to be winnable races for the Democrats.

I would never tell you we are going to win all or even a majority of these seven races. Democratic Party and progressive movement infrastructure is very weak in these states, and the Democratic brand is in terrible shape. The Republicans and their corporate/billionaire allies will be out-spending us by a ton. We have let races like these slip away many times in the last decade plus.

But folks, when this many red states, when the Plains states going down to the deep Republican South, are this close in the polling two months out from the election, something is bubbling out there.

Democrats need to not let this opportunity slip away. We need to speak to the rural and blue collar voters in these states, talking to them about the kitchen table issues that matter the most to them. We need to move the resources needed to compete — and in most of these rural states, it wouldn’t take that much money to run a strong campaign. We need to talk about an agenda that makes sense to them, so that we aren’t just the anti-Trump party.

In 2006, the sixth year of an unpopular Republican presidency bogged down in a badly managed Mideast war, with an economy starting to show some serious cracks, Democrats shocked the hell out of everyone by not only picking up 31 House seats, but by winning six out of the seven most closely contested Senate pick-up opportunities. We can match or exceed that victory this year, because things are bubbling out there.

Is it a “holy shit, we are going to win a sweeping victory” year? It’s up to us.

Some candidates have gotten around this problem by quite literally walking away from the party label. Dan Osborn in Nebraska, Brian Bengs in South Dakota, and Bill Hill in Alaska are running in red states as Independents. (There are some other Indy candidates around the country as well, but these three seem like they have the best chances to win.) In a year where Kamala Harris lost Nebraska by over 20 points, Osborn only lost by six, and he is currently tied in this year’s Senate race. Bengs and Hill are tied in the polling in their races as well. If any of those guys win their races, you will probably see a lot more Independent candidates running in red states in 2028.

But in the American electoral system of two dominant parties, there are big challenges to running as an Independent. Most center or left-of-center candidates, even in red states, chose to run as Democrats. So how should Democratic candidates in tough states and districts talk about the Democratic Party?

I am not one of those Democrats who think candidates should just fly their Democratic flag with pride and not worry about the brand. A candidate’s job is to win their district/state, not defend the brand of the Democratic Party, and voters right now have a ton of cynicism about our party. If you are from a red or lean-red place, you need to show that you are independent enough to criticize Democrats.

But what I would advocate is that Democratic campaigns make those criticisms in a way that doesn’t attack the whole party, worsening our brand and depressing Democratic turnout.

One example is the first from the WP article: Roy Cooper saying that “he bucked his party to oppose defunding the police.” I have long been on record saying that I thought “defund the police” was one of the most politically tone deaf slogans of all time, so yeah, Gov. Cooper, criticize that policy all you want. But to say you “bucked your party” in opposing it is just wrong: I doubt that there were even 5% of Democratic candidates or elected officials nationwide that ever said they supported anything resembling defunding the police. It was a slogan thrown out there by a few lefty activists, not by very many Democratic office holders or candidates. Suggesting that most or all of the rest of the party was for defunding the police hurts the entire party from top to bottom.

How about saying something like: “Some national Democrats said they wanted to defund the police. I said no, and led the North Carolina Democratic Party in rejecting that idea.” That way, he helps not only himself but other Democrats who are running in the state.

Mary Peltola has the smarter approach: “I’ll take on anyone, including Democrats… who doesn’t understand what Alaska needs.” It acknowledges that there are Democrats nationally who don’t get how Alaska works, but the ad doesn’t denigrate the entire party.

The approach Iowa Senate candidate Josh Turek takes doesn’t criticize the party, but just talks about how bipartisan he is. This is not harmful to any other Democrats, but I have my doubts on how many votes it will get Josh. Everyone says they like bipartisanship in general, but it is an insider process word that doesn’t mean much to regular people. Voters want to know whether you fought to get prices down, created jobs in the area, kept their hospital from closing, not whether you were bipartisan on some generic pieces of legislation they don’t know anything about.

Here’s another suggestion: I have no problem taking issue with some of the more extreme slogans of what some people are calling Woke 1.0 social issues. However, economic issues are the most persuasive with working-class voters. I would call out Democrats who supported bad trade deals like NAFTA (which working-class voters in focus groups still bring up as a terrible idea), or who bailed out Wall Street in the financial crisis. Mentioning issues like that will matter more to voters who are hungry to know what Democrats will and won’t support on economic issues.

Having the debate over what the Democratic Party should be at the right time

We have seen a vigorous debate in Democratic primaries this year over where the party should go related to corporate power, Medicare for All, what to do about AI and data centers, policies toward Israel, and many other important issues. We are going to have that debate, robustly, after this election is over, as a score of potential presidential candidates position themselves and make their case as to why their agenda and message are the right ones for Democrats to embrace. I look forward to that debate, and certainly plan to be a part of it.

But right now, with early voting starting up just a few days from now in North Carolina and other states to quickly follow, it is time to focus like a laser beam on turning out Democratic voters, persuading the persuadables, and racking up as many Democratic wins as we possibly can. If we net four Senate seats, we can stop any more right-wing judicial nominations or cabinet officials from being confirmed. If we net four House or Senate seats, we can stop any more terrible budget bills from being rammed down our throats.

Our democracy is on the line, and this election is our opportunity to turn the tide against Trump’s awful version of fascism. Now is not the time to attack each other and throw out goofy rhetoric. And I’m talking to everyone here. Any progressives out there still talking trash to Democrats who have already lost their primary races for taking too much Big Tech and AIPAC money, you can focus on that after Election Day, don’t keep hammering away right now.

As for the Third Way and pro-Israel folks who are loudly whining about Democratic Socialists and Hasan Piker, just stop until after Election Day. Seriously: Democrats who are obsessing about the shitty things some goofy influencer who supports El-Sayed once said are just helping the Republicans right now.

I don’t like some of the shit Piker says either, and not just about Israel. But I guarantee you that Mike Rogers is supported by plenty of sexist, racist, antisemitic assholes, and I don’t hear anybody talking about that. To wit, there is a Christian Nationalist billionaire funding Rogers’ super PAC who reportedly told the former Jewish Texas House Speaker that “only Christians should hold leadership positions” in that body. Now that is some blatant antisemitism that deserves to be denounced.

Left-of-center folks are not going to get everything they want if Democrats win control of Congress, not even close for the next two years. But Democrats winning majorities and chairmanships mean so many more things are possible, and so many more things can be stopped. We need the Senate to block new right-wing judges and cabinet officials from being confirmed, and we need both houses to win the budget fights we need to have. Now is the time to unify.

After the election, hopefully we can celebrate our big wins and take a breath, and then we go to the mats on the 2028 debate. For those of us who like a good fight, that will be fun. But between now and Election Day, our fight is with the Republicans, not each other.

The difference between those results - and the 2024 election - was the populist, working-class voters left behind.

After FDR’s four consecutive landslide victories from 1932 to 1944 (and corresponding dominance in congressional and state legislative elections), no Democratic presidential candidate had gotten over 50% of the vote twice until Obama. He also left office with a high approval rating and has stayed popular ever since. And yet, the party he led was utterly crushed in his two midterm elections while in office, and the election following his two terms — we went from having a 37-vote edge in the House and a 60-40 Democratic Senate to Republicans having both houses of Congress along with having gained over 1,000 seats in state legislative chambers around the country.

