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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

That’s not just because of Sherrod Brown’s run for the Senate, although you could make a damn good argument (as we do below) that this will be the most important single election of the year. But it is also clear the Governor’s race is the most important Governor’s race of the year because of its centrality to the future of public sector collective bargaining in one of the labor movement’s biggest states member-wise. And the five congressional races at play will go a long way to determining who controls the House in 2027-8.

Beyond 2026, Democrats have to start focusing now on how to expand the Electoral College map. If we had managed to pull off squeaker wins in PA, MI, and WI in 2024, we would have won the Electoral College with 270 votes, not a single vote to spare. Given that those three states are always close, and especially given that in the 2030 census Democratic and purple states will be losing more electoral votes, we desperately need to compete in more states. Obviously, the sunbelt purple states that Biden won in 2020 — GA, NV, and AZ — are states we should compete, as well as NC, where he came close. There are certainly demographic arguments for a long-term strategy for competing in TX and FL. But Ohio and its smaller Midwestern sibling Iowa were much more amenable for Democrats for the four decades leading up to the Trump years, and if Democrats return to our working class roots, they could become purple again.

At 17 electoral votes, Ohio provides us far more options in terms of electoral math.

But Ohio is only going to become purple again if we start making significant investments of time and money there now. Here are the reasons we think that investment is one of the best Democrats can make in 2026.

Why is the Ohio Senate election the most important race in the country this year?

That is a pretty bold statement – there are lots of big races out there. But we make this argument for two reasons, and we are going to use the bridge analogy for both of these reasons.

The first is that Sherrod Brown winning this seat is our bridge to having a real shot at retaking the Senate.

Let’s say for a moment that this cycle continues to be favorable to the Democrats. Winning the Senate is still a high mountain to climb, but in a Democratic year, it becomes possible. Let’s assume for a moment that it is a Democratic enough election to get all the seats we hold back in Democratic hands. In that kind of a year, it is likely that we also pick up the open seat in North Carolina, with a popular former Governor running. Let’s assume as well that Maine is Democratic enough in a Democratic year that we can overcome the tough primary we are going through up there. (Side note to the Dems in Maine: the point here is to win the Senate seat, not beat each other bloody enough to just win the primary.) That gives us two seats we are well positioned in.

Beyond those two, every other state where we have a chance in is a red state, most of them very red: Iowa, Nebraska, Alaska, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, maybe even Arkansas. In every one of these states, we have a good candidate and interesting dynamics, but these are really, really tough states. In a blue tsunami of a year, we could win a few of them. In a pretty good Democratic year, we might be lucky enough to win one or two. And that’s where the bridge comes in.

Sherrod Brown is the one Senate candidate running in a tough state who is well-known with a long track record as a statewide elected official with a positive brand. He has a long-term field organization built around the state and fundraising connections both inside and out of the state.

If Sherrod wins this race, and we are doing well enough overall to win those other close states we mentioned earlier, we only have to win one of that sizable list of red states with good candidates. That seems possible.

Here’s the other bridge: Sherrod is the bridge to a tougher, more populist, more fighting-for-working-people Democratic caucus in the Senate. Sherrod is the pro-labor, tough on Wall Street and Big Tech, anti-corporate abuse of power Democrat who has the respect of both wings of the Democratic caucus. When Democrats from blue states say we should be more populist, they are more easily written as lefties from lefty states. When Sherrod says it – after representing working class, red leaning Ohio for so long – other Democrats listen. He is a bridge to a better, more working class oriented Democratic caucus in the Senate.

In the four Senate races Sherrod Brown has run over the last 20 years, he has consistently out performed national Democratic number because of the populist fighter for the working class brand he built. He has successfully aligned himself with the core economic identity of the state: a pro-labor, pro-dignity of work, anti-corporate concentration of power politician. While he couldn’t overcome the disintegration of the national Democratic brand on the economy in 2024, he has shown it is possible to compete in Ohio with that kind of message and brand.

One final note on the Senate: Ohio will be home to two more Senate races in 2028 and 2030. If we can bring Ohio back so that we are competing in these races, we could pick up not only one but two Senate seats.

House races

Gerrymandering, in both state legislative and congressional districts, has made Ohio look more Republican than it actually is. The new congressional map which the Republicans just passed makes things even tougher, but as in Texas might turn out to backfire if this turns out to be a solid Democratic year.

Ohio is one of only four states which will likely have at least six House seats up for grabs this year, and the only one with both a competitive Senate and Gubernatorial race.

The Republicans in the Ohio legislature redistricted to make Democratic House members Marcy Kaptur’s and Greg Landsman’s districts tougher, so both are a little more Republican than they were. The good news is that these two are very good candidates who fit their districts to a tee: Landsman is the perfect kind of suburban nice guy for his Cincinnati suburbs district, while Kaptur is an old school working class Ohio populist for her old school working class populist Ohio district.

Emilia Sykes’ very competitive district is, if anything, a little more Democratic than it was. It will still likely be a close race.

Meanwhile, there are three districts we have the chance to take back from the Republicans in Ohio.

In Ohio 7, a working class Northeast Ohio district, the Republican incumbent barely won last time. We have a great opportunity there this time around.

In Ohio 10, Kristina Knickerbocker is running in a southwestern Ohio lean Republican district against incumbent Mike Turner. She is a strong candidate with deep roots in the district, and currently leads Turner by two points in public polling just out.

The Republican maneuvering made Ohio 15 a little more Democratic, adding some Democratic leaning Columbus suburban turf to the mix. The Democratic candidate is Adam Miller. In 2024’s Republican year in Ohio, Miller lost the district 56-44. In a better Democratic year with a better district, this one is a live round.

If we do well in the Senate and Governor’s races, we have a real shot at keeping all three of the seats we have and picking up two more.

The Governor race

The public polling since September of last year has basically been a dead heat – a couple showing Democrat Amy Acton ahead by 8-10, a couple showing Republican Vivek Ramaswamy up by that much, everything else showing a statistical dead heat.

Ramaswamy is showing the same lack of grace on the campaign trail in Ohio as he did in his presidential race, saying one dumb thing after another, while Acton has proven to be an adept candidate even though she has never run for office before.

She served as the current Republican Governor’s head of the Department of Public Health during the covid crisis, which gives her a bipartisan aspect in a state with a lot of moderate Republicans.

The toughest thing about this race is that Ramaswamy is a billionaire with a lot of billionaire friends, so he will have unlimited money. Ohio voters will be inundated with anti-Acton ads and social media. But if Acton can raise the money this is a very winnable race.

Here’s the thing: the DSCC and Sherrod’s longtime network of donors and raisers will be able to raise a lot of money for his campaign, but national donors and organizations need to get over their mentality that Ohio is too tough a state to win in the Governor’s race. If Acton can’t raise the money to compete and ends up losing by a lot, Sherrod and those 5 House candidates are going to get beaten as well. Politics is a team sport, especially the way it is played right now. Sherrod did 8 points better than Harris, but could not overcome her 13 point loss. Tim Ryan did 9 points better than Nan Whaley, the 2022 Democratic candidate for Governor (who donors and groups gave up on early), but couldn’t overcome her 24 point loss.

We have a path to winning the Governor’s race in 2026, but donors and organizations need to invest now to make it happen.

The future of the Ohio labor movement and factory towns

Ohio’s Republican Governors over the last 20 years, John Kasich and Mike DeWine, are old school pro-corporate Republicans who never loved the labor movement and tried to undermine it, but weren’t willing to stake their legacy on destroying unions in Ohio. The fact that they were not all out, far right, Trump-style Republicans helped them win elections, and after losing a couple of ballot measure fights to the labor movement, they mostly kept to an uneasy truce with unions.

Ramaswamy is an all out MAGA warrior who will declare total war with unions, including wanting to end public sector collective bargaining in the state. Ohio is the 9th biggest state in the country in terms of union membership. Remember the devastation caused to the labor movement by Scott Walker’s anti-union jihad? Ohio is almost twice as big as Wisconsin.

I visited Ohio recently and spent a lot of time talking to union leaders. They know how important this Governor’s race is: they described this Governor’s election as an existential threat to the future of the labor movement in Ohio. Ohio without a labor movement basically would be devastated – it would basically become like Kentucky, both politically and in terms driving wages down for workers. And having a weak labor movement in Ohio would be a serious blow to the labor movement nationwide.

If we ever want Ohio to start moving back our way politically, we need to keep labor strong in the state, and we do that by winning the Governor’s race and these other elections in 2026.

The reason the blue wall broke in PA, MI, and WI – and the reason OH, IA, and MO went from being always purple to being red states – was because of factory towns. We need to regain ground there.

Ottumwa, Iowa used to be the most Democratic town in Iowa. Bethlehem, Johnstown, and Scranton always used to turn out big margins for Democrats in PA. Youngstown used to be one of the most Democratic cities in Ohio.

These and many other mid-sized factory towns in the old industrial belt of PA and the Midwest all went for Clinton, Obama, and then strongly for Trump. Our research and organizing work in these factory towns shows that these are still swing voters – unhappy and cynical about both parties, skeptical about some government programs and immigration, but strongly populist in being angry at corporate abuse of power and billionaires rigging the system.

Ohio still has a lot of union members, union retirees, and people who used to be union members that still believe in the labor movement. It still has plenty of workers who work in manufacturing, including small manufacturers in small and mid-sized towns. It still has a lot of multi-generational working class families rooted in their historic hometowns. These are not natural Republican voters, even though many of them have been moving toward the Republicans in the last decade. They are instead economically oriented voters who have been culturally and informationally realigned over time. If Democrats want to rebuild a durable working-class coalition nationally, Ohio is one of the only places where that can happen at meaningful scale.

Bringing Ohio back to purple

I will never forget sitting in the boiler room of the 1992 Clinton campaign HQ and tracking the turnout numbers, waiting for the states to come in on election night. We had been on the state targeting committee, and that committee had as our top goal from Day One to win Ohio. We went into Election Day feeling pretty good, with a 6 point lead in the national polling and knowing we would bring home states like CA, IL, and NJ that we hadn’t won since 1976. But we also knew that we could still fall just short if Ohio didn’t come through. When Ohio was called late that night, we knew we had just elected a Democratic President.

Ohio had been one of the key states for JFK, and had been the state to give Jimmy Carter the victory in 1976. If we had won Ohio in 2000, all those hanging chads in Florida wouldn’t have mattered; if we had won Ohio in 2004, John Kerry would have been President.

Ohio is not that far away from being a purple state again. It has several outstanding young mayors and other local elected officials in its urban cores of Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton. The labor movement and other progressive forces still have strength there – we don’t have to build from scratch, but can extend and integrate what is already on the ground.

