The 5 things Democrats Need To Do To Win in 2026 and Build a Long term Sustainable Majority
Democrats and their progressive allies have a lot of work to do to right our ship.
There are many fine examples of strategy pieces about what the Democrats should do next – I have done some myself – but I want to make a cautionary note as our party thinks about the future: there is no one reason we lost, there is no one cure, and there is no one thing we have to do that will solve all of our problems. Many people are focused on whatever aspect of politics they are usually focused on, but there is a lot going on here, and we need to treat the problems holistically. Democrats and their progressive allies just have a whole fuck of a lot of work we need to do in order to right our ship, by which I mean that we are not only winning elections but building an enduring electoral majority.
There is also no reason to despair. We are collectively capable of good strategic thinking and hard work. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that there is one magic bullet that will automatically fix everything.
Below, I want to outline my Top 5 list of what we need to take on. All of these are interconnected and interwoven – part of our hard work needs to be making sure we don’t do that old trick of going into silos on projects and organizations and issues while not talking to each other. Included on the list are some implicit suggestions of things we definitely should not be doing, because in some cases if you go down one path it means going in the opposite direction of something else.
Leading, always leading, with populist economics.
I am in profound agreement with James Carville on this point. Democrats as a party, as a brand, need to re-establish their credibility on the issue that matters the most to the broad majority of Americans, namely how they are doing economically. If we are not talking about how to make people’s lives better and easier, if we aren’t talking about how to solve the economic stresses most people are experiencing, they think we don’t get it.
The economy is not the only important issue, but especially with hard pressed working class voters, it should be the first one we talk about, the last one we talk about, and the one we talk the most about. Celinda Lake and I wrote a piece on this topic late last year, entitled simply Democrats Need An Economic Plan. Most voters believe we don’t have a plan on the economy, and certainly not one that speaks to their lives and situations. Working class voters especially have been battered by the modern American economy – by factories closing and pensions and unions going away, by the rising cost of health care and housing and groceries and energy prices, by wages being flat or going down, by their communities crumbling, by big powerful corporations nickel and dining them to death with one junk fee after the next.
Democrats are having trouble with crime, immigration, and trans rights issues (more on that below), but those troubles are made immeasurably harder by not having a clear, compelling brand on fundamental economic issues. If voters are convinced we care about them and will fight for them on an economic plan that really helps them in their daily lives, they will be a lot more open to listening to us on every other issue.
And it’s the fighting for them that’s key, which is why economic populism is so central to our mission. The problem with so much of the Harris message being about how she will listen to and work with anyone, that she loves the Cheneys, etc is that working class voters felt like that is all well and good for elites, but nobody was going to be listening to them or, more importantly, fighting for them. All of the public opinion research I was seeing was crystal clear on this topic: people are mad as hell about elites and the establishment not giving a shit about their lives.
We need to seize the day on the big fight coming up about the budget and economy.
The Republicans have predictably decided to try to cram all of their most terrible ideas about the economy and budget into one huge nuclear stinkbomb of a bill. Republican hard liners are demanding trillions of dollars in budget cuts to get their support for the bill. The package will likely include some toxic combination of the following:
$5 trillion of tax cuts mostly for millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations
Radical cuts to, or the elimination of, Medicaid
Raising the retirement age and other ways to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits
The privatization of the Postal Service
Radical cuts to, or the privatization of, veterans’ health care
Eliminating tax incentives and other investments to spur solar and wind energy
Repeal or slash the subsidies for the ACA
Eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of civil servants doing important work on behalf of the American people
And these are only a few of the biggest items the Republicans are talking about. This bill will be chock full of a thousand of the worst ideas you could ever think of in your nastiest nightmares.
Which gives Democrats an outstanding early opportunity to stop Trump 2.0 in its tracks. The above policy ideas are dreadfully unpopular, and with the narrow margins in the House and Senate, we will have a prime chance to make the Republicans in the most competitive seats sweat their asses off. We should be organizing – starting now – in those districts on the budget fight, with a particular focus on the working class voters who will be impacted the most by all these horrible ideas.
Doing year round community organizing on both issues and politics.
The Nation Magazine is out with a great article on how the Democratic Party should be rebuilding local precinct organizations and civic society, and Scott Goodstein is out with a great article expressing similar ideas.
From my own research in the Factory Towns project, I can tell you that working class voters are profoundly cynical about politics, both political parties, and political ads – they have no faith in any of it. To reach these voters, they need to get information around the issues they care about from people and groups they know and trust, the more local the better. To build that kind of trust, we need people talking with them on an on-going basis, not just right before an election. We need organizing that is day-in and day-out, and year around, that accomplishes and delivers real aid to people at the local level.
Better messaging is great, but we need a major plan ASAP urgently to deal with a broken media landscape.
There is a whole lot of talk in Democratic circles about better messaging, and I certainly agree with the importance of that topic, but a great message that few of the voters we need to reach ever hear is blowing in the wind.
Outside of the biggest metro areas, voters are just not getting much legitimate news. Small and medium sized town newspapers have mostly either gone away or are shells of their former selves. Small town and regional radio stations have been bought up by big media conglomerates who don’t care about delivering news that matters to local folks. Sinclair Broadcasting and two other far right media conglomerates now own more than 50% of all local TV stations.
More and more people are getting their news from social media, which would be okay except for the fact that right wing social media is far ahead of progressive or even neutral social media. However, at least we have the capacity of doing something serious in terms of building up our social media assets, which we need to invest serious money into but which does not require the capital that buying or forming major cable networks or similar media outlets would. We especially need locally oriented social media pages, led by local folks, to be talking about the issues that matter to people on the ground in rural and mid sized communities.