Barack Obama ran as an economic populist and got working-class votes as a result.

The difference was that the candidate Obama built a powerful three-legged electoral coalition. Everyone knows that Obama got a record turnout and percentage of Black voters, along with high percentages of Latinos and Asian-Americans; and that young progressive urbanites flocked to his campaign banner as well. But Obama also got 45% of the rural vote (tying Clinton’s 1996 performance as the highest percentage by a Democrat in the modern era), and he won the midsized Factory Towns of the industrial heartland — Pennsylvania and the Midwest. It was winning those kinds of voters that not only allowed him to carry the traditional swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in these elections, but also Ohio and Iowa twice, and Indiana in 2008, He almost carried Missouri in 2008 as well.

Sit for a moment with the thought of how different American politics would be if all of those states were still competitive for Democratic presidential candidates.

Obama did not govern as an economic populist, but he ran as one in both of his campaigns. In 2008 and 2012, he ran against the ultimate avatars of the political establishment, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, as the change candidate. As Wall Street was melting down, he promised to be tough on the big banks, borrowing policy ideas and rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren.

And in the 2012 campaign, President Obama gave a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt had given his famous New Nationalism speech calling for the economic reforms that would become the basis for the New Deal when his cousin Franklin took office a generation later:

I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.

Obama was pitch perfect as he ran against Mitt Romney’s history as the head of Bain Capital, a hedge fund that bought up companies, stripped them of their assets, laid off their workers, and sold their spare parts like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. When Romney’s infamous 47% tape came out, Obama’s campaign jumped on that in a populist fashion.

That economic populism convinced enough working-class rural and factory town voters that Obama was on their side to carry him to majority vote victories twice. Having a Wall Streeter like Romney as a foil also really helped in 2012. But the Obama administration’s decision to bail out Wall Street and let the bankers keep their bonuses, while forcing unions to renegotiate contracts to save the companies they worked for, was a ticking time bomb. The perception was that Obama bailed out Wall bankers, but not regular working folks.

In one exit poll I saw after the 2010 election, about 25% of voters thought the bad economy was Obama’s fault, another 25% thought it was Bush’s fault, and 44% thought it was Wall Street’s fault — and Democrats lost that segment of the electorate 2-1. The rise of Trump and far right populism in those years can be traced directly back to our lack of focus on working-class voters.

Beyond the policy dynamics, Democrats generally thought it was very cool that Obama had done so well with people of color and young voters, and were less interested in all those working-class voters he had once won. But without them, Democrats are a minority party.

Adding the populist working-class voters leg back to our coalition, and re-energizing young progressives as well

A reporter the other day asked me about what people are starting to call the Bernie-dogs (a combination of Bernie and Blue Dogs), candidates from working-class backgrounds who sound like Bernie Sanders when it comes to economic populism, but also project a more moderate image that makes working-class swing voters more comfortable voting for them. Candidates like Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, Brian Poindexter in Ohio, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, Sam Forstag in Montana, Bill Hill in Alaska. These guys talk like normal people talk, focus on the everyday kitchen table issues voters actually give a shit about, but also have a compelling critique of how corporate abuse and concentration of power is hurting regular people’s lives.

These candidates remind me of a poll I did a while back, where we asked voters how they felt about different kinds of labels for Democrats: moderate Democrat, centrist, progressive, liberal. You know what label got the highest approval rating? Working-class Democrat.

In this era of arrogant billionaires and corporations that have built huge monopolies and interconnected oligopolies, Democrats need to show that they will fight these powers that be on behalf of everyone else.

Everyone else, by the way, is a very big number. Forbes counts 989 American billionaires; other estimates put it at around 1100. Even if you add in all the family members hoping to inherit, and all the high level execs working for them and getting great salaries and stock options; add in all the nutcases who think of Ayn Rand as their guru; add in all the Christian nationalists who want the government and their fundamentalist church to be merged, and that it is time to repeal women’s suffrage... Add up all those people, and everyone else is most of the population. We ought to be able to win a majority of voters if we show that we will fight for them and solve their problems in a common-sense way.

I hear the pushback already: what about all those businesspeople who are too moderate to want a fighting-for-the-people approach to politics? There are some of those, but I am finding more and more wealthy Democrats who are deeply concerned about how the Big Tech companies are trying to take over all aspects of American life and business. I have had three different conversations in the last few weeks with wealthy Democrats, including one of the wealthiest and most successful of the Democratic businessmen I know, who talked in ominous terms about Big Tech monopolies trying to take over everything.

The anti-monopolist tide is rising everywhere.

The formula that allows us to energize the populist Left and working-class swing voters at the same time

DC pundits who talk endlessly about the divide between the Left and the center in the Democratic Party don’t understand that the center to them is not the same as the center for voters. The DC center focuses on what makes lobbyists and donors happy, but the voters in the center of the American electorate are working-class populists who don’t like corporate lobbyists or either party’s establishment.

The reason working-class Democrats and Independents have such great appeal is that they talk in the common-sense language of regular folks about the kitchen table issues most voters care about, but also understand that corporations and billionaires gaming the system and abusing their power really pisses people off. Standing up to those who abuse their power energizes and excites young progressives and Democratic base voters, but it arguably is even more appealing to working-class drop-off and swing voters.

The signs are everywhere. Republicans are panicking at the anger over AI data centers and begging the Big Tech companies to come up with a message that saves their candidates. A poll in one race I was briefed on the other day showed that the best message in that race was one of pure anger at the utilities and their outrageous price hikes. Voters are expressing outrage at Big Oil’s windfall profits since the beginning of the Iran War. The cost of groceries is making people irate at the big food companies. People are expressing huge amounts of support for wealth taxes and closing corporate tax loopholes.

Democrats need to think more ‘bigly,’ to steal from the opposition: stop making the goal 50 plus one, while ignoring huge swaths of the country. Winning by incredibly narrow margins by eking out votes from college graduates and minorities in urban and exurban areas is not sustainable for the party in the long-term. We can start winning again in places like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, the Rocky Mountain West, and the Plains States if we broaden our appeal to the same working families who used to vote for us at least some of the time a generation ago, before we forgot who those voters were. Those voters don’t like what they perceive the Democratic Party has become, but if the Democrats in those races express the same anger at the powers that be that voters have, our party will have a great November.

But as a lifelong card-carrying member of the progressive wing of our party, while I am happy about these victories, I am not spending a lot of time celebrating until Democrats win enough general election victories to take back the House, the Senate, or both. And we have a long way to go.

Jesse Jackson often said in the 1980s and ‘90s that the Democratic Party needed two wings to fly. He was a progressive happy to throw elbows and have vigorous debates with the establishment wing of the party, but he also understood the importance of coming together.

