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Opinion
The Midterms Weren’t Red vs. Blue, They Were Bought vs. Not Bought
The 2028 lesson is not to find the most “electable,” most “moderate,” or most anti-MAGA Democrat. It’s to nominate one who is boldly and proudly against corporate money.
Nov 06, 2026
This week, voters in red and purple states sent Democrats to the Senate who ran against corporate money. James Talarico won in Texas. Annie Andrews won in South Carolina. Adam Hamilton won in Kansas. All three took $0 in corporate PAC money.
More than 16 years after Citizens United gave corporations a free speech right to unlimited political spending, I believe Americans have reached a breaking point. A fundamental realignment is underway, and the midterms are the clearest evidence yet. The 2028 lesson is not to find the most “electable,” most “moderate,” or most anti-MAGA Democrat. It’s to nominate one who is boldly and proudly against corporate money. A candidate who is not bought.
I know because I’ve spent years reporting on it. I was the fifth hire at More Perfect Union, a news start-up that would focus on the working class issues the mainstream media so often ignored. We told working-class stories across all 50 states: minor league ballplayers living in abject poverty, corporate chains flagrantly breaking the law, baristas organizing their Starbucks one store at a time, each inspired by a video of the last. We filmed factory workers at Kellogg’s and John Deere, resident doctors, Hollywood writers. The struggle was the same in every state and county, and in every workplace. It wasn’t a blue one or a red one. It was a working-class one.
Abdul El Sayed’s slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and medicare for all” is the blueprint, and we must follow it.
It came into focus covering freight rail. In 2022, rail workers nearly shut down the US economy by refusing a contract with zero guaranteed sick days. President Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed “Union President,” brokered the deal rail workers had just rejected, then asked Congress to impose it on the 125,000 workers anyway. The Congress that did so had taken millions from the same railroads. In the 2020 cycle alone, rail PACs gave $3.7 million to congressional candidates.
That was the corporate Democrat playbook in one decision: Say you stand with workers, then side with the people who fund you when it counts. That’s the Democratic Party voters have been rejecting, and it’s the one we have to leave behind.
Now look at the midterms. Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Jon Ossoff in Georgia, all at $0 in corporate PAC money. Mary Peltola in Alaska and Scott Colom in Mississippi, whose races are too close to call as I write, fit the same mold. Angie Nixon took no corporate money and came within 200,000 votes in Florida, a state considered solidly red. Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown won without this message, but I believe they’re the exceptions to the rule.
Abdul El Sayed’s slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and medicare for all” is the blueprint, and we must follow it.
Talarico, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas since 1988, pointed out over and over in his campaign that "in America, we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis." Andrews was proud to say that "I don't take a dime of corporate PAC money.” and differentiated herself from her opponent by saying, "Unlike Senator Graham, I will not sell out to big money or take any corporate PAC money." This is the same anti-swamp, outsider message President Donald Trump won on, only this one has spine.
Voters are sick of watching the cost of everything rise while we send billions overseas for new wars. They’re sick of being forced to work longer hours, adopt AI without guardrails, and produce more without seeing their paychecks go up, all while the US produces its first trillionaire.
Campaign finance is public record. Tools like the Political Integrity Index let anyone see which candidates are selling out to corporations and which have taken an integrity pledge to the people who elected them. To win the presidency in 2028, Democrats must take a bold stand against corporate influence over politicians and campaigns. To save our democracy, we must do as much.
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The People Voted to End the War on Immigrants—Now Democrats Must Act
Latino voters stood by their immigrant families and neighbors on Tuesday, and Democrats need to remember that. Remember the families who remain separated. The imprisoned and the dead. And those who stood with immigrants at the risk of their own lives.
Nov 06, 2026
Yes, Election Day was a day of hope and victory. From coast to coast—and especially among Latino communities in key states like Texas—voters overwhelmingly rejected Immigration and Customs Enforcement violence, President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and billionaire-backed scapegoating. People saw through the lie that immigrants drive up the cost of living and chose a future focused on real economic relief. The future is suddenly looking brighter.