We need to invest real money into progressive media projects that specifically target working class audiences.
In terms of the whole “we need our own Joe Rogan” discussion going on in the party right now, what is needed is to find strong local talent and give them a boost with not only financial resources but with the big progressive online audiences that already exist such as Occupy Democrats and DailyKos and existing podcasts like Sam Seder’s and Al Franken’s. Years ago, a group of us did this with Ed Schultz, a radio show host at a local station in the Dakotas who was a great voice from and for working class folks, and we helped turn him into a national media star very quickly. We need more of those kinds of recruitment and promotion efforts.
We need to build on the coalitions we have, but figure out different language to talk about some issues.
There are some people in these discussions who are arguing that we need to change our position, or just avoid at all costs talking about certain things that are uncomfortable to voters, namely immigration, crime, and trans rights.
There are significant problems with this kind of approach.
The first is that the Democratic coalition would blow up over the idea that we are going to walk away from marginalized and oppressed groups. One of the most fundamental rules in politics is that you don’t tear your electoral coalition apart, and most Democrats believe very strongly in civil rights, LGBT rights, and a path to citizenship for immigrants in this country. For all our problems, even in a year when anti-Trump voters didn’t show up at the level they had in 2020 because they were discouraged by the economy, we still came relatively close to winning this election. To rip apart the coalition we have as a party is insane.
The second problem is that voters wouldn’t believe us even if we said we were walking away from those groups. It’s like the gay marriage issue a generation ago: voters thought Democrats were for gay marriage long before most Democrats said it publicly, and when we denied it we didn’t convince them but instead lost our credibility. We just had to convince folks we were right. To suddenly start suggesting that the Democrats no longer are in favor of trans rights or immigrants rights would not be credible to voters, and Republicans would be emboldened to attack us both on the policy and on the duplicity.
What we are going to have to do is reposition ourselves and build a new strategy and narrative around these issues.
On immigration, as one example, there are widely popular policies that Democrats can focus on instead of always being on the defensive about border security. Protecting the DACA young people, allowing immigrants married to citizens to stay with their families, and allowing immigrants who have already been in America leading productive lives for more than a decade work permits are all policies that draw wide support from more than 60% of voters and do not cause a backlash with working class folks.
Part of what we have to do is talk to people about our views on these issues in language that they relate to, non-judgmentally, and not act like they are bigots if they come down in a different place than we do. On the trans issue, for example, no one should be surprised or judgemental that an 80 year old grandparent gets upset if their beloved grandchild suddenly has a different name and is using different pronouns, nor should we be surprised that a parent of a girl in athletics might be facing what they perceive as unfair competition from men. These kinds of concerns are natural, and our reaction should not be to talk down to people and label them bigots – this is not easy stuff for many people.
Democrats ought to make it clear that we are not for discriminating against anyone, including trans folks; and that we are concerned about the bullying and nastiness that trans kids face. But we also need to be open to having honest and nuanced dialogue on complicated issues.
Here’s the thing: voters are not going to agree with Democrats on every issue, just like they don’t agree with Republicans on a lot of issues. We can still win if we convince voters we are focused first and foremost on the issues that will improve their daily lives and their standard of living, and are willing to listen to their concerns without condescending to them or lecturing them or calling them bigots.
Conclusion
There are plenty of other things to do. Many different constituencies and demographic groups need tons of outreach. We need to rebuild and expand our training programs. We need to invest in state parties and rebuild county parties. I could go on and on, there are so many things we need to be doing…
And none of the five things I talked about above, which in my opinion are our most urgent priorities, is easy to pull off; they are all challenging as hell. But all five of them need to be done, and done with a sense of urgency, for Democrats to consistently start winning enough elections that we have a long term governing majority. They are dependent on each other. Having a better brand and message related to working families won’t be enough unless we find new ways of breaking through the media deserts in much of America; talking about the economy in general won’t be enough unless we are directly engaging the Republicans in the specific budget fight coming up; we need to be organizing year round to have chance in the vital issue fronts facing us, and in order to gain the trust of voters on economic issues; rebuilding trust on the Republican culture war attacks won’t happen without a strong economic brand and plan, and getting folks to trust us on the economy doesn’t work nearly as well if voters think we are condescending to them on social issues.
So we have a fuck of a lot of hard work to do, as a political party and as a progressive movement. The good news is that there are millions of good people who care about our country who are willing to do this work. I hope you will join me in being one of them.
Mike, Your points are well- taken. Many of necessitate an army of volunteers to do the job. The army of grassroots groups is ready, and capable, yet we continue to fight to get a seat at the table. As soon as all the great work you suggest gets started in one way or another, i would suggest that a seat be offered to the Grassroots Coalitions in every instance where you will be calling upon us to do the work. We are the ones most familiar with those who we need to reach.
The most important thing the Dem Party needs to do is to loudly and thoroughly renounce Neoliberalism, fess-up to the working and middle class about the Party’s complicity in signing-on to Trickle-down economics and Globalization without regard to their impact on the working and middle class, ‘repeal and replace’ the economic policies adopted and still functioning to deny workers a decent wage and a dignified way to make a living — including by restoring a progressive taxation system, restoring the Glass-Steagal banking/finance firewalls, and much, much more.
Neoliberalism as economic policy has basically left the working/middle class in the worst economic shape since the Great Depression. Nothing will win them back to the Dems so long as the Dems leave them as vulnerable and insecure financially as they have become over the last 40 years — since Reagan.
Trump has won middle America by declaring ‘a plague on both party’s houses.” He and the plutocrats who have jumped on his bandwagon will continue to dominate our politics until our Party makes clear that that bandwagon is fueled and driven by billionaire bandits.