How Progressives Win Competitive General Elections

I am deeply tired and irritated by all the doom-and-gloom centrists writing off the chances for El-Sayed, Troy Jackson, and other progressive primary victors to win in competitive seats. It hurts the party and hurts our chances in those races, and it is also just bullshit. These are 50/50 districts, states, and elections, whomever the Democratic and Republican candidates are. Every candidate and campaign has challenges. The centrist candidates would have had just as many challenges as the progressive victors, just different ones.

But for progressives to win they have to run smart campaigns. They can’t just turn out the lefty urban base in higher numbers, be clever on social media, and sail to victory — the numbers do not add up. We need a No Arrogance Rule for all of our candidates and campaigns. Our campaigns need to reassure skeptical voters about whose side they are on, listen to those voters about what matters the most to them, and offer substantive ideas about how to improve their lives. Candidates also need to inoculate themselves against the nasty Republican attacks they know are coming, so that voters understand what their values are and that they are not out-of-touch, crazy extremists.

In the primary voting, and in the early general election polling I have seen, El-Sayed is not as strong as he needs to be with Black voters, with rural voters, and with the people I have been working with for years, what I call Factory Town voters — working-class folks from small and medium-sized towns whose lives have been upended by deindustrialization, the opioid crisis, and several years of inflation.

All of the categories of voters I mentioned above are populist voters who are focused on getting a better break from this economy. El-Sayed can win them, but these are cynical people, burned by a hundred politicians making promises that never improved their lives. He is going to have to show he gets it, and that he cares about them.

The other thing progressives have to do to win is to genuinely reach out to the people in the other wing of the party. We can be clever on social media without being so arrogant or making so much of fun of people who should be our allies. Some Democratic primary voters voted for Stevens because potent attack ads instilled fear that El-Sayed was genuinely rough on women. Some worried that a progressive or a Muslim couldn’t win the general election. These Democrats are not bad people, and we need their votes to win this race. Michigan supporters of El-Sayed should reach out to Stevens supporters with open hands and hearts, and welcome them to the table.

Bridge Building Between the Progressive and Establishment Wings of the Party

Throughout the age of Trump, we have heard a lot from party leaders about how we have to all unite, at all costs, to keep Trump and his followers from destroying our democracy. They were right. Now is when the rubber meets the road for the Democratic leadership. Party leaders need to embrace the progressives who win primaries, and show that they are going to do everything possible to help them win those races.

I have heard rumors that the DSCC and Senate Majority PAC are going to hold off on offering full financial support in the Maine and Michigan Senate races, in spite of how urgently we need those seats to have a chance at winning the majority. If that rumor comes to pass, it would be a nightmare for party unity going into 2028.

I was the main liaison to the progressive community in the Clinton campaigns and White House, was the Progressive Liaison for the Obama-Biden Transition Team, and informally helped play that kind of role in the party for many years. My business partner Heather Booth played that role for the Biden campaign in 2020 and Harris campaign in 2024. I can tell you from personal experience that there has always been a lot of tension between the progressive and establishment wings of the party, but the tensions don’t have to devolve into open warfare.

After Democrats didn’t turn out in the disastrous 1994 midterms because they were upset about NAFTA and the collapse of health care reform, Clinton saved his presidency and assured his re-election by joining forces with progressives to fight Newt Gingrich’s massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, and environmental programs. After Obama angered both Democrats and swing voters by bailing out Wall Street, we got swamped in the 2010 midterms, but he saved his presidency by running a progressive populist campaign attacking Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

And after Biden won the 2020 primary, he joined forces with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, embracing major parts of their platforms, and ran the most progressive populist presidential campaign a Democrat has run since the days of the New Deal, when we won five presidential elections in a row. Biden followed that up by appointing many progressives to economic policy making roles and worked closely with progressives to accomplish more major legislative victories in two years than any president since LBJ in 1965-66.

History is clear: if the Democratic Party leadership pays due respect, and unites with progressives on important parts of their agenda, they win elections and get good policies passed. If on the other hand, party leadership unites with big money interests to wage ugly fights with progressives, whoever wins the primary we will be left sitting with a serious mess to clean up.

Vote Blue No Matter Who

The slogan “vote blue no matter who” became popularized in the 2020 presidential to help unify the party — in an unwieldy 27-person primary field — to defeat Trump and MAGA Republicans. The idea is that while you will never agree with any candidate on everything, in this moment of ultimate peril for our democracy, with the fascist wolf at the door, that any Democrat would be better than a Republican, that Democratic control of government is a million times better than Republican control.

Besides the obvious point that we should not leave authoritarians to take over our government, it’s much easier to win policy fights when you’re in the majority. (Duh.)

While I certainly ascribe to this point, it is also important to note that the slogan has been more often weaponized against more left wing progressive candidates than more centrist ones, as a way to say, “Hey, Lefties, you can’t get everything on your wish list.”

So yeah, we can’t we be purists. However, now progressive candidates on the leftier end of the spectrum are in ascendance with the Democratic primary electorate, and many centrists are threatening to sit out. This is not tenable. You cannot chide lefties to “vote blue no matter who,” and then storm out of the room with all your toys when your preferred candidate loses.

Have fights all you want before the primary is decided, but once the primary is over, you must be gracious and be a team player. (It is great to see Haley Stevens and Gretchen Whitmer doing just that in Michigan.) Otherwise, you are helping Republicans.

General elections are binary choices. Democrats need to have a debate about their future as a party, and I will be firmly on the side of those who want to take on corporate power, get money out of politics, and get health care for all. But with the primary season quickly coming to a close, the time to do it is in the 2028 presidential race, which will be great fun.

Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the party committees they control should go all in to help Abdul El-Sayed, Troy Jackson, Will Lawrence (the progressive House candidate who won the primary to compete in Michigan 7), and other progressives winning primaries in tough general election races. Progressives should welcome the help and do everything in their power to win those races and prove progressive candidates can win swing districts and states.

The forces of fascism will destroy democracy if we don’t all work together. Let’s join forces now that the primary season is coming to a close, and give Democrats a sweeping victory in the 2026 elections... vote blue no matter who!

Part of being a progressive is wanting to know about the truth of our history, being willing to acknowledge the flaws and sadness of the past and not just wrapping it all in a gauzy bubble. We know about the horrors of slavery and the destruction of 90% of the Indigenous population; we know that women and the poor did not have the vote when our country was founded or for many years after; we know working people were oppressed and nature was despoiled.

So we are deeply aware that the American Revolution was far from a perfect thing. I would argue, though, that the Declaration of Independence was one of the most important events in human history, because the rebellion it announced, and the language in it, opened the door to the possibility of a country, as Lincoln said, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Written by Jefferson, edited by Franklin and Adams, inspired in great part by Tom Paine, the Declaration stated right at the beginning:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Declaring that people have the right to govern themselves, and that we are all created equal were profoundly revolutionary ideas. They were powerful and compelling enough to become the cornerstone for what Americans have strived for ever since — for every good thing that has ever happened in American history. These foundational ideas were the through line of American progress for 250 years.