Democratic states will lose enough electoral votes in the 2030 census that just winning the usual blue states plus PA, MI, and WI will no longer give us the presidency. Thank goodness NV, AZ, NC, and GA have moved from solidly red to purple, but none of those states are easy.

After the 2000 election, Democrats started giving on working class states like WV, AR, TN, MO, IA, and OH. Some of those states have slipped so far away after years of neglect that they may be lost for the foreseeable future. Ohio and Iowa were the least two to go, and have the strongest promise to come back to purple. (Iowa is also high on my 2026 priority list but is a lot smaller state than Ohio.)

Ohio rests at the intersection of three different major strategic imperatives:

• Rebuilding a national working-class coalition

• Counteracting Electoral College erosion

• Restoring geographic balance to the Democratic map

Ohio is still winnable with an economically populist, working class oriented message and strategy. In 2026, with Republican voters discouraged, Democrats fired up, and working class swing voters back in play, we have a real opportunity to begin winning Ohio back. We should seize the damn day, and reverse the trends. It will take some serious investment, but this is the year to go all out.

One final point: if Democrats want to start competing for working class voters again, what does it say about us if we leave Ohio off the target list? Bringing Ohio back into the mix is not just optional for Democrats, it is imperative. Let’s do this.

As Democratic Party strategists have gotten more and more invested in Big Data targeting, we have created a culture which has narrowed our interest in targeting voters, districts, and states that are harder to win. I have been having this debate with the Democratic establishment for more than 25 years, as party leaders began giving up in one state after another.

Up until 2000, West Virginia was a reliably Democratic state in presidential elections with two Democratic Senators and a Dem Governor. After we lost it in a surprise in 2000, we stopped targeting it, and because we paid no attention, it became one of the most Republican states in the country.

Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio all used to be purple states in presidential elections and have at least one Democratic Senator.

There are all kinds of problems with this narrowing of targets mentality. One is that once you give up on a state, it becomes more and more Republican, and harder to win any elections there. Another is that more and more people get radicalized by the non-stop social and legacy media domination in those places. But the number one reason to not give up on states is simply math. Look at the states that are generally considered blue, red, and purple:

Blue (17)

VT
MA
CT
RI
NY
NJ
DE
MD
VA
MN
IL
NM
CO
CA
OR
WA
HI

Purple (9)

ME
NH
PA
WI
MI
NC
GA
AZ
NV

Red (24)

WV
SC
AL
FL
MS
LA
TN
KY
AR
MO
IA
IN
OH
ND
SD
NE
KS
OK
TX
MT
WY
ID
UT
AK

Let’s talk about the Senate for a while. I know that many progressive-minded folks like to bemoan the way the Senate is deeply biased toward rural and Republican states, and there is certainly some truth to that complaint. However, that is the system we have for the foreseeable future, so if we care about passing legislation, and confirming or stopping judicial nominations and administration appointees, we need to figure out how to win the Senate.

With many party strategists and pundits ascribing to the view that Democrats can no longer compete in red states, that means the Democrats would have to win every single Senate race in both blue and purple states to get to 52 seats.That leaves almost no margin for error. Give the DSCC and Senate Majority PAC credit, they do really well in those swing state races: they’ve won 14 of the 18 races in those purple states over the last three cycles. But we are very unlikely to win them all: we need to win some of those “red state” races, and we need to turn more red states purple.

A lot of pundits and party leaders forget that nothing in politics is immutable and unchanging.

Look at just how politics has shifted since the turn of the century, 25 years of American politics. Within that timeframe, Democrats have had both Senate seats in MT, ND, SD, AR, LA, and WV, and one each in OH, MO, IA, and NE. Democratic presidential candidates have won or come very close in 9 different states that Trump won in 2024: IN, MO, AZ, NV, NC, FL, GA, PA, MI, WI. And in case you think it’s all been bad news for Democrats, at the beginning of this century VA, GA, NC, and AZ were all considered reliably red in presidential races. In 2018, we won Senate seats in OH, MT, and WV; since then we have picked up two Senate seats in AZ and two more in GA.

We have to get out of a mindset that says we should only compete in the usual purple and blue seats and districts.

Great candidates and a message taking on corporate abuse of power

There are two ways Democrats, and Independents who share many of our values, can win in red states.

One is to recruit kickass candidates who truly represent their districts and states, and are genuine about identifying with working class folks. The best red state/district candidates are those actually rooted in the working class, and who speak to the strong anti-establishment populism voters are feeling today. I’m going to highlight a few of those folks below.

The kinds of candidates who have the best chance in working class red states and districts are the populists. Not all of these kinds of candidates are Democrats – Dan Osborn, the Nebraska pipefitter and former union President who got 47% of the vote in the 2024 Senate election is an Independent. He is running again this year and is tied with the Republican billionaire incumbent right now.

Here’s a great video of Dan talking about corporate America while fixing a car.

Let me show you a couple more of my favorite campaign videos, where working class candidates have kickass populist messages.

The first is from firefighter and local union Vice-President Sam Forstag.

The second is from a farmer who had to sell her farm last year because of Trump’s terrible policies hurting the ag economy. Check this out.

These videos are amazing. They take corporate abuse of power head on and promise to fight for working people on those issues, and show off really appealing, charismatic candidates fighting the good fight.

But it’s not just the message: how do we deliver that message?

The media landscape has changed radically in recent years. 3,000 newspapers have closed in the last 10 years. Most radio and TV stations have been bought up by huge national media conglomerates, many of them with a far right-wing bent like Sinclair Broadcasting. Meanwhile, most people are moving away from watching traditional TV, getting most of their entertainment from streaming services and most of their news from social media.

We need to stop spending so much money on TV ads and invest far more into social media, especially local pages that can build trusted communities, and get people news and information about issues.

Progressive non-profit groups need to be investing in long term social media infrastructure. Democratic candidates need to invest in building campaign Facebook pages that engage people in every community in their districts, pages where you can deliver content and do organizing at the same time.

Over time, I hope that some wealthy progressives buy more media properties, and that our progressive movement can organically support genuine talent who build audiences for the progressive worldview. In the short term, we need to be organizing at the local level to give our candidates a chance.

If we do this kind of local organizing, and build our message delivery capacity through a serious social media strategy, we can win in red districts and states.

I think this phrase exactly fits the scary moment American politics and economics are in right now. Between the chaos and open fascism and corruption of the Trump administration, the rapidly evolving brave new world of social media and AI, and the crushing weight of global corporations and billionaires who dominate our economy, it is most assuredly a new world we live in. And with the brittleness of an economy built by those global corporations to serve only their money and power, our economy is on very thin ice, brittle as can be.

What do I mean by brittle? Massive global corporations more and more have decided that the best way to maximize their profits is to put most or all their factories in the same places, usually in low wage Asian countries. That means when there are economic problems – like, say, oil shortages and sudden price hikes now being caused by the Iran war – it can cause severe problems both with those factories and the supply chain, as shipping and air freight costs suddenly also go through the roof. Remember all the supply side problems during the pandemic? Get ready for Round 2.

Then there is the world of speculative financial markets. Crypto and AI are two of the most obvious examples, with hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing around with no steady anchor or ways to generate actual profit-making products yet. The only way to profit right now is to keep speculating and hope it doesn’t crash down on you at the wrong time. In fact, many of the biggest companies with the highest stock prices have massive outlays in ventures with highly uncertain futures, based on – again – speculative spread sheets.

Here’s another domino that could fall: lots of the investment capital these companies have raised is from what’s called “private capital”, as opposed to actual banks which are regulated and backed by real deposits and FDIC. If private capital companies start getting shaky, which is already happening in some areas, it could create a wave of financial waves that could topple key businesses.

I am not the only one worried about all of this. This article is by one of several people who predicted the 2008 financial collapse who is concerned about another one.

Into this fragile, brittle, creaky economy, with the regulators Trump has appointed letting the financial and tech industry run wild, inject the uncertainties and high stresses of the Iran war.

So what do Democrats and progressive minded folks do with this knowledge in mind?

Number one, we have to do what we have done as Trump is unleashing all his threats against us: we have to stick together in hard times. Help each other weather the storm by showing the kind of mutual aid and solidarity that the people of Minneapolis showed us. As the economy gets worse, we need to step up and give help to our neighbors in trouble.

Second, we need to sound the alarm. It is not enough to attack Trump and say the word “affordability” over and over again. Democrats and their progressive allies need to be warning people about the economic dangers of monopolies, corporate concentration, and the lack of effective oversight on the financial, tech/AI, and crypto industries. We need to be doing more than telling about the problem of high prices; we need to talk about the reasons prices are going up and talk abut the villains of the story. And we need to show we are fighting for solutions: stopping price gouging, tough enforcement of antitrust laws, raising wages, and empowering working people and consumers.

If we sound the alarm and talk about solutions now, when this crash comes we will have far more credibility to deal with it then.

The inspiring victory won in the streets of Minneapolis gives Democrats an opening for a realignment of American politics, but only if we build a bridge to working-class voters conflicted on immigration, based on the populist economic issue driving their anger right now: the abuse of corporate power. We must show people that the same government that is terrorizing people in cities like Minneapolis is also allowing big business to abuse its power to make life tougher for all working families.

The combination of wages’ not rising fast enough plus the inflation of recent years has hit working families very hard. These voters have not liked the excesses of ICE, so we have an opening with them on immigration, but it will never be their main issue. Economic struggles will always be the first order of business for most working-class voters.

Right now, the political dynamic favors the Democrats. Republicans are no longer winning the immigration debate, and the economy is hurting them because they are the party in power.

The problem is that Trump is moving fast to develop and promote his own populist-sounding affordability agenda, including proposals to cap credit-card interest rates at 10 percent; prohibit large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes; and slash the cost of prescription drugs.

The Danger Ahead

For all the good news, Democrats are at a dangerous moment politically. On a high from winning the 2025 elections so decisively and seeing Trump’s numbers tanking, much of the party leadership believes they can glide into a 2026 election victory by simply attacking Trump and repeating the word affordability. But Trump’s team is politically flexible enough to craft a populist-sounding affordability package that—rhetorically, if not substantively—borrows key elements of the Elizabeth Warren and Zohran Mamdani agenda.

It is no accident that Trump has surprised observers by recently saying favorable things about both Warren and Mamdani. Even his rejection of popular healthcare subsidies long supported by Democrats has been framed with a populist twist, attacking “subsidies” as handouts to greedy insurance companies.

At this moment in time, Donald Trump is sounding more like a progressive economic populist than many Democrats. If that perception holds—if he succeeds in rebranding himself as more of a fighter against big business than the Democratic Party—then Democrats may eke out a smaller-than-expected victory in 2026 but will face serious danger in 2028. They will also have squandered their best opportunity since 2008 to produce a genuine political realignment.