For an immigrant like me who came to this country and still has no ability to vote, there’s so much hope coming from Houston, where Latino voters turned out in record numbers and dedicated their vote to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the immigrant father who was killed by ICE. There’s hope coming from young first- and second-generation Latinos like my nephews and nieces who dedicated their votes to their immigrant family members and friends.
This message from voters is very clear for the newly elected candidates celebrating this week—everyone who won on the promise to fight back against Trumpism. Tuesday’s vote was a clear rejection of the war on immigrants. Let it also mark an end to Democratic cowardice, and the end of putting corporate interests over people.
Democrats, you had the Latino vote before and lost it. Now you have it back—don't mess this up.
It's time to act on the mandate that voters just delivered—especially the millions of Latino voters, horrified by the last two years, who just swung hard away from Trump.
Democrats, you had the Latino vote before and lost it. Now you have it back—don't mess this up. History in California, Arizona, and Texas shows that while Latino voters will reject mass deportation campaigns, failing to deliver on promises made to our communities causes that support to slip. You cannot take us for granted. You need a positive, pro-working-class, pro-immigrant agenda, and you need to compete for our votes. You can start by showing true political courage by protecting our families and neighbors.
Getting ICE out of our communities is no longer just an immigration issue—it is a safety issue for us.
That courage starts with stopping ICE. Get those violent criminals out of our communities and make sure they can never terrorize us or anyone else again. Stop ICE and Border Patrol and all the other corrupted parts of the Department of Homeland Security. Bring to justice everyone in this government responsible for so many crimes and terrors against immigrants.
Inspect detention centers and enforce real congressional oversight. Shut off the pipeline that feeds from streets and sidewalks of immigrant communities into for-profit torture prisons where neglect and abuse have led to a rising toll of sickness, injury, and death.
At the local level, you can stand up for immigrants by fiercely defending sanctuary laws, cities, and states. Keep federal agents and anti-immigrant operatives out of our homes, schools, and churches. Stop ICE’s local enablers by ending 287(g) programs that turn local police into immigration enforcers. We cannot let local law enforcement take federal dollars to racially profile and target brown communities. Put an end to the abuse now.
Latino voters stood by their immigrant families and neighbors on Tuesday, and Democrats need to remember that. Remember the families who remain separated. The imprisoned and the dead. And those who stood with immigrants at the risk of their own lives.
Remember the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti. Carlos Roberto Montoya, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. The unconstitutional and unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The detention of 5-year-old Liam Cornejo Ramos. The brave people of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
I'm grateful for everyone who voted on Tuesday for decency, humanity, and the Constitution. I'm also grateful for the courageous people, immigrants and allies, who took to the streets in the last two years, like ambulance crews rushing to the scene of an emergency or firefighters to an out-of-control blaze.
Election Day gave us many victories, but organizing gives us power—so let’s turn this mandate into action, hit the streets, hold our leaders accountable, and build the safe, just future our families deserve.
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Will the Blue Tsunami Bring a New Deal for Unions?
What American workers—and American democracy—need most is a larger, more powerful labor movement. Unions should take advantage of this moment to build one.
Nov 06, 2026
Union activists like me can be forgiven a certain degree of giddiness after Donald J. Trump’s agenda got walloped in the midterm election. After all, Trump has been one of the most anti-worker presidents in history. He stripped millions of federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, he gutted the National Labor Relations Board, and he sliced back regulations that gave overtime to millions of employees and that protected people from being improperly classified as independent contractors without labor rights. He cut taxes for corporations and billionaires and slashed food and medical benefits for working Americans.
Congress is now in the hands of Democrats, including many who trend younger and more progressive, and even more who proclaim themselves to be the friend of the working person (some even say “working class”). Alas, Trump remains in place. It would take some extraordinary parliamentary maneuvering to undo all—or perhaps any—of Trump’s anti-worker policies. There is no reason to shy away from uphill battles, but we cannot expect complete victory in the next two years.
Anyway, the agenda is broader than a few immediate policy initiatives. As I argue in my upcoming book, Building Power: Collective Action, the Writers’ Strike Against Hollywood, and Organizing for the Future (Cornell University Press), what American workers—and American democracy—need most is a larger, more powerful labor movement. That is the key to making sure the federal government acts in the interest of working people over the long haul. (By “working people” I mean everyone who earns a living by their own labor, whether by putting up buildings or tending to patients or teaching kids or writing software or working on the assembly line.)