The conservative movement has fought against those ideas in the Declaration from the beginning, from the American Royalists who opposed the revolutionary cause to the pro-slavery forces and Jim Crow forces in the South. A leading force in the conservative movement in the mid 1900s, Irving Kristol said, “To perceive the true purposes of the American Revolution, it is wise to ignore some of the more grandiloquent declarations of the moment.” In the mid 1800s, conservative slavery advocate John Randolph described Jefferson as the pied piper of equality and democracy, decrying the Declaration as leading to the “leveling” ideas of abolitionists in that era.

This anti-Declaration philosophy continues in the MAGA movement of our day. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri stated:

We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.

He went on to say, in a notion repeated by JD Vance, that America is not merely a “shared set of values” or a “proposition,” but rather a homeland belonging primarily to its European settlers and their descendants.

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Every progressive leader and movement in American history has claimed those ideas of government by the people and of equality among people as their own. From the abolitionists and modern civil rights leaders to the women fighting for the vote and equal rights; from the early labor union organizers to the populists organizing family farmers; from the Progressive Era reformers to the creators of the National Park system and the New Deal, the Declaration’s language and ideas have been the cornerstone of them all.

It is no accident that Lincoln at Gettysburg built the most influential speech in American history on the scaffolding of the Declaration, affirming its foundational propositions of equality and self-government:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

One hundred years later, Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial, and picked up the torch:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The two most important speeches in American history both referenced our most important document. All three are part of the gospel of the American ideal.

So, yes, we acknowledge that our ancestors were hypocritical men who did many wrong things. But we should take the incredible gifts they gave us, embrace our heritage, and celebrate our great nation like all get out on the 250th anniversary of its founding.

Upon getting selected to the Basketball Hall of Fame yesterday, Candace Parker said, “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” We have taken our ancestors’ charge in the preamble to the Constitution, where they wanted us to create a more perfect union. In our striving to build on the foundation of the Declaration, we have indeed become our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

For our sake, and for theirs, may we find a way to overcome the fascist forces which seek to overturn the Declaration and Constitution, so that America can forge a new and deeper commitment to freedom, liberty, and the proposition that all of us are created equal.

The supporters of Mayor Mamdani (and apparently there are a lot of them) are justifiably ecstatic about the three decisive congressional primary victories in NYC. The Democrats who don’t like Mamdani are weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth, freaking out that Republicans will sweep the elections because some Democrats are socialists.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath. Politics is a long, tough slog with no permanent victories or defeats, and many twists and turns. And everyone needs to remember that the fight against fascism is deadly serious, probably the most important thing we collectively will ever do, and we need to build a big coalition to win it.

I want to make several points about what is going on inside the Democratic Party right now.

The Mamdani Moment

Whatever you think of Mayor Mamdani, he is having a moment. In a country that is inherently irritable, anti-establishment, and anti-incumbent against whoever is in power, usually the first thing that happens after a politician wins power is that they start diving in the polls. The last two mayors in NYC, Adams and de Blasio, both struggled mightily from the moment they took office. Obama, the most popular politician of this century, won decisively twice, but lost the next elections by huge margins after his big victories.

Not Mamdani. His popularity and political muscle were fully on display in the NYC primaries, with his endorsed candidates beating incumbents and winning big.

I think rather than panicking and going on cable TV to melt down about it all, the question all the anti-Mamdani Democrats should be asking themselves is: why is this guy so popular?

It’s actually not hard to figure out. He promised lower costs for New Yorkers, and instead of waiting around, he is already delivering. On child care, on rents, on grocery stores in neighborhoods that don’t have them, he is already making things happen. Mamdani’s policies are clear, easy to understand, and focused on helping working folks. It’s not hard to see why he is popular and why the candidates he is supporting are winning. Steve Rosenthal wrote a great column about this here yesterday.

My advice, based on 45 years of political experience, is highly sophisticated and nuanced: copying what is working is a better strategy than panicking on cable TV. Maybe if you incorporated some of the progressive populist Mamdani agenda into your platforms and messaging, you too could combine working-class swing voters with working-class base Democratic voters, and then win more elections.

Please, Everyone: Calm the Fuck Down

To my progressive friends dancing on the graves of their establishment Democrat opponents, while your victories are important and worth celebrating, we still have such a very long way to go. Donald Trump is still president, and threatening to smash our democracy and hand over the economy to the billionaire tech overlords. The Republicans still run Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and most state governments, and have hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate America to try and crush us. Democrats backed by crypto, AI firms, Wall Street, AIPAC, and Big Pharma still have won lots of Democratic primaries over the last several weeks. Progressive economic populism is clearly winning a lot of the time, but those of us who advocate for those positions have many miles to go before we can rest.

It would also be good to acknowledge that outside of the biggest cities on the two coasts, voters may have more mixed feelings about the word socialist, about slogans like “abolish the police,” and about the immigration issue. And we are going to have to win the votes of at least some of those skeptical folks.

To our friends in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party freaking out over people who call themselves socialists winning elections, or the random goofy comments by Chevalier (and yeah, as progressive as I am, I do think she has said some pretty dumb stuff), please take some very deep breaths and stop reinforcing the ideas that (a) Democrats are crazy leftists bent on the country’s destruction, and that (b) when centrists lose primaries, they want to destroy the unity of the Democratic Party.

For those who think Democrats can’t win in swing districts because some socialists won their primaries, I want to remind you all that after AOC got massive media coverage for winning her primary in 2018, Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House that fall; that after Mamdani became the media star of the moment for winning the Democratic primary in June of last year, Democrats went on to dominate the fall elections all over the country and in special elections throughout the last year; and that when Joe Biden very visibly moved to the left to embrace much of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform — arguably running the most progressive populist Democratic presidential campaign since LBJ — that Democrats won a trifecta that November.

Democratic candidates in red and purple states and districts are perfectly capable of distancing themselves from the rhetoric and positioning of Democrats they don’t agree with, and if they need to do that to win, Godspeed. But the one thing all of our Democratic candidates should definitely do is not to forget my first point: whatever label you put on it, Mamdani’s economic populism is working. That is the through line all Democrats should be embracing.

One final point in terms of calming the fuck down: that goes for us all. If we want to prevail over Trump’s fascist authoritarianism, Democrats need to be able to work together as we head into the general election this fall. Mamdani referred to AIPAC, who supported some of the candidates he opposed in those primaries, as monsters. My old buddy James Carville said he didn’t want to be in the same party as Chevalier because of some of her dumb tweets. And Jaime Harrison ranted about Democratic candidates who criticized the Democratic Party.

C’mon guys, simmer down. For democracy to survive, we all need to work together to beat Trump. Chevalier had some outrageous tweets about the American flag, private property, and abolishing, I guess, all kinds of things, but she also apologized and took the tweets down. I think AIPAC has become an awful organization, full of right-wing donors and Bibi-philes, but they and the candidates they support are not monsters. And Democrats criticize each other all the damn time, as you just proved Mr. Harrison. Please, in the words of Desperately Seeking Susan, everyone should “take a valium like a normal person.”

Democrats have our differences, but we are not mortal enemies. Our mortal enemies are the fascists who have come to destroy our democracy.