The Populist Moment We Live In

I have never seen a political environment as intensely populist as this one.

Part of this dynamic is that people feel increasingly hard-pressed. When my organization began Factory Towns polling in 2021, respondents were asked whether they or an immediate family member had recently experienced hardships such as job loss, health problems or coverage loss, medical bankruptcy, retirement income loss, foreclosure, or eviction. More than half answered yes to more than half of these questions.

A recent poll by GQR and the Century Foundation showed that life remains difficult for working-class voters and that their first instinct is to blame corporate CEOs, corporate power, and corporate greed.

Another poll that Lake Research and I conducted for the antitrust trial bar in late 2024 revealed exceptionally strong populist, anti-corporate-power sentiment. Voters strongly opposed corporate monopolies and expressed support for politicians advocating vigorous enforcement of antitrust law.

Working-Class Voters and Realignment

Recent private polling on working-class voters and immigration echoes these findings. While some voters remain sympathetic to Trump on immigration, many are deeply populist and strongly opposed to concentrated corporate power. This pattern is particularly evident among working-class men, both Latino and white.

These voters are highly skeptical of both major parties. A Manhattan Institute study identified “New Entrant Republicans” who diverge sharply from traditional party orthodoxy:

Younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past, this group diverges sharply from the party’s core. They are more likely, often substantially more likely, to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain. They are more supportive of left-leaning economic policies…

Many populist voters have supported both Trump and anti-establishment Democrats or independents such as Bernie Sanders, Dan Osborn, and Mamdani. In New York City, approximately 10 percent of Trump voters supported Mamdani—sufficient to affect close elections.

In addition to strong anti-corporate sentiment, these voters are highly pro-union. One Fair Wage polling has shown broad support for a $25 minimum wage.

These voters were central to the Factory Towns Project.

Donald Trump recognizes this electorate and is adjusting rhetorically toward economic populism. Many Democrats, by contrast, remain hesitant to define themselves as working-class-oriented, anti-corporate populists.

What an Affordability Agenda Could Look Like

There are three major pathways Democrats could pursue on affordability.

First, government could directly subsidize or fund more services. While popular in specific domains, swing and middle-income voters often remain wary of large-scale expansion.

Second, Democrats should emphasize raising wages and strengthening unions. Workers understand that wage stagnation remains central to their struggles.

Third—and most critically—Democrats must address corporate concentration. Voters already recognize that monopoly power drives price increases. From groceries and housing to healthcare, corporate consolidation shapes everyday economic pressures.

Yet many Democratic leaders resist a full embrace of anti-corporate populism, fearing its effects on campaign finance. However, public demand for such policies would likely prove politically powerful.

Highest Possible Stakes

Government policy is not the only threat to working families. Corporate practices—from wage suppression to price gouging—compound economic insecurity.

If Trump succeeds in positioning himself as the primary anti-corporate populist while Democrats avoid confronting corporate power, the long-term consequences for democratic governance could be severe.

Democrats remain far more credible messengers on corporate accountability than Trump, whose record reflects favoritism toward concentrated wealth and corporate interests.

The moment to decide is now.

Here is how the Reverend changed American politics:

1) He showed people a candidate could go over the heads of the establishment and win voters over to your side with a movement oriented campaign.

People forget how many Black elected officials disdained Jackson’s run in 1984 and endorsed Mondale instead. The Mondale campaign assumed those Black elected officials could deliver the Black vote, but those endorsements were overwhelmed by the passion and excitement Jesse Jackson created. Progressive insurgent campaigns ever since have used that kind of model to win surprise upset victories.

2) He showed people a Black insurgent populist could draw White working class votes.

Before the Rev ran, most voting in America in primary elections followed closely along racial lines. There were exceptions, but there hadn’t been many. The other thing that had been conventional wisdom before Jesse was that only “safe” Black candidates, people who weren’t rabble rousers, could win White votes – think Tom Bradley in CA or Wilson Goode in Philly.

Jackson changed that assumption. While he dramatically exceeded exceptions in 1984, it was mostly by winning higher percentages of the Black vote and by turning out more Black voters than usual. But in 1988, his progressive populist campaign once again exceeded expectations, this time with not only higher Black turnout but with lots of White voters. He won over 11% of the vote and 13% of the county delegates in Iowa, where only 1% of the voters were Black. He won the Texas caucuses by putting together a coalition of Blacks, Latinos, and populist Whites. After sweeping through the mostly Southern Super Tuesday primaries, he shocked the Democratic establishment by dominating the Michigan caucuses, winning a ton of White labor union voters.

At that point, he had more delegates and state primary victories than any other candidate. He even won states like Vermont and Alaska that have hardly any Black voters.

3) Jackson dramatically out-performed his fundraising, proving the power of his populist message.

The way Democrats usually won Democratic primaries was to win Iowa and/or New Hampshire, and then ride that momentum to raising a lot of money, allowing them to compete in the later states. Dukakis repeated that pattern, but raised so much early money that he was able to swamp other contenders like Gephardt even though Gephardt had won Iowa.

Jesse’s early momentum did not result in him raising that usual flow of money, because he was Black and populist and scared the hell out of the money men (they were almost all men) in the party. But he won all those votes, delegates, and states I listed above anyway. I think it is safe to say that no candidate for president’s vote total has ever out-performed the amount of money he raised so dramatically. Jesse’s populist message allowed him to punch way above his weight.

If internet fundraising had been around in the 1980s, I think it is likely Jesse would have won the nomination in 1988. And when Obama ran 20 years later, no one was writing off his chance to win the White voters he needed to win to get the nomination.

4) Jackson’s voter registration and turnout capacity allowed Democrats to compete in the South again.

After the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, Democrats had a lot of trouble winning in the South. Carter won a few Southern states in 1976, but none other than his home state of Georgia in 1980. We didn’t win a single Southern state in the presidential races of 1972, 1984, or 1988. But the Black voters Jackson energized helped the Democrats win back the Senate in 1986, and over time, we started competing again for the Southern states in presidential races. Virginia has now become a lean Democratic state, and North Carolina and Georgia are now two of the most competitive states in the country. We have won Florida a couple of times since the 1990s and it was stolen from us in 2000. Texas is becoming more competitive, and in Mississippi we only lost the Governor’s race last cycle by 3 points, and Cindy Hyde Smith only won by 4 points 6 years ago when she ran.

And by the way, it wasn’t just his registration efforts in the years he ran. Jesse would hit the trail every single cycle for Democrats, and he never lost his ability to inspire and mobilize and turn out voters. I lost track of the number of times I would get calls from party fundraisers asking me to help raise more money for Jesse to go out and get more folks to the polls, because party strategists knew how important he was in turning out the vote.

5) Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition rebuilt the potential for the Democratic Party to become a majority party again.

After the crumbling of one of the most enduring electoral coalitions in American history, the New Deal coalition that lasted 40+ years, Democrats were searching for a new way to win elections. The corporate wing of the party was arguing that we should be working to win over higher income “office park dads” and move away from the New Deal’s focus on working class folks. Jesse Jackson understood that those numbers didn’t ever add up in the end – that a charismatic candidate like Clinton could keep enough of the old Democratic coalition together while winning over some higher income voters, but that it wasn’t an enduring majority coalition.

Jesse argued that with populist economics and a welcoming message, we could stay engaged with working class voters of all colors and generate excitement from voters and activists who had never been involved in politics before. No Democratic politician in that era did more to reach out to Latino voters, to Asian-Americans, to LGBT folks, or to young people; but Jesse also carried the flag of farmers who were being foreclosed on during the 1980s farm crisis, and the factory workers who were being decimated by bad trade deals and deindustrialization.

Jesse’s vision of the Rainbow Coalition did not carry the day often enough in party councils. If it had, Democrats would have won a lot more elections in recent years. His legacy, though, is enormous.

Reverend Jackson, rest in peace and rest in power. Thank you for the changes you made in our politics. Those of us who loved and admired you will carry on.

Subscribe now

Peggy Flanagan, the Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota who is running for the open Senate seat there, and one of the most exciting candidates running this year (please help her out), has maybe the best metaphor for 2026. She says that what the people in Minnesota have been going through is neither a sprint nor a marathon: it is a relay race. People working together, moving forward, handing the baton off to each other as the race goes on.

With Tom Homan’s announcement that the Minneapolis ICE surge was drawing down, maybe- maybe- things will get better for the courageous Minnesotans who have been dealing with the federal occupation of their city these last months. We can only hope so, although we know that everything coming out of the administration’s mouths seem to be lies.

But no matter what happens next in Minnesota, the relay race continues. Our side in this long and hard fight will need to continue to support each other, take care of each other, and come to each other’s common defense when we are attacked by ICE, the DOJ, or any other Trump administration department that is running amuck.

And it’s not just when government agencies attack. The Trump administration and Republican members of Congress are leaving big corporate CEOs free to screw us in any nasty way they think will make them more money: closing factories, cutting wages (or committing wage theft) and health care and retirement benefits, busting unions, forcing workers to sign non-compete clauses, price gouging and jacking up utility prices, junk fees, crushing small business competition, polluting our air and water, and all the other ways Big Business abuses its powers.

We have to show solidarity in the face of regular working folks getting hurt every day, whether from Trump’s government which values cruelty over dignity, or from the predatory monopolistic corporations Trump is letting run wild.

We are in battle over two different definitions of the word freedom.

Trump defines freedom as the freedom for his followers, and for the Epstein class of elites who give them money, to do anything they want, to whomever they want, whenever they want to do it. They think they are so rich and so powerful that nothing they do will ever be held to account.

Progressives define freedom as the ability to build good lives for their families and their community, to have dignity at the workplace, to live in a trusted community where they won’t be seized by masked secret police because of the color of their skin, or be taken advantage of wealthy and powerful corporations who don’t care about their families’ well-being.

That is the choice in front of us: which side are you on? I’m on the side of the relay team fighting for dignity and community.

I have always thought there is something special about being the uncle and aunt without kids. When you have your own kids, your unclehood (Is that a word? Probably not) is mostly defined by being the parent of one or more of the cousins. Your role early on is a lot about making sure none of the cousins kill or are killed by your kid. Which with some particularly rambunctious kids is a fulltime job.

But when you don’t have your own kids to worry about, when you are lucky you often get to build closer and more interesting relationships with your nieces and nephews. My Uncle Stan and Aunt Dee didn’t have any kids, and I always felt a special bond with them.

There’s so much joy in seeing these fascinating, smart, funny kids grow up. Being an uncle has been one of the greatest things in my life.

