How Democrats Win in 2026 and Beyond

A generational opportunity to reset politics.

Democrats should not wait until Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the midterm campaign, to pivot and begin sprinting toward November. No one who genuinely cares about the fate of democracy should be kvetching about primary polling (which partisans trolling for donor dollars, but not real voters, obsessively focus upon) or relitigating the relative electability of primary opponents after primaries are decided. (Kudos to Rep. Haley Stevens for fully embracing Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in recognition of the stakes.) Fortunately, a batch of insightful Democrats have stepped forward to offer a pathway to win decisively on a populist economic message with broad-based appeal.

Leading the way, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico delivered a speech last week that adeptly framed the argument for Democrats:

For fifty years, billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians have been stealing from the American people. Stealing the wealth we created. With their bribes, their bailouts, and their billionaire tax breaks.

This “affordability crisis” isn’t something that happened in the last five years. This affordability crisis has been fifty years in the making.

Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties, and then those politicians turned around and rigged this economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.

We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.

Pushing back on the notion that Democrats despise capitalism, Talarico makes the case that the far right has destroyed free markets. Corruption, tariffs, and dark money have influenced regulatory favors and tax giveaways, and massive corporate consolidation are the antithesis of a competitive free market that would create wealth for a wide cross-section of Americans.

“[T]he idea behind capitalism was simple and revolutionary: people should get fairly compensated for their labor. We should get paid for our work. But that’s not what we have right now,” he argued. “You can’t tell me the market is working as it should when billionaires are becoming trillionaires — while the people who do all the work can’t afford the basics.” He added, “Adam Smith is rolling over in his grave. This is not capitalism; this is crony capitalism.”

Talarico’s proposed agenda, dubbed the New American Dream, includes raising the minimum wage, expanding overtime, repealing tax cuts for the super-rich, protecting labor organizing, and investing in college and vocational education. He also includes items that genuine fiscal conservatives used to favor — such as reducing the national debt (“closing tax loopholes, cracking down on tax cheats, and ending forever wars that send billions of our tax dollars overseas”) and removing red tape that impedes housing construction.

Talarico’s pro-worker proposals include universal childcare and paid family leave, an expanded child tax credit, and “cracking down on the data centers jacking up our utility bills and using up our water — and preventing new ones from being built unless they meet our demands.” Positions such as these, which legacy media would characterize as “progressive,” and MAGA operatives would denounce as “socialism,” are embraced by super-majorities of Americans. Here is where Talarico adeptly turns MAGA hacks’ rhetoric against them:

They’re going to claim this new dream is radical. They’re going to claim it’s extreme. They’re going to claim we’re socialists, or communists, or whatever sounds scariest in a headline. And we’ll say: Is that the best you can do?

These are the same old scare tactics. The same old politics of the past. The names they’ll call us only reveal how small their dreams are.

The people at the top want this to be a contest of names because they know they’ll lose a contest of ideas.

(Credit: Gage Skidmore)

Pete Buttigieg, speaking at a unity rally in Michigan on Friday, made a similar argument in the context of the Michigan Senate race:

[W]e have Abdul El-Sayed, who insists that money in politics has gone too far. And we have him running against Mike Rogers, who insists on being part of the problem. We have one candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, who wants to expand affordable health care and keep more money in your pocket. And we have another candidate, Mike Rogers, who literally voted against the Affordable Care Act. And you better believe he will cut health care one more time if you give him a chance in the United States Senate.

Cranky Democratic establishment-types will find it hard to find substantive differences between bogeyman El-Sayed and their favorites such as Talarico and Buttigieg. In truth, their real objection is hearing their corporate donors fingered for rigging the economy.

In a parallel vein, Democratic Senators Chris Murphy (CT), Adam Schiff (CA), Tina Smith (MN), and Elizabeth Warren (MA) put out a memo in January arguing Democrats should not only advance populist economic measures but should sound serious about “tak[ing] on corporate power and the billionaires who are making it impossible for the American people to provide for themselves and their families.” When Democrats don’t mince words, and instead underscore realities such as “big corporations get massive tax breaks and then turn around and lay off American workers,” voters take them seriously.

Citing a raft of polling, the Democratic senators urged their colleagues to sharpen the message and point directly at the culprits. Ordinary voters “do not want insurance companies denying treatments prescribed by doctors, or giant corporations driving small neighborhood shops out of business,” they explain. Regardless of party, voters deeply resent it when “wealthy people and big corporations get away with breaking the law — all while Trump is giving special treatment to his friends, enriching his own family, and pardoning corporate wrongdoing all the time.”

As the senators put it, the “backlash” to this outrageously corrupt presidency is “laying the foundation for a large popular majority to wrestle government back from the billionaires and corporations and give the power back to working people.” Democrats can reap the benefits if they embrace “a platform rooted in true economic populism.”

That’s exactly what El-Sayed and other Democrats in Michigan did at their unity rally. Skewering Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), El-Sayed framed the election as a choice between an advocate for ordinary voters and an oligarch-serving MAGA foot soldier, wisecracking that Rogers’s last name is “very fitting for him… [‘c]ause that’s his answer every time a corporation or Donald Trump tells him to do something”:

“Mike, we need you to put a data center in the backyard.” — “Roger!” “Mike, we need you to hike their prescription drug prices.” — “Roger!” “Mike, we need you to rubber-stamp this war we shouldn’t be fighting.” — “Roger!”

Democrats should follow the unity message from Michigan and flatly repudiate self-absorbed voices in their ranks still waging internecine battles. Launching a war now against Democratic Socialists [!] shows a jaw-dropping lack of perspective, suggests they care more about soothing their corporate donors’ bruised feelings than saving democracy, and inevitably amplifies Trump’s hysterical “socialist” smear against Democrats.

In sum, to win decisively, Democrats must avoid distractions and challenge the billionaire class’s pet policies and oligarchs who have rigged the system against the interests of ordinary workers. Their success will determine the fate of our democracy.