Plenty of Time to Have the Battle Democrats Need to Have

Don’t get me wrong: the Democrats are going to have a big battle over whether our agenda for our future should sound more like NYC’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg or more like the current one Zohran Mamdani, or maybe like the many great union and working class-candidates who have sprouted up in this election cycle, running in all kinds of competitive states and districts around the country. The big money will naturally be on Big Money’s side, but a lot more voters will be hanging out with those of us on the populist side.

We won’t be able to avoid this fight if we wanted to, and shouldn’t want to: the Democratic Party needs to decide which side we are on. In the primaries yet to come this year, in our labor and community organizing, in the columns we write, and in the Zoom calls we conference in, we can make our case this year. I know I certainly will.

But once this general election is over is the real time to engage in this battle. There will be a fight over the soul of the party in the 2028 presidential nomination fight, and I hope my progressive populist side can settle on a good candidate and win that fight then — I’m pretty sure that is the only way we will win the 2028 general election. I’m also quite certain there will be plenty of good progressive populists to choose from, and plenty of candidates supported by the Big Money team if you want to go with them.

In the meantime, though, Democrats need to stay focused on winning the November election rather than beating the hell out of each other.

And just one final note to my friends in the Democratic Party establishment: looking at the populist politics that are working and welcoming us progressive populists to the table makes more sense as a purely pragmatic political strategy than trying to banish us from the party.

Bad news for Trump, who is hailing the New York primary results as proof that Democrats are embracing communism — a label he routinely applies to policies that ask the wealthy and powerful to pay more or expand the role of government. Bad news as well for much of the mainstream media, which is eager to portray these outcomes as merely another left-versus-right battle within the Democratic Party. And especially bad news for the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party: large majorities of American voters support many of the policies commonly associated with democratic socialism.

Candidates such as Zohran Mamdani, along with Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander, prevailed because they embraced a populist economic agenda that speaks directly to the concerns of working people. Their victories reflect growing support for policies that address the economic challenges Americans face every day.

Public polling over the past year helps explain why these candidates are finding success. Seventy-six percent of voters identify the cost of living as their biggest economic concern. Sixty-six percent support guaranteeing health care for all. Seventy-eight percent believe housing is a fundamental human right, and 74% support government investment in building and subsidizing homes for low-income families. Sixty-nine percent say the cost of prescription drugs is a major concern.

The same pattern appears on workplace issues. Sixty-eight percent of Americans approve of labor unions, 66% believe it should be easier for workers to join a union, and 77% support policies that strengthen workers’ bargaining power.

The public is equally clear about the role of money in politics. Seventy-three percent of American voters want to reduce the influence of billionaires on the political process. Seventy-two percent support strict limits on campaign spending by individuals and organizations, and eight in 10 believe political donors, lobbyists, and special interests wield too much influence in government. Sixty-five percent support raising taxes on corporations and billionaires to ensure they pay their fair share.

Far from being politically fringe, the positions championed by these candidates align with the views of broad majorities of the American public—not only Democrats, but Independents and, on many of these issues, significant numbers of Republicans as well.

This is not simply a battle between the political left and right. It is increasingly a battle over class and economic power. For years, Trump and the MAGA movement have appealed to working-class voters by channeling frustration with political and economic elites. But many of those voters are beginning to ask a more fundamental question: Am I better off? For millions struggling with the high cost of housing, health care, groceries, childcare, and prescription drugs, the answer is increasingly no.

The Democratic candidates generating the most enthusiasm today—many of them proudly identifying as democratic socialists—are speaking directly to those economic concerns. They are offering an agenda focused on lowering costs, strengthening workers’ rights, expanding affordable housing, and reducing the influence of corporate power. Democrats as a whole would be wise to recognize the appeal of that message.

The party’s corporate wing remains closely aligned with Wall Street, corporate PACs, pharmaceutical companies, the health insurance industry, Big Tech, and AIPAC. Yet many voters increasingly view those relationships as evidence that too many elected officials are more responsive to powerful interests than to ordinary Americans.

Candidates who reject corporate PAC money are drawing a sharp contrast. Rather than relying on corporate political action committees, DSA-backed candidates have generally pledged to finance their campaigns through small-dollar donations and grassroots organizing. At a time when overwhelming majorities of Americans believe wealthy donors and special interests have too much influence over government, refusing corporate PAC money reinforces the message that these candidates are accountable to working people rather than corporate donors.

These candidates have also begun addressing another issue that many elected officials have largely ignored: the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and the data center infrastructure needed to support it. DSA candidates have called for slowing the unchecked growth of data centers, arguing that communities should not bear the environmental and economic costs solely to maximize corporate profits. Organized labor has likewise pushed for stronger safeguards, with the AFL-CIO advocating policies to ensure AI enhances workers’ lives rather than displacing them.

These concerns resonate with the public. A majority of Americans believe the risks posed by emerging technologies may outweigh the benefits. Large majorities of working-class voters worry that AI will eliminate jobs, and many believe it could directly affect their own employment or that of someone in their family. Significant numbers also oppose the construction of large data centers near their communities. If Democrats hope to avoid AI becoming the next NAFTA in the minds of working Americans, they will need to demonstrate that technological progress can be managed in a way that protects workers, communities, and the public interest—not just corporate profits.

The lesson from New York is larger than any single election. Voters are not demanding ideological purity—they are demanding politicians who will fight for them instead of the billionaires, corporations, and special interests that have dominated American politics for far too long. Whether these ideas are labeled progressive, populist, or democratic socialist matters far less than whether they improve people’s lives.

Candidates who focus relentlessly on lowering costs, raising wages, expanding health care and affordable housing, protecting workers, and getting big money out of politics are speaking to the concerns of a broad majority of Americans. If Democrats want to build a durable governing majority and defeat Trumpism, they should stop running away from that agenda and start embracing it.

• Rep. Haley Stevens, the Schumer-backed candidate who has received major support from the crypto industry, AIPAC, Wall Street, and Pharma

• Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate backed by the Bernie Sanders wing of the party (including Bernie himself)

• Mallory McMorrow, who galvanized progressives across the country with her anti-hate speech in the Michigan legislature in 2022.
  

The polls have gone up and down, lately Stevens and El-Sayed have led the field, but a pro-McMorrow super-PAC just got a big new surge of money, so I expect this race will be competitive right down to the end.

The candidate who I think is least likely to win what will be a very competitive general election is Stevens. She is your classic establishment Democrat, with a mushy message, careful not to be too populist, so that she doesn’t offend all her big business donors. But the biggest problem with Stevens is that she doesn’t want to think big in terms of solving the real problems people have right now.

Stevens called me a while back to ask me for money. I like money calls, because it allows you to have conversations with candidates and really hear their best pitch. She volunteered the observation that Democrats should not be looking to do big things right now. She said we need to be modest in our policy goals: “not try to pass big programs like Social Security.”

I think Congresswoman Stevens is deeply wrong on that topic. It is those Democrats who lack ambition to make working-class voters’ lives better in a big way that give the Democratic Party its weak brand problem. Voters want seriously lower drug prices and health costs; they want corporate monopolies broken up; they want the cost of housing, utilities, gas, groceries, and child care to go way down. And you know what: not only would voters be glad to see politicians pass big ambitious legislation like Social Security again, they would like see Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits expanded.

