Jonathan P. Baird

With the mid-term elections coming up in November 2026, Democrats need to rethink their political approach. This is true on a wide range of fronts including our substantive politics as well as our messaging. It is not enough to define as simply being against Donald Trump and his fascist regime. Democrats need a more affirmative identity.

Any honest appraisal of Democratic performance in recent years must acknowledge our weaknesses. Democratic Party leadership, which is both elderly and out-of-touch with Democratic base voters, has been unwilling to engage any deep process of rectification. We have been losing elections with regularity but I have not seen much soul-searching. Now the Democratic leaders hope to win with only minor adjustments.

Neither major political party serves the interests of the working class. Both parties are controlled by Big Money but the Democrats were supposed to be the party of the have-nots. The Republicans have always been the party of the haves. In the last few election cycles that has flipped around. More of the have-nots have voted Republican and more of the haves have voted Democratic.

MAGA has attracted more people who feel like neither party has served them as we all have watched the economic erosion of working people. Economic anxiety is very high with undeniable inflation and fears about AI and job loss. While white working class voters have gravitated to the Republicans, that tendency has also evidenced with Latino and African American voters.

I think the problem for Democrats goes back to Bill Clinton embracing the centrist path of neoliberalism. Clinton’s triangulation politics undermined workers’ bargaining power and entirely pushed aside progressives and those who favored an economic populist message. Clinton allied with Wall Street and the financial sector. Since that time, the majority faction in the Democratic Party has favored a strategy premised on appealing to suburban moderates. Most recently it showcased Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in the misguided belief that would win Republican voters.

Centrist Democrats sidelined Bernie Sanders and his brand of progressive politics. This approach of moving to the middle as advocated by centrist Democrats is bankrupt. It is a vanilla brand guaranteed to continue the losing tradition and it fails to give people any reasons to vote. One thing you can say about the Republicans, they are not afraid to let the fascism hang out. Democrats have been political cowards, unwilling to stand up for strong values of any kind.

It is past time for Democrats to develop a far more progressive, economic populist identity. The billionaire class is buying elections like they would any commodity. We need a vision that can attract the American majority. The pieces of this vision should not be any great mystery but I will suggest some policy planks:

• Medicare for all. It is wildly popular and needed especially as we watch the disappearance of Obamacare subsidies which will devastate 24 million people and make health care unaffordable. Universal health care is exactly the kind of value Democrats should embrace enthusiastically.
• Federal jobs guarantee. Considering economic fears, this could not be more timely. It would be very reassuring and supportive if a political party demonstrated caring for the economic circumstances of working people. There is a reason affordability is such a hot buzz word. Jobs remain a central issue and will for the indefinite future. This demand is entirely in keeping with Democrats’ FDR tradition.
• Housing is a human right. We need to increase the supply of affordable housing especially for low and middle income people. We also need to strengthen tenants’ rights and protections. It should be a national goal to end homelessness. It is morally unacceptable that our country which has so much wealth tolerates the degree of homelessness we have.
• No war in Venezuela and opposition to the massive military budget. We must oppose war crimes (the boat strikes and their lawless murders) and the $900 billion military budget. Most Democrats just voted for this budget in spite of how bloated it is. Fighting a war in Venezuela for regime change and to access Venezuela’s oil is in the worst tradition of American imperialism.
• Opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. The Democratic base overwhelmingly opposes this war but the Party leadership has been clueless. The Democratic leaders are wedded to AIPAC money. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a moral disgrace. There is nothing antisemitic about opposing this war. Ironically, it is the bellicose and racist actions of the Israeli state under Bibi Netanyahu which promotes antisemitism.
• Abolish ICE. ICE is an entirely out-of-control agency acting like a fascist gestapo. Its masked and unidentified agents are disappearing and deporting people with no due process. Nothing could be more un-American. Whatever concern the masses of Americans had about undocumented immigration, they did not bargain for the nightmare that ICE has caused and is causing. Trump has been scapegoating immigrants. He and the billionaires are using racism to divide the working class. We should be calling on people to join together across racial lines to fight the power of greedy elites.
• Expanding the Supreme Court. Democrats should push to add four seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. That Court has been corrupted and it has acted like a tool of the Republican Party. Nothing prevents Congress from changing the number of seats on the Court. As currently embodied, Democrats can expect the Court would veto any legislation which helps the majority of the American people just as they did when Biden was President.
• Oppose climate change denialism. One of the worst aspects of the Trump agenda has been an anti-science agenda which fails to recognize the harm of climate change. Trump’s doubling down on fossil fuels is beyond stupid. The rest of the world is embracing renewable energy. Democrats should be opposing greenhouse gas emissions as climate change remains an existential risk.

In her book, Outclassed, Joan Williams describes the Democrats’ class blindness. The Democrats lost the allegiance of the working class because they betrayed the interests of that class. They allowed MAGA and the Far Right to act like they were the anti-elitists even though they were in bed with Elon Musk and the broligarchs.

Democrats need to create a far more welcoming approach to all working people and we should get away from the snobbiness, disdain and moral judgmentalism which has characterized many college-educated Democrats. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. I think anger at Trump voters is stupid.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote about “crackpot realism” and how ruling circles indulged in that type of thinking. That is exactly the kind of thinking too many Democrats indulge. Even if masses of people hate what the Trump regime is doing, there is a no guarantee they will vote for Democrats. The Democrats need to give the people reasons to vote for them. It remains unclear whether that will happen.