If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing.
Here is the painful truth: Only about 10% of American workers are represented by unions. In the private sector, it’s closer to 6%. It is difficult to get corporate chieftains and elected politicians to fight for working people in the face of corporate opposition when union density is such a small fraction of the overall labor force and economy.
Things were this bad when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. Union density was about 11% in 1934. The New Deal transformed federal labor law, FDR proclaimed that every worker should join a union, and the labor movement got to work organizing the unorganized. By 1945, density skyrocketed to nearly 35%.
Union density remained between 30-35% for decades, and tens of millions of union members won a measure of economic security. Wages and productivity increased at about the same rate, roughly doubling from 1948 to 1973 (Sven Beckert, Capital: A Global History (Penguin Press 2025) at p. 949). In other words, working people won a reasonable share of the wealth they created.
Union density nosedived after the early 1970s, and economic inequality exploded. From 1980 to 2020 income gains for the top 1% were more than triple those in the middle. The gap became even larger between the truly wealthy and the less well-off; the top 0.1% saw gains 12 times as large as those of the lowest 20% between 1979 and 2022.
A recent Economic Policy Institute study estimated the gains working people would make if union membership tripled to about 30%: $1.2 trillion a year, or about a third of the increase in economic inequality since 1979. Thus, if union density returned to where it was during the New Deal, this would put a serious dent in the economic inequality that has roiled American politics and ruined household finances. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful outcome for the Blue Tsunami than a New Deal for unions.
However (and sorry, this is a distinctly non-giddy point), one midterm election does not lock in a long-term political realignment. We need politicians to support pro-worker legislation for as long as it takes—decades, not years. The first legislative step would be to transform federal labor law to support, rather than hinder, unionization. That would make it vastly less difficult to increase union density.
None of this will happen by itself. Political candidates and consultants do not build movements. Organizers and leaders and activists and members do. Political winds shift and elections swing like pendulums. More important, politicians respond to leverage, not good vibes. They will only adopt labor law reforms if they feel sustained pressure to do so. If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing and bargaining, of engaging working people directly, of building their power in a sustainable way. They can use that power to exert leverage on whichever politicians seek their support. That is the surest way to capitalize on the gains that working people made in the midterm elections.
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Time for a Green New Deal 2.0
With Trump’s repudiation in the 2026 midterm elections, it is time to end Green New Deal hushing and instead consider what a Green New Deal revamped for today should be.
Nov 06, 2026
The overwhelming repudiation of President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterm elections may make it possible to constrain his worst depredations. But that will hardly be enough to solve the multiple crises facing the American people or the world. The Green New Deal represents the best vision we have for addressing those realities, but it needs to be updated and expanded for the world we face today. We need a “Green New Deal 2.0.”
Trump’s pet whipping boy was the Green New Deal. His excoriating attacks led many Democratic politicians to engage in “Green New Deal hushing.” With Trump’s repudiation in the 2026 midterm elections, it is time to end Green New Deal hushing and instead consider what a Green New Deal revamped for today should be.
The Green New Deal project has been promoted by a wide array of social forces. It has brought together people operating inside political systems with social movements organizing outside of them. It has used both the institutions of representative democracy and the direct-action power of the people to implement its objectives. The Green New Deal 2.0 will draw on comparable sources of power.
The Green New Deal has proven perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet.
No doubt there are many in both the Republican and Democratic parties who would like to see the Green New Deal where Trump believed he consigned it—in the grave. But the Green New Deal has proven perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet. It is a project that in all its varied manifestations takes the necessity for climate protection as the basis for a broad program for social reconstruction—a visionary program designed to protect the Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. It will rise again transformed.
The Heritage of the Green New Deal
In 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for “investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs, and spurs green growth.” He said what the world needs, in short, is a “Green New Deal.”