But now I am faced, for the first time, with the loss of one of these amazing people. My nephew Josh has been struck down by cancer. The irony is that Josh might well have been the healthiest person in our whole family, walking 5 miles or more every day, eating healthier than any of us. The cruelty is that he probably would have lived to be 100 if this rare and deadly form of cancer had not overtaken him.

Josh was such a good man. He spent most of his life working to take care of people with severe autism, heading up a group home for a while and then doing it one on one. When he first was diagnosed with cancer, he started posting regularly on TikTok about what he was doing to get better, and to be in community with others going through cancer treatment.

Josh knew more about movies than just about anyone I know. He taught me about really fun musical artists I never would have known of otherwise. He married a truly amazing woman and they have a 10 year old son who looks just like Josh did at that age, and who is in his own right one of my very favorite people in the world.

Josh cared passionately about our screwed up political system, was a big Bernie guy in the years Bernie ran for president. He and I talked a lot about politics, and he had great insights. He was the first person I ever talked to about the “MAHA” movement, and he gave me an early warning of how politically important these voters were. He would sometimes yell at me about the fact that Democrats weren’t doing enough for working families like his, but I never minded because (a) he was mostly right, and (b) I was glad to see him so engaged and fired up about changing things.

The last time we talked, he said something profoundly important. I was talking about how pissed off people are by Trump, and he said “But never forget that people are still pissed off by the Democrats, too. People are looking for something different.” He was 100% right.

This is the hard part about being an uncle, saying goodbye. Josh, thank you for being such a big part of my life. I will love you for all time.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Elizabeth Warren gave a great speech on Monday morning at the National Press Club about the future of the Democratic Party and what we needed to do to build an enduring, governing electoral majority. It was a Warren classic, full of fight and clarity about the path ahead. She eloquently made the case for a full throated economic populism. As she put it:

Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it. Revising our economic agenda to tiptoe around that conclusion might appeal to the wealthy, but it will not help Democrats build a bigger tent, and it definitely will not help Democrats win elections. A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party that is doomed to fail – in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

Warren’s speech highlights the dilemma that Democrats have to face. On the one hand, we all want to stay united in order to make sure Trump and the Republicans don’t win elections in 2026 and 2028. Opposition to Trump has been, and will continue to be, the tie that binds us.

And you can certainly say that our commitment to democratic principles, and to the centrality of the affordability message, are things Democrats are strongly unified around. All this is to the good as we work hard together to stop the MAGA policy agenda and win the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Subscribe now

The fundamental fight we cannot avoid

Having said that, Democrats are not going to be able to avoid an absolutely foundational fight over how we project ourselves as a political party. It will be played out in 2026 primaries, in the 2026 general election, and in the 2028 presidential race most of all.

There is no avoiding the fight over whether we should be the party that boldly and bluntly takes on corporate concentration and abuse of power, that takes on big money and tax breaks for wealthy corporations and billionaires, or whether we should be the party that softens our rhetoric and scales back our agenda and ambition every time it bothers some megadonor to the party.

I will tell you that the polling data is overwhelmingly in the favor of those of us arguing for a message taking on corporate concentration and power. In the fall of 2024, I worked on a poll that showed the public overwhelmingly in favor of strong antitrust enforcement and other measures to reign in corporate power. Last week, Rasmussen, a Republican leaning polling operation, came out with a new poll saying the same thing. The full report is paywalled, but former Wall St Journal reporter Brody Mullins sums it up:

A new poll by Rasmussen Reports reveals that an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats think large corporations have too much power, Big Tech firms have “run wild” and that President Trump should do more to enforce antitrust laws.

In all, nearly three in four Americans believe big companies hold too much power, according to the poll; Two in three think stronger government enforcement of antitrust laws would lower prices for Americans.”

In all of my Factory Towns project polling and focus groups, the anger toward corporate monopolies and big corporations abusing their power was palpable. And in a recent private briefing I got from extensive polling, the conclusion was 100% clear that the only way Democrats have a chance at starting to win back blue collar voters, especially men, was a strong anti-corporate power message. This is even more true of the white working class voters who will constitute the decisive voting bloc in Senate races like North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Alaska, as well as most of the key races in the House.

Finally, I would note that Donald Trump won elections in great part because of his populist message – attacking weak trade deals like NAFTA, promising to cap credit card rates and prescription drug prices, not taxing tips, and taking on the Wall Street and Big Tech establishment. The fact that he lied about most of that agenda is coming back to haunt him.

Abundance and other ways to change the subject

Warren addressed the Abundance Democrats in a way that I very much agreed with. After talking about how one of the gaols of the CFPB was to consolidate consumer regulation, she went through some of the examples of the way she and other progressive Democrats have looked to cut back on unnecessary regulations in a way that actually helped regular folks. She then remarked:

So yes, we need more government efficiency—a lot more. But many in the Abundance movement are doing little to call out corporate culpability and billionaire influence in creating and defending those very inefficiencies.

Instead, Abundance has become a rallying cry – not just for a few policy nerds worried about zoning, but for wealthy donors and other corporate-aligned Democrats who are putting big-time muscle behind making Democrats more favorable to big businesses. It looks like the corporate tycoons have found one more way to try to stop the Democratic Party from tackling a rigged system with too much energy.

The people in our party who work for big corporations as consultants, lobbyists, and pollsters want to talk about anything other than the power of the populist message. They want to change the subject from the overwhelming amount of evidence that economic populism is what works. They want to talk about Abundance. They want to say we are too liberal on social issues.

Yes, we might need to use more effective language on these issues, but our Factory Towns polling of working class counties showed very clearly that the problem on social issues was far less our specific policies than on their perception that we prioritized every other issue but the big economic issues that mattered to them. It also showed a populist economic issue beating a Republican culture war message. Sometimes these pro-corporate Democrats will say “well, we don’t want to sound too liberal,” even though progressive populist messages consistently outpolls the watered down messages of the pro-corporate Democrats.

Democrats Have to Decide: which side are they on?

If I thought the mushy pro-corporate brand was the best way to win the next two elections, I would shut up and fight the good fight on issues when Democrats swept back into power. However, our only way to an electoral majority is by winning back a significantly higher share of working class voters. And the only way to do that is through big, bold and loud economic populism. We can’t be pussyfooting around anymore. I know we will lose some big money contributions as a result. Not having as much money as the Republicans will be challenging, but what I have learned over the years is that full throated roaring populism can also raise money because of the excitement it creates. Elizabeth Warren raised more money than any other Senate candidate when she ran against Scott Brown to win her first race. Bernie raised a ton of money in his two presidential runs, as did Elizabeth. Populists like Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Dan Osborn, and Ruben Gallego, and other populists raised the money they needed to be competitive in Senate races.

Even long-time centrists like James Carville and Adam Schiff are saying we need to move in the populist time. Now the rest of the party needs to get on board.

So let’s have this fight. If us progressive populists with the strongest message win the battle over the message and agenda the Democrats should be pursuing, we will beat back MAGA for good.

In it, he sings about the reason the fascists are bound to lose: that people are getting organized.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump and Steven Miller believe that if you kill and threaten enough people, folks will be too scared to do anything to organize against them. That is what Hitler believed. It is what the KKK believes, and the Southern slave owners before them. It is what Putin and his fellow tyrants around the world believe.

But what they don’t understand is that their oppression only inspires people to be more courageous and more determined.

The days ahead will require courage. It will be, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, both a moral and physical struggle.But if we, as my dear friend the legendary Heather Booth says, keep organizing with love at the center, we will beat these fascists. Hope and courage and solidarity will always ultimately prevail, even over violence and intimidation.

You fascists are bound to lose.

According to the Hebrew scripture, after the Jewish people suffered many years of worsening slavery and violence, Moses marched them out to the banks of the Red Sea with the formidable Egyptian army in fast pursuit. In that worst of moments, faith and hope saved them.

According to Christian scripture, when a baby born in a barn to a poor unwed mother was threatened by a maniacal king who started killing all the male babies born to Jewish women, hope and faith, as they escaped for asylum in another nation, saved them.

When Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery, and then went back down South(!) to free other slaves, it was her faith and hope which saved her. A decade later, hundreds of thousands of slaves were leaving the plantations to join up with the Union Army in what W. E. B. Du Bois called the greatest strike of all time. Less than five years after that, the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery was enacted into law.

When Alice Paul and her friends were arrested and went on a hunger strike in 1917, and their jailers force fed them and sent them to the horrible psychiatric wards, it was faith and hope that saved them. Two later, the Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote was enacted into law.

When Martin Luther King, Jr was stabbed and repeatedly threatened; when those four little girls died in the bombing of a Birmingham church; when Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman were brutally murdered in Mississippi; when the Freedom Riders and John Lewis were beaten within an inch of their lives, it was the faith and hope of the Civil Rights Movement that kept them marching on to great victories in the years to come.

We are living in one of the most horrific times in American history. Due process is denied to more and more people; Americans are being arrested on the basis of their skin color. Armed masked men, paid by our government, are storming random apartment buildings and invading schools to snatch children away from their parents. Millionaires and billionaires are getting more and more power and money while poor and working-class children are being denied health care and food. Gigantic corporations are crushing small businesses, workers, and consumers.

There is evil abroad in the land.

But there is great hope as well. Millions showing up in the streets, accompanied by people dressed up as frogs and millipedes. Local and statewide elections being won, one after the other, in opposition to Trump and MAGA. People showing up for each whenever ICE shows up, to blow whistles or just walk children to school. Lawyers working with citizens and non-profit groups to win one court case after another.

The people are pushing back.

For all its flaws, American democracy is too strong to give up without a fight. Americans like living in the land of the free, and they are supporting their neighbors who are being attacked.

Thomas Paine, whose pen did more to inspire and save the American revolution than any other man’s, wrote after a horrific first year of the revolution:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

On hope and faith in the face of evil and oppression, he added:

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

MLK Jr. spoke eloquently about hope and faith for the future in his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Hope and faith. It is what kept King and the other civil rights leaders going, and what kept all those that came before them going. It is what must and will keep all of us going. We must have the faith that out of this horror will come a time when our country is restored to us, better than before.

As Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, the nation we are fighting for was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all were created equal.” We must resolve with Lincoln that our nation will indeed “have a new birth of freedom, and that our government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the earth.”

Yes, it has been a horrible year. But it has also been a year of hope and joy as we rise up together to fight the good fight. I am proud to be part of the progressive movement fighting to make sure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the earth.

Democrats should be feeling pretty good about their 2026 chances — I am optimistic enough that I think we have a serious shot at winning the Senate.

But two things happened last week that show Democrats still know how to do messaging that doesn’t work, even in these politically favorable times.