I like the other two candidates a lot: they are both strong progressives running on a pro-working families, anti-big money agenda. But in the end, I have come to believe McMorrow has the best chance to win. She is the only one of the three who has over-performed in a historically Republican district. Michigan has a great affinity for women candidates, they have elected a lot of them over the years, and the swing voters in the state tend to be women — both middle and upper middle income suburbanites and working-class White women in small and medium Factory Towns throughout the state. I suspect both of those demographic groupings would be more drawn to McMorrow than to El-Sayed.

This is such an important race in our party’s battle to win over the Senate. We have to hold our swing state Senate seats. We need to have our best candidate on the ballot this November. Please give what you can.

These five states have been solidly red in recent years, but like everywhere else in this country, voters are souring fast on Trump and the GOP. Working-class families are fed up with politicians of both parties who carry water for the billionaires and global corporate conglomerates that are crushing the middle class, and they aren’t blind to the fact that Republicans hold all the federal levers of power during an unprecedented era of corruption and grift.

In Iowa, both Democrats in the Senate primary and the likely Dem gubernatorial nominee are all leading the likely Republican nominees in the polls. There are three House races seriously in play as well.

In Nebraska, Democrats look likely to pick up the Omaha House seat and even in the congressional district I grew up in, Nebraska 1, the polling looks promising for us. (Just to put that into context, a Democrat has not won that district since the LBJ landslide election of 1964.) Meanwhile, independent candidate Dan Osborn has a five point lead in the polling in spite of the yacht loads of billionaire money incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts is spending against him. I talked to Dan and one of his top advisers while in Nebraska, and they have serious momentum coming down the stretch.

In Kansas, a popular and renowned Methodist minister, Adam Hamilton, who leads the biggest Methodist church in the country, is running for the Senate as a Democrat, and is widely considered to be a strong candidate. People think we also have a strong chance in the governor’s race, where we’ve won four times in the last six elections.

Oklahoma is the most Republican of all these Republican states, but even Oklahoma has some interesting political things brewing. Ironworker Local 28 President Trey Martin has a real shot at winning congressional district 5, the Oklahoma City district that we picked up in 2018, and only lost by 4 points in 2020. It is R+9, but in a strong Democratic election with a candidate who fits the working-class district as well as Martin, this one’s winnable.

I’m sure it will shock you to learn that Oklahoma is also a state rife with government corruption and rightwing Christian nationalism – a dangerous double threat to our multicultural democracy that more and more people are waking up to. Check out this recent story by my colleague Lauren Windsor, who exposed some sleazy deal making by state Treasurer Todd Russ with the so-called Christian finance industry. She has more bombshells to drop in the coming weeks on how corrupt Christian nationalists are shaping politics in red states that will truly be eye opening.

But my story today isn’t just about the short-term politics of 2026, it is about the long sweep of working-class history in this country. My wife and I took a side trip between our two family weddings to see three remarkable museums in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The first was the Greenwood Rising museum, which is dedicated to remembering both the terror of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the determination of the city’s Black residents to keep building a strong community there. The Tulsa Race Massacre is widely regarded as the single worst incident of racial violence in American history: over two days, White supremacists killed more than 300 Black people and destroyed 35 city blocks. The power of this museum, the way it told its story, was incredibly moving.

The second museum we went to was the Bob Dylan museum. Dylan wanted his collection of personal papers to be housed in a museum next door to the Woody Guthrie museum in Tulsa, and having the two of them together there was really fun. For any Dylan fan (which I definitely am), walking around that museum, listening to his songs, watching his classic and often hilarious interviews , seeing the early versions of song lyrics written down on scraps of paper made for an experience that was just super cool.

But it was the Woody Guthrie museum that moved me the most. He wrote and performed thousands of songs about the working folks that society had forgotten and thrown away -- about White, Black, and Native peoples who lived in the Oklahoma he grew up in. His lyrics told stories about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and what those calamities did to people. Guthrie sang about the farm workers who were “known by no name except deportee,” about labor unions and the Civil Rights Movement, and about the poor tenant farmers forced to leave to try to rebuild their lives out West.

Guthrie put a sticker on his guitar during World War II, when he served in the Merchant Marines, that said “This machine kills fascists.” He knew that art and culture, songs and books and movies mattered as much in defeating fascist ideas as guns and bombs. And he kept that sticker on after the war, and when people asked him why, he said it was because fascism happened whenever big corporations ran the government and used racism and hate to keep people divided.

The Guthrie museum reminded me that places like Oklahoma used to have great populist, working-class leaders who told the story of working families and fought like hell for them, not just to win elections but to build a movement. The Democratic Party and progressive movement need to reclaim that movement and vision. We need to fight the good fight for all working people.

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act is a terrible thing in terms of racial justice in America, and of course it will hurt Democrats as Republicans move to take advantage of it. John Roberts’ early legal career was devoted to challenging the VRA, and the right-wing justices have been eager to role it back for a long time. It is tragic our country is taking this awful step backwards.

But one big thing the decision doesn’t change: Democrats can win the election in 2026 and the years to come by winning back the working class voters we have let slip away from us. It will force our party to build new coalitions in districts that lean Republican but suddenly have new voters from a more diverse array of racial backgrounds.

Republican leaning districts that used to be 10% Black and 5% Latino may become 20% Black and 10% Latino. The majority in these kinds of districts will still be White, but more diverse districts open up new opportunities for multi-racial working class coalitions, where the majority of voters in the district are angry at corporate abuse of power, want the wealthy to be taxed much more than they are, want serious increases in pay, and are pissed that their healthcare, housing costs, gas, and grocery prices keep rising.

The only way to win in Southern districts like this is also the only way to win in working class congressional districts throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and West: focus on winning over working and middle class folks of all races with a message focused on populist economic issues. We need an economic plan for America’s working families: stopping price gouging, capping health care costs, raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour, making it easier to organize labor unions, and breaking up corporate monopolies.

If we have an agenda like that, along with a communications and organizing strategy that reaches people where they live with voices they trust, we give ourselves a real chance to realign American politics not just for this year but for the long term.

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How am I defining the working class?

Let’s be clear: the economy is not going to get any better for working folks over the next few years. Our economy is being propped up right now and is running on the AI bubble, crypto corruption, insider trading, and shaky private capital markets, all completely unregulated by the Trump administration. Very little of all this speculative financial bullshit helps working or middle class folks.

First thing to clarify: what is the difference between working and middle class? This used to be an important distinction in many voters’ minds – it was important to many people to be seen as middle vs working class. That distinction has gotten much more blurred as wages and benefits have eroded, the cost of living has risen far faster than incomes, local economies and businesses have been hit hard, and the biggest corporations have become dominant in people’s daily lives.

In focus groups, people will often say things like, “I used to think of our family as middle class but I don’t anymore. The middle class is going away,” or “I’ve always thought of us as middle class but I don’t know how I am going to afford new clothes for my kids as they go back to school.” People are identifying more with working class candidates and language. One example: when voters in a recent poll were given a list of several different ways of describing Democrats – including moderate, centrist, liberal, progressive, pro-business – the one that was the most popular by a lot was “working class Democrat.”