Subscribe now

Strong floor, no ceiling, bad idea

The first was Hakeem Jeffries unveiling his new slogan “Strong Floor, No Ceiling”. He got this idea from a venture capitalist, who wrote a book with this title to, he said, appeal to moderates in both parties. This kind of moderation was what I was referring to when I wrote this article about what moderation looks like to those in the Beltway bubble.

It’s a terrible slogan for this populist moment where Trump won against Democrats by attacking them as the elitists, and when every single poll and focus group and dial test I know of shows that the only hope for Democrats is an economically populist message focused on taxing the rich, stopping corporate abuses of power, and taking on CEOs and giant monopolistic companies.

But don’t be too hard on Jeffries: this is a long term Democratic Party problem. For the almost 40 years I have been involved in the national Democratic Party, we have faced this dilemma: we have to figure out how to appeal to enough big donors to raise the money we need to compete with the right wing billionaires of the world. There are plenty of ways for individual candidates with a progressive populist profile to raise good money from online donors and wealthy progressive forces: Bernie raised more than Hillary did once his campaign took off in 2016. For the DCCC and DSCC, that kind of populist insurgent money doesn’t much exist, so party leaders like Jeffries try and contort themselves like a pretzel to find a message that will work for voters but not piss off the big donor base in the party.

Such efforts rarely work, and this one was a particularly bad idea.

Running as a national Democrat in a Republican district

The other dilemma was faced by the Democratic congressional candidate for Tennessee’s 7th district, a +22 for Trump seat that combined a little sliver of Nashville, some wealthy Republican suburbs, and a lot of rural Tennessee. Behn, whose career as a state legislator has been very progressive, decided to lean into that progressive history and hope that in a Democratic year, she could rally enough excited Democrats to win the seat. Behn did a lot of things right, especially her focus on lowering grocery prices, and she is a candidate with a lot of charisma who fired people up, but as soon as I saw that Kamala Harris was invited to the district to help turnout the Democratic vote, I knew the race was over.

Ever since Election Day, Democrats have been patting themselves on the back because Behn only lost by 9 in a R+22 district, but we need to get out of the mindset of feeling good when we lose by less than last time. Democrats are going to have to win more Republican districts in places with lots of rural turf, especially iifthe Supreme Court decimates the Voting Rights Act, as they are almost certain to do. But we are fully capable of winning more of those tough races if our candidates have the right strategy.

The winning strategy for Republican leaning places

In order to have a chance in Republican leaning states and districts, Democratic candidates need to simultaneously explain why you are a Democrat, while also showing your independence from the national party. A majority of voters in red leaning districts just don’t like what they think they know about the national Democratic Party.

The best way to do that is a combination of economic populism, being straightforward while leading with your values on the tough social issues, and openly criticizing national Democrats for some of the dumb stuff they have done. The last thing you should do is invite national Democrats like Harris to come to your district. Instead, you should be saying stuff like this:

“I am a Democrat because I didn’t want to join a party whose main economic policy seems to be handing out more huge tax breaks to billionaires and profitable corporations. I wanted to be in a party that would fight monopolistic corporations and arrogant CEOs who are jacking up our prices and killing small businesses, to be in a party that would raise the minimum wage so it was a living wage and fight for more power and dignity for people in their workplace.

“Both parties have a lot to answer for. I didn’t like it when Bill Clinton pushed for NAFTA and more trading on unequal terms with China. I didn’t like it when Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street before helping workiworkiople. I didn’t like when Biden and Harris were too slow to combat inflation.

“But I will also be straight with you. I know a lot of you voted for Donald Trump, and I don’t blame you for that, but I didn’t like it when Trump and the Republicans in Congress cut Medicaid and rural hospitals to give trillions of dollars in more tax cuts for the wealthy. I don’t like that he is spending more time on tearing down the White House and threatening our allies with price hiking tariffs than he is figuring out how to lower prices and raise wages. I don’t like that his” billionaire tech bro friends are getting everything they want while the rest of us don’t get much of anything.”

You can run as a proud Democrat in Republican districts if you show folks that you don’t agree with the national Democrats. And when you are asked the tough questions on social issues, don’t dance around on the issues and change the subject; lead with your values. Tell people how you understand theirdoubts and fears about the trans issue, but that you hate bullies and trans kids need to be treated with respect and understanding. Tell people that you agree we need to secure our border and deport immigrants convicted of violent crime, but that immigrant families are just like the rest of us in wanting better lives for their families, and they deserve to be treated with fairness and get due process. Tell people that we all need to be kept safe from crime and violence, that violent criminals convicted fairly deserve to be in jail, but that the number one way to stop crime is prevention.

Conservative voters may not agree with you on these issues, but they will respect and appreciate your honesty and your values. We don’t need for swing voters to agree with us on everything, they never will, but connecting with them honestly will open the door to their support.

The Choice

To get the gavels back, Democrats are going to have to win in Republican leaning districts. We are well positioned to do that in this cycle: people are leaning our way and Democrats are fired up to vote while Republicans are discouraged. But we’re not going to win with muddled messages designed by venture capitalists. We have to make a choice in 2026 and 2028: messages that appeal to working class voters, or messages that appeal to our big donors. I vote that we take the hit on our money supply, because our grassroots donors are going to be as fired up as they have ever been if we give them a populist message.

And our candidates running in those red districts also need to make a choice. You can run as a conventional Democrat hoping that in a good Democratic year you can sweep into victory. That will work in some cases. But to truly have a chance to win in districts like Aftyn Behn’s you have to show voters that you are a different kind of Democrat, one willing to take on the party establishment and the big money donors.

The reason that Donald Trump keeps signaling that he is about to come up with a new health care plan and then fails to deliver one is that every single Republican option on health care is a massive loser with the American public, and unlike on many other policy issues, voters really pay attention to the details on health care.

A little history

Back in the 1990s, several eons ago, there was a moderate wing of the Republican Party, and on the health care issue, Republicans actually had serious policy ideas to contribute to the debate. The leading Republican on health policy in the Senate, John Chaffee, introduced a bill providing for universal coverage in 1993 that had 22 Senate Republican co-sponsors.

The theory at the time was that the Clinton administration would introduce their version of health care reform, and then the Republicans would come to the table with the Chaffee bill and we would forge a compromise. However, there was a political decision made by Newt Gingrich that Republicans should vehemently oppose health care reform because any new health care bill passed would become as beloved as Social Security, the GI BIll, and Medicare, and would help Democrats in their future political battles for decades to come. The Republicans and the health insurance industry defeated “Hillarycare”, as they called it. Democrats, disappointed by the health care disaster and the passage of NAFTA, failed to turn out in big numbers in the 1994 election, and Republicans swept into power in both houses in Congress.

Short term, that strategy obviously worked great for them, as did their identical decision in 2009-10 to oppose what was essentially that same Republican bill, which was pretty much the basis for the ACA. Their demonization of the ACA helped them win the 2010 election in a landslide.

Ever since, though, it has put them into the exact political box that Gingrich had predicted in 1994 - voters like having more help with health care benefits. When Trump tried to repeal the ACA in 2017, the backlash was fierce and the issue hurt them badly in both 2018 and 2020.

The political and policy problem

Fast forward to today. The political problem for Trump and the Republicans on health care isn’t just the fear that voters have in terms of their benefits being taken away. The even bigger problem for them is what the hell to propose as an alternative. The thing I learned from working on health care with Hillary all those years ago is that every change you make in the health care system creates complications, and voters pay a great deal of attention to the details of health care policy because it is such a big part of their lives. For Republicans, the problem is exacerbated by a factor of about 10 because what they want to do to save money and move the health care system more in a free market direction will screw millions of people over badly.

All of their policy ideas will result in some combination of higher insurance rates and prescription drug costs for more people, fewer people being covered, more sick people being thrown off insurance plans, and more hospitals being closed. The only people “empowered” by their free market proposals are insurance and pharmaceutical CEOs.

Republican options

Trump and his Republican allies in Congress basically have three options:

1. Put out a policy proposal that will deeply piss people off.

2. Do what Trump has been doing for a decade now, which is to keep putting off announcing a health care policy proposal, and do nothing. With subsidies going away and premiums skyrocketing, that too will deeply piss people off.

3. Cave in to Democratic demands to extend the health insurance subsidies. That will make them look weak and dumb, and will piss their health industry donors, but it will at last make voters happy.

Republican leadership in Congress or the White House have not produced a health care proposal since 1993. They have walked into a clusterfuck of their own making this year when they ended those health care subsidies and cut Medicaid so deeply. None of those political alternatives work for them.

One more thing to be thankful for this week. Enjoy your holiday.

This cave-in by 8 moderates in the Senate is the latest awful example of this problem. Thank God it happened a year out from the election, which gives us a year for voters to focus on how much Trump and the Republicans are pissing them off rather than on how these Democrats stopped fighting for them in exchange for almost nothing.

DC Centrism as opposed to voter centrism

I am one of those Democrats who think we need swing voters just as much as we need to turn out more base voters; who believe that we need to reach out to independent minded and swing voters who are wary of the national Democratic brand on some issues, especially cultural issues. I think our language needs to be more plain spoken and less politically correct, and that a lot of national Democrats sound too much like college professors and not enough like waitresses, nurses, and construction workers. I think we need to recruit and support viable working class candidates who relate to their districts in rural America and red states as much as we do in big cities and blue districts. I like candidates described as moderate like Amy Klobuchar and Jon Tester, as well as candidates described as progressive like Tammy Baldwin and Keith Ellison.

I also believe that Democrats should talk about the issues that (a) voters care the most about, which are mostly kitchen table economics, and (b) Democrats should talk as much as they can about the policies they believe in that are most popular with voters.

Some would say all of the above makes me a moderate. I think of myself as a progressive, but whatever you want to call me is fine.

However, what I talk about above unfortunately has little to do with what I would describe as DC Centrism, which is Democrats who undercut the rest of the party to do unpopular things, making it harder for Democrats to win elections.

The first time I ran into DC Centrism was on the NAFTA issue when I was on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992. The two most important, hotly contested swing states in that campaign were Ohio and Michigan. NAFTA was hated by the working class voters we needed to win in those two states, and by the key progressive institutions, especially unions, that dominated the politics in those states. We were about to do a press event reinforcing Clinton’s support for the NAFTA treaty that President Bush had negotiated, and I was begging everyone in the campaign to change or soften our position on the issue. Word quickly spread through the campaign that I was just an old school labor liberal, and my position was rejected – Clinton endorsed NAFTA. It made no political sense, it made it far harder to squeeze out wins in Michigan and Ohio, but by God it was centrist, and the Clinton campaign wanted to be centrist.

This pattern was repeated over and over again in the years to come, where Democrats would support unpopular policies and hurt Democrats’ political chances by taking unpopular stands on issues, claiming all the while to be centrist. These centrists:

• Supported letting China into the WTO

• Deregulated Wall Street

• Passed a bill to make it harder for working families to declare bankruptcy

• Went easy on Wall Street after the 2008 financial collapse, letting them keep their bonuses, while forcing UAW workers to make big wage concessions to save the auto industry

• Supported cutting Social Security benefits in a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans

• Supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another unpopular trade deal that fortunately died

• Kept Biden and the Democrats from passing legislation providing more affordable child care, elder care, and building more affordable housing

• Kept Biden and the Democrats from passing an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit

• Kept Biden and the Democrats from passing a wealth tax on billionaires

And now, these 8 Democratic “moderates” in the Senate caved before we had the chance to force Republicans to extend health insurance subsidies, a wildly popular policy that had just helped us win decisive electoral victories in the 2025 elections.

Winning elections isn’t about defining ourselves as moderates; winning elections is defining ourselves as fiercely fighting for working families

All of the policies I talked about above had one side that was popular with DC Centrists, and the other side that was popular with the general public. The DC Centrists thought their centrist positions were popular because their lobbyist friends from corporate America told them they were the moderate thing to do, and these Democrats thought it was politically advantageous to position themselves as moderates. But we would have won so many more elections over the last 30+ years if we hadn’t done all those “moderate” things.

Democrats win elections when we fight like hell for and pass legislation that will benefit working families’ lives. You know what is popular right now, in addition to keeping those subsidies on health insurance, according to the polling I’ve been seeing?

• Stopping monopolistic companies from price gauging

• Negotiating all drug prices the way the VA does

• Raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour

• Breaking up corporate monopolies and making it easier for small business to sue them and compete with them

• Driving down housing costs through rent control and building more affordable housing

• Free or low cost child care and elder care

• Raising taxes on the wealthy and profitable corporations

• Stopping the practice of forcing employees, even low level employees, to sign non-compete clauses

• Making it easier to organize unions, and empowering those unions in bargaining

Maybe if some centrists were to join progressives in making those policy fights, we would be more likely to win working class voters and thus win some elections. And then, maybe we could stop having fights over why we are losing elections.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

This was a dominant victory, and the number one reason it was so dominant is that Democrats are so damn pissed off at Trump and his toadies in the Republican Party. Even the races that were supposed to be closer, like the New Jersey Governor’s race and the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court races, were won in landslide fashion.

The Democratic turnout in election after election yesterday was enormous for an off-year election, and the Republican turnout was flat. We even did better in rural counties than we have done in a while, reversing a precipitous decline in recent years. Black and Hispanic returned to the Democratic fold as well.

I don’t think it is an accident that this extraordinary result happened in the middle of this government shutdown fight. Voters are blaming the Republicans for this shutdown, and even more importantly they see the Democrats fighting hard for something really important to them, their health care. Showing this kind of fight on a core economic issue is exactly what we need to be doing to improve our brand with the working class voters we need to win elections.

Now look, let’s be clear: one election is exactly that, it’s one election. It’s an indicator of where we are in this moment of time, not a certainly of anything in the future. But it shows us the way:

• Fight like hell on big issues that matter to working class folks like health care and affordability

• Keep people excited about taking on Trump by showing no fear in our battles with him

• Turn out, turn out, turn out

The Republicans are going to keep cheating. They are going to keep intimidating people. They are going to keep trying to suppress votes. But if Democrats stick to those three principles above, we will win the 2026 elections in a big way.

Even if they do their worst on redistricting, we will win the House back. And yes, we will win the Senate back too. And we will pick up half a dozen Governor races and hundreds of state legislative seats.

It will be that kind of year if we do the hard work we need to do to keep this momentum going.

Just the other day, I wrote about how Democrats tend to worry about everything and set their hair on fire way too much. I am hoping that the decisive victory yesterday will stop that trend, at least for a moment. We still have plenty of problems to solve as a party; we still have enormous amounts of work to do and money to raise and Republicans to fight off. Let’s not take yesterday’s extraordinary results as a sign that all our problems are solved. But let’s also understand that we have a path to winning big in 2026 and 2028.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

One of them is from a group called Project Enduring Majority, and their report is called A Roadmap to Win America. I give this report a lot of credit for diagnosing the Democratic Party’s culture and communications delivery problems. If you are a reader of this Substack page and Will Robinson’s you will find many similar critiques. A lot of good data and a lot of good ideas here. I didn’t think the what-we-should-do-to-solve-things part of the report was as strong as the diagnostics, and I thought a couple of their state analysis decisions were strange (one example: they had Mississippi at the bottom of the states in terms of places we should target even though Democrats came within three points of winning the Governor’s race in 2023, and is 38% Black), but I strongly recommend you all taking a look.

But the document I want to talk about in a lot more detail today is the new report from a new PAC called the Welcome PAC, so named because they think more voters and candidates in red states should feel more welcome in the Democratic Party – an admirable goal for sure, and one I strongly share.

As I will detail below, I agreed with some of the big ideas in the piece, and disagreed with some as well, but there are two big points I want to say at the start.

The first is that I dearly wish the factions in the Democratic Party wouldn’t immediately look to frame everything as a big fight within the party between liberals and centrists. The entire frame of this otherwise interesting document, pounded into your head over and over again with a two by four, is that liberals lose and centrists win.

Look, if you just want to have the same argument Democrats have been having since FDR died in 1945, with the same talking points (turnout of base voters alone isn’t enough! More voters say they are moderate than liberal!), you can do that but it doesn’t really get us very far.

Framed differently, as an in-depth, more nuanced think and research piece about what is really working and not working right now in the Democratic Party, it might have gotten them less press since reporters love these internal fights, or maybe raised you less money from wealthy donors who don’t like liberals, but it would have allowed a lot more genuine dialogue within the party.

The second point, which I will talk about more below, is that the standard liberal vs moderate narrative doesn’t speak to what I think is the main point that Democrats need to grapple with right now, which I call the which side are you on issue. For me, Democrats winning back voters is a whole lot less about where they position themselves on the moderate to liberal spectrum, and a whole lot more about whether they look like they are insiders or outsiders. Do we side with the big money establishment and big donors or do we side with working people, fighting for regular folks in their daily lives or playing footsie with corporate power? This report glides by that central defining narrative fight within the party, and that is its biggest flaw.

What I liked about the report

1. Make economic issues the priority.

The report’s argument that economic issues need to be the number one priority issue for Democrats is exactly what I believe and have been writing about for years. All of the polling research we have done in our Factory Towns work makes clear that the reason working class voters are turning away from Democrats is that they are hurting economically and don’t think we care. They believe that we prioritize every other issue and every other constituency above the central economic realities that make their lives harder. They want someone to fight for them again, the way Democrats used to.

The way I put it when talking to candidates: talk about economics first, last, and in the middle. If you want to talk about other things, feel free; if you get asked about other things, answer the question straightforwardly; but always either tie those issues to an economic narrative, or pivot back to economics when you finish.

As the report says, we talk too much about other things. Its research about the words Democrats use felt on target to me, and the increasing amount of time we tend to talk about other things, hit the mark for me.

2. The salience thing.

Voters do agree with Democrats on a wide range of issues, but I think the report is right that their instinct is to agree with Republicans on big picture issues that matter the most to them, the ones that determine who they vote for. And the broader the issue is described the more likely they are to agree with Republicans: in other words, they agree with us on whether the minimum wage should be increased and on family and medical leave, but they have been tending to agree with the Republicans on “the economy”. We definitely need to be focused on how to turn this problem around.

3. Their understanding that corporate centrism is not the way to go.

The most refreshing and surprising thing in this report was that it called out that corporate centrism is not the way to go. For as long as I have been involved in national politics (about 40 years now), centrist groups like the DLC and Third Way have gotten most of their money from Wall Street, Big Tech, and other corporate interests, so have tended to shy away from talking about some issues corporate America didn’t like, and have advocated for policies like NAFTA and going easy on Wall Street even when the polling was pretty damn clear that was the opposite of what working class voters wanted.

This report actually calls out the problem with corporate centrism by name, and some of the issues they are urging Democrats to embrace are more populist in nature – increasing taxes on the wealthy, lowering prescription drug prices, raising the minimum wage.

4. The false tradeoff between swing voters and turnout voters.

Their point about the false tradeoff between swing voters and those we need to turn out is also correct. I am continually struck by how much the swing working class voters we are surveying in the factory towns polls agree with the voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 but did not turn out for Harris in 2024 agree with each other. I think the report misses out on some key things about this agreement, which I will get to below, but I agree with them that the tradeoff is way overblown in conventional wisdom.

5. The acknowledgement that some left Democrats like Bernie and Mamdani know how to talk effectively about economics.

For a group and report driven by the central mission of saying Democrats needed to move to the “middle” (whatever that might be) to say what they did about leftist politicians speaking effectively about economic issues is a sign to me of two things. First, that populist economics is finally being acknowledged as a good thing to be talking about by the establishment wing of the party. And second, it is a sign that this report is more thoughtful than the knee jerk, run of the mill pro-moderate harangues of the last four decades. Good on them.

6. The key point that Democrats can’t sound like stereotypical liberals when they are running in red or purple districts and states.

This might seem like an obvious point, but I will admit that not all of my progressive friends necessarily accept this idea. But being from Nebraska and spending much of my political career working on races in places like Iowa, Ohio, and South Dakota, I know you can’t win in tough districts and states by sounding like a conventional liberal – or, the phrase a lot of people are using these days, a “national Democrat”. I always tell candidates: you have to sound like you are independent from the national Democratic brand, which is so damaged in red and rural places right now. You have to be willing to criticize party leaders; you have to take a stand on at least a couple of issues that sounds different than the national party.

My preferred way for doing that is to go more populist – for example, criticize Clinton and Obama for bad trade deals, or for going soft on Wall Street. But one way or another, candidates in rural, red, and purple places are well advised to show some gutsy independence.

The flaws in the Welcome PAC report

The flaws I saw in the Deciding To Win report were mostly a function of the obsessive desire to show how most or all of the problems in the Democratic Party came from being too liberal. Here are some examples:

1. The strange mix of policies showing that Democrats are moving to the left too much.

The opening chart in the report shows how a higher percentage of Democrats are co-sponsoring certain liberal bills than was the case a decade ago, therefore the party is moving to the left. Okay, but it was a pretty confusing list given their point is that being more liberal makes our party more unpopular. Some of the bills they list, like Medicare for All and Reparations, are more unpopular. However, several of the bills they list are quite popular: paid family leave, affordable child care for all, the Democracy Restoration Act (which includes a mix of voting rights and campaign finance provisions), the assault weapons ban, reproductive rights, stopping discrimination against LGBT people.