So how am I defining “working class”? It’s in some ways a complicated question. Many pollsters use a shorthand definition which has the advantage of simplicity, where they define voters without a college degree – which are ⅔ of the public – as the working class. However, I certainly put teachers and nurses, who have modest salaries and have to work long hard hours, as being in the working class as well. And my colleague Lauren Windsor, a generation younger than me, talks about how her generation was promised that if they graduated from college, they would be able to find good middle class jobs with a lot of security. However, for a great many of them, this hasn’t turned out to be the case at all, as people with degrees are Uber drivers or still working in low paying jobs.

It is almost easier to define working class by who is not in that category: top executives at the wealthiest corporations in the country; the financial industry traders and speculators; the partners at the biggest law, PR, accounting, and consulting firms in America, whose main clients are those corporate executives; the trust fund babies who are heirs to big fortunes.

And of course, there are plenty of people who work in professional or middle management jobs that don’t think of themselves as working class, although as AI eliminates many of those jobs, even those folks may start to identify as working class.

But most of the rest of us, the ones without huge stock portfolios and trust funds, the ones who are not masters of industry or helping the executives do what they do with their professional skills, fit somewhere in that working class description. These are the families whose working hours are usually not theirs to determine, whose income is often stretched and shaky, who feel real pain when the price of gas, utilities, groceries, or housing suddenly goes up.

They work all kinds of different jobs but share a common anxiety about their economic situation, and a sense that they have little power over their own lives. They know that an unexpected crisis – an accident, an illness in the family, a sudden unexpected spike in the cost of essential goods – could mean big trouble.

They might be gig workers or nursing home workers; people who deliver for Amazon or traditional truckers; janitors or home health aides; factory workers or farm workers; waitresses or secretaries; owners of small neighborhood businesses working 90 hours a week to keep the doors open or construction workers going from job to job. But they all work their asses off and still have don’t feel like they have the freedom to build the life for their family they dream of.

The way Democrats can win the kind of downscale voters and districts the Republicans are now winning is to root our language, our values, and the issues we are running on firmly in working class sensibilities and economics. If we succeed in doing those things, we can change American politics and stop worrying about the latest awful tactic the Republicans are going to throw at us. A coalition of economically populist working class voters, many of them from rural and factory town America, united with urban progressives and other voters appalled by MAGA”s far right authoritarian agenda, would cause a fundamental realignment in voting patterns.

Communicating with voters where they are at to build a long term majority

The media landscape has become a hellscape. If we want to build a relationship with working families,we have to start with building community, building trust, and old-fashioned neighbor to neighbor organizing. This is not done with TV ads the last couple of months before Election Day; it is done with building communities at the local level on social media, organizing house parties and community events, getting neighbors to reach out to other neighbors, and knocking on doors. We are going to have to reach out to more people than we usually reach out to, register more voters than we usually register, and talk with people in language they understand and relate to.

Democrats can become the party of working people again, just like they were when I was growing up in the post-New Geal era. We do it by organizing and communicating around an economic agenda which fights for working people and recognizes what they care about. Not only can we build that kind of Democratic Party agenda and strategy, we have to do that in order to survive as a political party. There is no other path for us to get back to winning an electoral majority.

The party with the incumbent president has lost every presidential and mid-term election in the last 20 years except one, when Obama escaped defeat by pounding Romney for what he did at Bain Capital, and what he said on the 47% tape. Voters continue to be in a “throw the bums out” mood. This means the odds are good Democrats will win in 2026 and maybe even 2028. But if all we do is not be Trump and go back to “normal”, we will get crushed in the census reapportionment election of 2030 and the 2032.

We need to have a workers party agenda that we are organizing for right now, that we build out in 2028 and in the first two years of a Democratic trifecta should we be lucky enough to have one. After the grift and naked corruption of the Trump years, we need to have a working majority for long enough to rebuild America’s economy and democracy.

I am more than a little bemused by the punditry’s reaction to Governor Mills deciding to drop out of the Senate race. An incumbent Governor backed Chuck Schumer couldn’t compete with an outsider populist? Shocking! Stunning! Mind blowing!

Unless you looked at pretty much every other thing happening in politics right now. There are some clues that DC pundits might want to take note of.

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Take a look at the current state of Senate primaries where Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has played a role. I list the following facts not to beat up on Schumer, but to make a point: voters are not in a mood to be told what to do by the Democratic leadership in Washington, DC.

In Michigan, the primary candidate backed by Schumer, Haley Stevens, is trailing not one but two populist anti-establishment candidates. In Texas, the candidate backed by Schumer, Colin Allred, who lost badly to Ted Cruz in 2024, was recruited to run again, and ended up pulling out because two outsider candidates were beating him badly. In the end the least known candidate at the start of the race, James Talerico, won. In Iowa, the candidate recruited by Schumer, Josh Turek, has been trailing the populist running against him, Zach Wahls, by a huge margin. Vote Vets, a group aligned with Senate democrats, just raised $5,000,000 to try and save Turek’s candidacy, but I suspect it won’t work. And in Minnesota, Schumer’s preferred candidate Angie Craig has been trailing Lt Governor Peggy Flanagan.

Take a look at the recent history of how elections have gone in this country.

With the exception of the 2012 re-election of Obama, who beat Mitt Romney by running a populist campaign exploiting Mitt’s background as the CEO of a private equity firm, every election in the last 20 years has resulted in the party in power losing either the presidency or control of either the House, the Senate, or both. In 2006, President Bush’s party lost both the House and Senate. In 2008, the Democratic establishment frontrunner (Hillary Clinton) lost the primary, and then the young upstart that beat her won the general election. In 2010, Obama’s party lost 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate. Bain Capital saved us in 2012, but then Democrats got hammered in 2014. Clinton got shocked by Trump in 2016. Dems proceeded to win 40 seats in the House in 2018, and then beat Trump and his party in 2020, winning a trifecta. In 2022, Dems stemmed the expected red tide, but still lost the House, and in 2024 that red tide came to shore.

Finally, take a look at current polling trends. Trump is way, way, way underwater, as one would expect a president this disastrous to be. Not surprisingly given that fact, Democrats are leading in the generic Congressional ballot. But Democrats as a party are not much more popular than Trump.

Why is that? Two reasons. One is that Democratic voters (and the Independents who usually vote Democratic) themselves are not enthusiastic about what they perceive the party is these days. Democratic leaders in DC are not popular with Democratic voters. The other is that working class swing voters don’t like either political party’s establishment.

This is not a left-right thing: big numbers of voters really don’t like either party. That is true with working class swing voters, with voters who voted for Democrats in 2020 but didn’t vote in 2024, with fervent Democrats who don’t get why we aren’t fighting back harder against Trump. What all three of those crucial blocs of voters share is they don’t like either Trump or the Democratic Party leadership.