Just because something is more “liberal” does not automatically make it more unpopular.

2. The strange description of the Republicans moving to the middle.

Seriously, you are going to give the Republicans credit for moving to the middle after they just passed the Big Ugly Bill and are taking a wrecking ball to the rule of law? I would grant that some Republicans have moderated their rhetoric on some issues, but their budget bill was the single most radical rollback of the gains of the last century than any piece of legislation in American history, and their radical moves toward shredding democracy, civil rights, voting rights, and the rule of law are as far right as any sane person could possibly imagine.

Again, Welcome PAC is straining so hard to make the argument that we should move to the center (“see the Republicans did it, and they won”) that it damages their credibility.

3. The claim that voter support for progressive positions are overstated in traditional polling is not backed by serious data.

There is an odd little section in Part 5 where they have a small paragraph laying out a big dramatic claim that traditional polling overstates support for liberal issues, and then goes on to tout how their vastly superior new methodology of polling will solve that problem.

I looked at the methodology they describe as their great new way of doing the polling, and honestly I didn’t see much difference between it and the methodology the pollsters I know are already using. More importantly, though, in terms of their claim that traditional polling substantially overstates support for liberal positions is based on one study of the difference between polling and ballot initiative results, with much of that analysis based on the gun issue (which is an extremely quirky issue).

I co-founded the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, so have a lot of experience on those kinds of elections. Ballot initiative campaigns tend to be hard fought, with confusing legalistic ballot language and none of the usual electoral markers like partisan identification that candidate elections have. The results are based on many different factors, including the tens of millions of dollars often spent, the quality of campaigns, the strength of the groups fighting pro and con in the campaigns, and a wide variety of local factors. When in doubt, voters’ tendency is to vote no because they are risk averse, but that is as true of conservative ballot measures as it is of progressive ones.

To make the claim that voter support is overstated for progressive issues based on ballot initiative results is an absurd proposition, and by the way, one at odds with the hundreds of ballot measures passed in the last couple of decades on abortion rights, the minimum wage, family and medical leave, school voucher fights, pot legalization, and many other progressive issues that have won.

Again, to my friends at Welcome PAC: don’t be so desperate to make your case that you undermine your own credibility.

4. The definition of the word moderate.

The report does attempt to define the term moderate, which they say is being willing to take popular positions and break with the party orthodoxy.

Hey, I’m for taking popular positions. While stunningly bold and controversial, I endorse that idea. Okay, maybe I’m overstating the bold and controversial thing. The problem for the only moderation-can-win team is that a lot of popular positions are actually pretty damn progressive, including many of the things this report cited in their very first chart as examples of the party moving to the left, which I noted above. Other issue positions which are simultaneously popular (according to recent polls I have seen) and progressive include breaking up monopolistic corporations, being tougher on Wall Street oversight, taking steps to reduce out-sourcing jobs, stopping trade deals that reduce American jobs, a wealth tax, rent control, increasing Social Security benefits, and a $25 minimum wage.

Those things are all pretty far left on at least in the DC version of the left to moderate spectrum, but poll above 60%.

Look, moderate is a nice sounding word. Americans don’t like the idea that they are extremists, and so when you ask them to self-identify where they are on the political scale, they have a natural tendency to call themselves moderate. But if you asked the people who call themselves moderate where they were on specific issues, they would be all over the map. It is one of those amorphous, pleasant sounding words that no one really knows what it means. It’s like asking people if they have common sense (they’ll say yes) or asking people if they are extremists (they’ll say no). But to draw broad conclusions about political strategy based on the fact that 10% more voters in a poll describe themselves as moderate vs liberal is overly simplistic.

The big thing the Deciding to Win report misses

My last point above leads directly into this one: what reports like the Deciding to Win document miss is that elections right now are won and lost not on a left-right spectrum, but on a which-side-are-you-on spectrum. That was the genius of the Trump “she’ll fight for they/them, he’ll fight for you” ad: it had a whole lot less to do with discomfort about trans people than it did with the priorities issue, in other words who will Democrats fight for.

This is a populist country. Voters are pissed off at the establishment, the elitists, the rich and powerful, the people who look down at them. They want politicians who will fight for them against the powers that be. The Deciding to Win report circles around and brushes up against that idea, but it was so busy picking the liberal vs moderate fight that it forgot about this bigger truth.

There were a lot of references in the report to the Obama re-elect in 2012, because in their minds Obama was a moderate. And he did govern as one. But the only reason Obama won that race was because Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital background and 47% tape made him the perfect foil for the kind of strongly populist campaign that Obama needed to run after four years of a flat economy and being tagged as too close to Wall Street. Trump, on the other hand, won precisely because he was a populist candidate, flipping the bird at the establishment and telling the elitists to go fuck themselves.

The one path for Democrats to become a majority political party again is by becoming the party of working class families again, and they will only do that if voters perceive them as populist fighters for those working class voters.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

I don’t want to be insensitive, and I certainly don’t want to trigger anyone, but I sincerely wish that so many Democrats wouldn’t set their hair on fire so much of the time.

To win elections, you have to calmly assess your strengths and weaknesses and the other side’s strengths and weaknesses, and then methodically build a strategy that maximizes your chances for winning. Setting your hair on fire and crying out “OMG, we have no chance to win because of the latest mean thing the Republicans are doing to us” doesn’t move us forward in any way I can think of.

The House and Redistricting

So, yeah, the redistricting stuff is bad for us, and if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act (VRA), that will be bad, too – although in the latter case, there are still a lot of unknowns and it is not at all clear that they will rule in time for new maps to be drawn for the 2026 elections.

But Democrats need to keep a few key things in mind, even in the worst case scenarios:

1. Republican-run states are already gerrymandered a lot to help the Republicans, and every time you try to create more Republican districts you have to squeeze the ones you have already gerrymandered even more. If the Voting Rights Act is thrown out, and all those Black districts in the South have their Black voters distributed to other districts, you likely start turning a bunch of districts that used R+15 into R+8, or R+10, into R+5. In a good year for Democrats we can win some of those districts, and Democrats could have more opportunities to win than they have had in years.
   

2. Republicans are basing much of their gerrymandering on election results in 2024, I guess because they actually think there is a permanent Republican realignment. But presidential years have very different turnout patterns than midterms, and are based more on which party’s base voters are more fired up to turn out. There is very good reason to believe that our voters will be more motivated than Republican voters in 2026.
   

3. As part of this Republican plan to use 2024 as their basis for redistricting, they are assuming Hispanic voters will be voting Republican in just as high a percentage. That prospect seems unlikely given the ICE military-style raids arresting Hispanics based on their skin color and language, and then not giving them due process, and given that the economic trends that matter the most to Hispanics are not going in a good direction.
   
   Let me give you one example, from the Texas redistricting: Texas District 35 was one of the five new “Republican” districts. However, it is only R+5, and that +5 is based heavily on Hispanics voting just as Republican this election as the last one. And keep in mind that because this is a newly formed district, it is an open seat, so there’s no incumbent advantage. Democrats have a great candidate there named John Lira, and I believe we are well positioned to win this one.
   

4. Keep in mind that most midterm elections are pretty strong waves for the out party. The Republicans won 52 House seats in 1994, and 63 in 2010; the Democrats won 31 in 2006, and 40 in 2018. Democrats need to pick up only 4 seats next year, so even if redistricting means we are down an extra 12, 15, or even 20, we are still well within range of winning the House. Keep in mind as well that Nate Cohn says that even under the absolute worst case scenario on redistricting with the VRA struck down, Democrats would need to win the national House popular vote by a percentage of 5.1% to 6.1%; in 2018, we won by 6.7%.
   

The Senate and Red States

My friend the pollster Celinda Lake has a line she often uses in presentations which I like: “The conventional wisdom tends to be wrong about 100% of the time, plus or minus 5%”.

The conventional wisdom about the Senate tends to be wrong a lot.

One thing you hear every single cycle is that Democrats will say to each other, “The map is bad for us this cycle.” Folks, the map is always bad. The nature of the Senate, with small rural states each having two Senators, is by its very nature always biased against Democrats. And yet, since the turn of the century, as rural voters were moving ever more decisively against Democrats, we have been in control of the Senate 13 and a half years (the 2001-2 Senate term had Republicans in control for the first six months before Jim Jeffords from Vermont switched to the Democratic side) – more than half of the time.

So the conventional wisdom says it’s a bad map for Democrats and we have no chance to win the Senate back. But in a year where Trump’s approval rating is stuck around 40% – and even more importantly in a midterm, Republican voter enthusiasm is low – I think we have a very good chance at a strong Democratic year. In a strong Democratic year, races in red states look a lot more possible, and defending our vulnerable seats looks a lot more possible.

And there are some fascinating Senate races to watch. I outlined a few exciting challenger races in a column a couple of months ago, and things look even more promising today. All the messiness of the Maine primary aside, we will come out of that primary with a tested and credible candidate against Susan Collins, whose approval rating remains weak. Sherrod Brown and Roy Cooper are off to strong starts, and Independent candidate Dan Osborn is running even in the polls with billionaire incumbent Pete Ricketts. We still don’t know whether Mary Peltola is going to run for Senate in Alaska, but polls are showing it a dead even race. We still have three candidates in the Iowa primary for the open senate seat there, but Iowa’s economy is the worst in the country right now, and their electorate is one of the oldest in the country, making health care an even bigger issue there than nationally.

I would also add a couple of more recent developments in terms of Senate races this year.

In my August column, I was pessimistic about the Senate race in Texas, saying I didn’t think Allred’s bland message could carry him to a win. However, a new candidate has joined the field, James Talerico, and Talerico has a much better campaign strategy and message in my view. And polling shows the Senate race close against any of the Republicans running in their wild and bloody primary.

There is one other red state Senate race which seems like a possibility. In Mississippi, the Governor’s race last cycle was decided by only three points, and the Republican Senate incumbent, Cindy Hyde Smith, only won her first race by 4 points. MS, which has the biggest Black population of any in the country, about 38%, tends to have close races when there is a good Democratic candidate capable of getting the Black vote out. The leading MS candidate this time is Scott Colum, who has been elected multiple times in a Republican district for District Attorney. He is a very impressive candidate.

These are tough races in tough states, but with good candidates and a good Democratic year, some of these are going to be possible wins. If Peltola runs, and Gov Mills wins the ME primary, we would have 4 different candidates who have won statewide in Republican held seats, and one more who came very close in 2024, along with 3 other races where things look interesting. That’s a lot of opportunities in a cycle that might well be a good one for our side.

Learning to Win in Tough Places Again

To be a governing majority party in the winner-take-all electoral system we have, we are going to have to learn to win in redder than average districts and states. Is it unfair what the Republicans are doing with redistricting? Is it awful what the Supreme Court will probably do with the VRA? Is the Senate system unfair to the Democrats?

Yeah to all three, but we need to get over it and stop whining. Our job is to suck it up and figure out a way to win. Democrats did that in Georgia in 2020, getting Biden a win and winning two Senate seats to give us a trifecta that allowed us to pass all kinds of good legislation in 2021-2. Ruben Gallego figured out how to do it in Arizona in 2024, a bad year for Democrats in that state and everywhere else.

What we have to do is organize, with love at the center. We need to reach out to the working class voters who will determine whether we can win elections, and start talking to them about the issues that matter the most to them. We need to go into rural America and show those voters that we care about what they care about and will help them build better lives. And we need to have an economic agenda that appeals to working families and gets them back on our side. If we do those things, Democrats can start winning in red districts and states again, just like we did not that long ago.

The fact that Trump (a) sent out that ultra-creepy shit dropping video, and (b) fired missiles over I-5 in Los Angeles is irrefutable evidence that the size and spirit of the No Kings demonstration shook him to his core. In spurned narcissist fashion, he continued to act out this week by desecrating the White House, only further underscoring that he does in fact believe he can do whatever he wants without consulting anyone… like a king. But Trump pushes the limits because he has to distract from the Epstein files and from his chaotic administration that is destroying the economy – he knows he’s in trouble.

The question for the pro-democracy movement is what is next.

The first thing we have to do is win elections, and luckily there are five major, critically important ones happening soon – on November 4 – along with the hundreds of local elections happening across the country. These elections have major policy importance, but also will tell us whether the anti-Trump movement can win:

1. The VA governor and state House races

2. The NJ governor elections

3. The three PA state Supreme Court races

4. Prop 50 in CA

5. The NYC mayoral election.

In small turnout, off-year elections with Trump’s approval ratings so low, we have a structural advantage, and these races are all in very winnable territory. If Democrats win all of them, it will be proof positive that the Trump regime is in real danger. If we lose some of them, it will frankly be a setback.

The other thing the pro-democracy needs to do is become more than an anti-Trump, more than a pro-democracy movement. For this, I think we need to look toward Martin Luther King, Jr and the other planners of the 1963 March on Washington.

They called that day the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They didn’t just call it a civil rights march, although that is what many people now remember it as. MLK, John Lewis, A. Phillip Randolph, and the other leaders of the march knew that it wasn’t enough to organize for new civil rights laws and an end to Jim Crow, or even the broader concept of freedom. They knew that to enlist Blacks in the South, Blacks in the North, and the working-class Whites, they would need to win policy and political victories. They had to make this cause about basic economics as well as civil rights, jobs as well as freedom.

Our movement today needs to learn the same thing. Our fight is not just with Trump and his authoritarian ways; our fight is for making working folks’ lives better. Our fight is for jobs that pay a living wage and health care that is affordable. Our fight is for dignity and power for workers on the job, and affordable housing, groceries, and utilities. Our fight is to rein in corporate power so that monopolies can’t price gouge, screw their workers, and crush small businesses.

Our message next time needs to be broader than No Kings, as unifying as that has been to our movement. Maybe it’s No Kings or Oligarchs. Maybe it’s No to Kings and Yes to Health Care, or Yes to Dignity. We can debate what that slogan should be, but in order to bring more poor and working-class people into our movement and our electoral coalition, we need to show those folks we give a damn about their struggles and dreams for a better life.

The first is to do everything in our power to resist the violent, unlawful, authoritarian regime that the Trump administration is pursuing. Yes, we need to be in the streets protesting, and we need to use our social media platforms to reach our friends and neighbors. Doing stuff like this.

But at the same time, we also need to regain the political support of working class Americans who have gotten cynical about politics and government. So yes to resistance, yes to demonstrations.

But let’s build a political narrative and infrastructure that makes sense to working people in their everyday lives.

That project starts with recreating the social contract.

The social contract that used to exist for working people in this country – the idea that workers were owed a decent wage and benefits and some dignity on the job – disappeared a long time ago in this country. It’s time to bring it back. And the idea of a decent corporate actor needs to extend beyond just the work place. Big business power needs to be reined in, and corporate abuses — from wage theft to non-compete clauses, from junk fees to crushing small business competition, from out-sourcing jobs to price gouging — need to be stopped.

Subscribe now

There has been a group of us who have been talking for a while about creating a Contract for Working Families. Pulled together by Steve Rosenthal, the former Political Director of the AFL-CIO, the group came up with some language and an agenda that we think would resonate with working people.

(I have altered the original draft language a little in a few places.)

A Contract with Working Families

Working families are pissed off, and have every right to be. The deck has been stacked against us. We’ve been fed empty promises for decades by politicians who don’t live the same day-to-day struggles that we do. Too many of them don’t give a damn about us except when they need our votes. No more. We don’t need lip service — we need leaders who will stand up and fight like hell to deliver real change..

IT’S TIME FOR OUR ELECTED LEADERS TO SIGN A NEW CONTRACT WITH WORKING PEOPLE.

We’re not looking for handouts — we’re fighting to protect our hard-earned paychecks, to ensure our wages aren’t eroded by rising prices, and to provide a decent standard of living for our families. We demand good jobs with living wages to give our families a life with the dignity they deserve — dignity at work and at home.

Note to politicians: this isn’t about crafting a “winning message” or winning elections. It’s about committing to a real agenda that changes the rules to give working families a chance. Both parties claim to stand with working people, but they can’t unless they embrace this agenda, campaign on these issues, and fight like hell to enact them once they get elected. No more excuses. It’s time to act.

We call for ending corporate price gouging, where CEOs profit while workers struggle.

We call for affordable health care, child care, and housing. We demand more power in the workplace, including the right to organize into unions without fear of being fired. We need a check on corporate power so working people and small businesses are not squeezed. We want strong communities where people look out for one another and protect the freedoms that make America home.

Our Agenda: A Call for Bold Action from Elected Leaders, Candidates, and Political Parties

1. Good Jobs, Good Wages, Fair Trade

• Cut taxes for working families through an expanded child tax credit.

• A living minimum wage for all working people — maybe that’s $30 in the highest cost of living places like NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, maybe $25 everyplace else. Make sure it is paid to all working people, including restaurant workers, and make sure it is tied to inflation.

• Strengthen workers’ rights and create good-paying jobs. Support the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to bargain for better wages and benefits and for all workers who want a union to have one.

• Negotiate trade deals that are tough and fair and protect American workers, not global companies. Tariffs should be used on a targeted basis to expand vital American industries like steel and auto, not mindlessly slapped on countries across the board in a way that will cause the price of everyday goods to soar, further threatening our standard of living. Ensure big companies don’t write the rules while working people pay the price.

• No tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Invest in American industries and workers.

• End wage theft, overtime abuse, and non-compete clauses.. It’s time to close loopholes that allow employers to cheat workers out of overtime pay.
  

2. Get big money out of politics and End Congressional Corruption

• End Citizens United to stop unlimited billionaire spending on political campaigns.

• Prevent members of Congress from getting rich in office. Ban stock trading by members of congress.

• Outlaw members of congress from accepting flights on corporate or private jets.

• Run and elect more working people to office.
  

3. Affordable Care for Families

• End corporate price gouging in health care. Implement a windfall profits tax on corporations that exploit consumers. Allow Medicare to negotiate all prescription drug prices, like the VA and other countries do. Cap insulin costs and other life-saving medication costs for everyone. Require insurance companies to cover treatment ordered by their doctors.

• Make health care more affordable. Lower ACA premiums. Cap medical debt at $5,000. Fully fund and expand Medicaid so families can get the care they need.

• Expand affordable child care. Cap child care costs at 7% of family income and offer a $5,000 per child tax credit for families earning under $400,000.

• Make elder care affordable and reliable. Expand home care for seniors and people with disabilities. Raise wages for care workers so they can stay on the job and deliver quality care.

• Protect, expand, and stabilize Social Security and Medicare. Expand Social Security by $2,400 per year and apply the Social Security payroll tax on all income over $250,000. This will fully fund Social Security for 75 years and the extra tax will not be paid by 91% of US households.

• Expand Medicare to include dental, hearing and vision care.

4. Hold Corporations Accountable, Stop Price-Gouging and Make Billionaires and Corporations Pay Their Fair Share

• Make corporations and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes. Elon Musk’s Tesla, valued at over $1 trillion, paid ZERO in US taxes last year. Everyone—not just the middle class—should pay their fair share.

• Put an annual tax on all wealth over $50 million and a higher rate on all wealth over $1 billion.

• Crack down on price gouging and monopolies. Families are getting crushed while corporate profits soar. It’s time for strict enforcement and real penalties.

• Lower costs for everyday essentials. Gas prices are sky-high, groceries are through the roof, and hidden bank fees are draining wallets. We must lower credit card interest rates and stop big banks’ predatory fees.

• End tax breaks and ban stock buybacks for companies that engage in mass layoffs.
  

5. Invest in Working People’s Future

• Build more affordable housing, create good-paying union construction jobs, and ensure families can afford to stay in their homes.

• Invest in public schools and job training. Every child deserves a quality education, a healthy meal, and a chance of success. Let’s make college more affordable and expand job training so everyone has a pathway to a good job.

Working people need a new contract, and political leaders who will fight for us.

While Trump wages trade wars, bullies our allies, and hands out tax breaks to billionaires, working families are struggling to stay afloat. We must reject the chaos and corporate greed and fight for an economy that works for all of us — not just the wealthy few.

This is not just a plan. It’s a commitment, a promise, a contract with the people who keep this country running.

We cannot afford to wait. The time to act is now. Join us — stand up, speak out, and demand a better future for working families.

This is the kind of contract with working families politicians should embrace. It’s time for the Democratic Party to figure out that fighting for a specific agenda for working folks, fighting for policies and values they would give a damn about, is the way forward. Democrats should be campaigning on this kind of agenda.

Scared of an agenda this big and bold? America’s working people are not. Poll after poll, focus group after focus group, shows that voters want big changes in how the economy works. The latest example? Check out this language from One Fair Wage on the most recent poll they did on the minimum wage.

A poll I helped do a couple of years back asked people whether they could support Democratic candidates, using a split sample to test a few different ways to describe the candidate. We tested moderate Democrat, progressive Democratic, liberal Democrat, conservative Democrat. None of those were particularly popular, but when we tested the phrase “working class Democrat”, support shot way up — it was easily the most popular description.

Democrats need to become the party of working people again, the way we used to be thought of by most people. And we need to fight for an agenda that can get them excited.

Share

Leave a comment