What they do like is candidates and elected officials who will fight the powers that be—greedy corporations, powerful billionaires, party leaders—in order to deliver for them on the issues they care the most about. They want politicians who will fight like hell for higher wages, lower costs, and taking on greedy corporations who are constantly screwing people. If Democrats give them fighters like that, people will vote for them every time they are on the ballot.

One final thought: candidates who do not feel like they were born and bred to be politicians, candidates who don’t sound like everything coming out of their mouths was poll tested, are a lot more likely to be forgiven for their flaws than the establishment candidates served up by, well, the party establishment. Going back to Maine, what Platner said and did in his youth was dumb and offensive, but voters know they did a lot of dumb and offensive stuff when they were young, too—especially coming out of a trauma like war. That is why the millions of dollars of attack ads from the Mills campaign had no impact at all. When people see candidates like Platner and Dan Osborn, they think: those people’s lives are a lot like mine, maybe they will actually fight for me.

Our country is at the high water mark in terms of a kind of screw the establishment populism. Democratic leaders should embrace the moment rather than fighting it.

A common habit of the pundit class DC centrists is to just throw all the people and movements and voters who are rebelling against the establishment into the same “populist” bucket. According to this way of thinking, Trump, Bannon, Bernie, and AOC are all just another form of scary extremism.

Besides being offensive to progressives, and the obvious fact that there are profound differences in the goals and policies advocated by progressive and right-wing populists, this kind of thinking is exactly what would allow Republicans to win in 2028. (Democrats are likely to win in 2026 no matter what.) If we dismiss working class voters’ anger and disdain at elites, and try to convince them that the establishment “center”, whatever that might mean at any given time, is the thing they should be voting for, we will not win their votes.

The latest example

The reason I am writing about this today is I just saw the latest example of this kind of thinking in a column from the Messina Memo by their Vice-President Tara Corrigan. It’s called The Center Can Hold.

Corrigan is writing about how establishment political parties can win and are winning against right-wing populism. I am all for joining forces with centrists and anyone else who is working to defeat right-wing politicians and political parties, but the framing in the column is troubling. More importantly, I think in her quest to elect centrists, she is choosing a strategy for Democrats which would be fatal: she wants us to try to talk voters out of their populism rather than embracing it. She writes:

“Populists run on grievance, fear, and fury. Their movements are born of frustration with the status quo, and so they instinctively frame elections as a simple binary: more of the same, or change. It’s a frame that strongly favors outsiders who promise to shake things up and return power to the aggrieved.”

Her solution is to:

• First, make the election about “results, not change”. She writes that “A campaign framed around results, rather than sentiment, gives incumbents the ground they need to compete.”

• Second, she says that the incumbent or establishment party should seek to “frame first, frame fast.”

• Third, she wants the anti-populists to use fear as a weapon. She writes “Fear no longer just propels change; it also restrains it. Voters have seen what populist governance looks like, and many want no part of it.”

To Corrigan’s credit, she never actually lumps progressive populism in with right-wing populism, as some pro-corporate centrists overtly do. And, look, if you are running an incumbent’s campaign against a right-wing Trump style populist, and your candidate is determined not to be a “populist”, then the advice here is reasonable.

The question for Democrats, though, is why would you be determined not to be a populist? As even Corrigan’s article implies, it is so much easier to run against the establishment. Notice that she acknowledges that the anti-establishment frame “strongly favors outsiders who promise to shake things up and return power to the aggrieved”. And note the phrase “A campaign framed around results rather than sentiment…” When you are trying to come up with ways to overcome the sentiment that is out there, you have a much tougher road to hoe.

We need to embrace populism not fear it

I have written many times about how voters are becoming more and more angry and cynical about both political parties and powerful, wealthy corporations screwing over working people. With Republicans the party in power, and reveling in giving every advantage to wealthy, powerful corporations as opposed to working folks, now is the time for Democrats to embrace pro-working class economic populism: raising wages, stopping price gouging, fighting corporate corruption, breaking up monopolies, strengthening unions, and taxing the wealthy. These ideas are all massively popular with voters right now, especially the angry working class voters who are the main swing voters we need to win.

Democratic strategists and campaigns should not be spending their time figuring out how to win in spite of the voters’ populist sentiments. We should be embracing that populism full steam ahead.

Thursday night was a Holy Shit moment in Democratic politics.

Arguably a Holy Fucking Shit moment, if you want to be technical about it.

In case you missed it, here’s a recap:

• Shawn Harris, a Black retired brigadier general, cattle farmer, and Democrat, got 44% of the vote in Marjorie Taylor Green’s blood red GOP district (votes still being counted). That number represents a 30 point swing for the district away from Trump’s voteshare in 2024.

• In Wisconsin, Chris Taylor, a liberal Supreme Court justice was elected with a 21% swing from Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024.

• And that’s on top of other recent mega-swings, like Democrat Emily Gregory winning with a 20% shift in the Florida district that includes Mar-A-Lago, or Eileen Higgins riding a 19 point swing to become the first Democratic mayor of Miami since before Britney Spears dropped “Baby, One More Time” in 1999.

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These shifts aren’t just happening because Democrats’ more educated coalition turns out at higher rates in special elections; Democratic candidates are also winning independents in these races by overwhelming margins, mostly on account of them recognizing that everything is fucked.

Farmers know how badly tariffs have hurt them.

Latinos know that ICE could grab anyone at any time, regardless of citizenship, based on the color of their skin.

And everyone knows that gas prices are up because Trump attacked Iran without good reason.

If these swings of 20-30 points continue happening through the midterms, scores of House seats will flip and Democrats can win the Senate.

But if you’ve ever been surfing or boogie boarding, you know that you can’t catch a wave by sitting back and doing nothing.

To catch a wave, you’ve got to get yourself just ahead of it and kick forward like your life depends on it. Then, when you’re right at the front of the wave, you can ride it all the way in to shore.

In practical terms, that means:

1. It’s time to start donating. Democratic fundraising has been struggling since 2024 because donors have been understandably pissed. But part of the reason Shawn Harris in GA was able to run 30 points ahead of Trump’s performance in 2024 – instead of 20 like the recent winners in Florida and Wisconsin – is because he had money to mount a real campaign. Good campaigns can outperform their environment by as much as 10 points, which on top of a 15-20 point Democratic environment puts all kinds of races in play at every level of the ballot.

2. It’s time to run for office. If you’ve ever thought about it, now is the time. If you know someone who you think might be good at it, especially someone in a red or purple state, pester them until they get in. Organizations like Run For Something and Contest Every Race have staff standing by, ready to walk you through the logistics – which are not as complicated as you fear. We cannot let a single seat anywhere, for any office, go uncontested in a cycle like this one when the wind may be at our backs.

3. It’s time to volunteer. Organizations like Volunteer Blue are putting together volunteer job boards for people with specialized skills – from graphic design to video editing to data analytics. At the same time, canvassing, letters, and phone calls are at their most effective early, before the fall when voters get deluged. If you have a few hours a week, jump in now.

This is a harrowing moment. The damage Trump has done is going to last for the rest of our lives. But in every crisis there’s also opportunity.

It’s time to start kicking and catch the wave.