The project of a Green New Deal rapidly picked up momentum around the world. Green New Deals became official policy in many countries, endorsed by the UN, the international trade union movement, and even by the International Monetary Fund. China, India, and the European Union began implementing some of the policies envisioned by the Green New Deal. But within a couple of years a global counterattack demanding austerity stymied much of the drive for massive investment to implement climate protection and economic justice. The Green New Deal appeared dead.
Even in the Trump era the Green New Deal has continued as a force in American life—from below.
The Green New Deal was reborn a decade later when the Sunrise youth climate movement held a sit-in in the office of US Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) demanding she support a resolution for a Green New Deal proposed by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Drawing on the proposals a decade earlier for a Global Green New Deal, the resolution called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal amassed support among congressional representatives, progressive organizations, and young people across the country. A poll found that more than 80% of registered voters “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal. A poll five years later found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”
Notwithstanding its popularity with the public, the Green New Deal met implacable opposition from the fossil fuel industry and hostile forces in both the Democratic and Republic parties. Upon his election as president, Trump declared the Green New Deal dead and proceeded to devastate both climate protection and social justice.
Nonetheless, even in the Trump era the Green New Deal has continued as a force in American life—from below. It has continued to be implemented through little-noticed initiatives by community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors pursuing the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. I have described it as the “Green New Deal from Below.”
The Green New Deal 2.0
The Green New Deal 2.0, like earlier Green New Deals, is a project to abolish the extraction and burning of fossil fuels while rapidly expanding equality, justice, and well-being. To do that it will have to learn from the earlier Green New Deals but also develop far beyond them. It will be aided in doing so by the radical reduction in the cost of fossil free energy and the ways in which energy is used—the Greentech Revolution. But the Green New Deal 2.0 will also have to function within—and help transform—the period of American dysfunction and global disorder that has come to be known as the Polycrisis.
To succeed, the Green New Deal 2.0 will need to be multilevel: local, state, regional, national, and global. From the start it needs to be global in its perspective and to transcend national borders in many of its actions. But it will initially have to be built from the bottom up, community by community, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Eventually it will need to control and wield the power of national governments.
Achieving the goals of the Green New Deal 2.0—abolishing fossil fuel extraction and burning while rapidly reducing inequality, injustice, and deprivation—will require simultaneous action at many levels from local communities to global institutions.
The Green New Deal 2.0 won’t happen all at once; it will have to develop over time. In the US the Green New Deal 2.0 may start with an Emergency Green New Deal addressing the catastrophe now being experienced by the American people and its impending intensification. This catastrophe includes the crises of food, housing, energy, health, public safety, climate, inequality, democracy, and the rule of law—a veritable American Polycrisis. In some ways it resembles the “Yeltsin Era” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union when systems from employment to food to healthcare to housing to the rule of law broke down; male life expectancy at birth fell by six years just between 1990 and 1994.
There is little likelihood of immediate federal solutions to this catastrophe. The newly-elected Congress has an important role to play in limiting Trump’s freedom of action, proposing alternatives, and supporting popular mobilizations. But as long as Trump remains in office, he can veto legislation and wield the powers of the executive branch. Addressing the crises we face requires people organizing themselves from below to implement an Emergency Green New Deal that will put people to work doing the things are that are necessary to ensure survival and well-being in the face of the American Polycrisis.
Achieving the goals of the Green New Deal 2.0—abolishing fossil fuel extraction and burning while rapidly reducing inequality, injustice, and deprivation—will require simultaneous action at many levels from local communities to global institutions. It will constitute an era of social reconstruction.
Elements of the Green New Deal 2.0
Here are some of the ways in which the Green New Deal 2.0 can incorporate but go far beyond previous Green New Deals:
The Greentech Revolution: Protecting the climate by replacing fossil fuels with fossil-free energy was the central pillar of the original US Green New Deal. Since then, climate catastrophe has truly arrived. But the global Greentech Revolution has created a new basis for moving to fossil-free communities, countries, and world. The Green New Deal 2.0 will accelerate the timetable for the transition to climate safety, while utilizing it as the pivot for other transformations.
Jobs: The original US Green New Deal resolution noted a “four-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and anti-labor policies.” It proposed to use climate mobilization as a vehicle to transform the world of work through high-quality union jobs, worker rights, labor standards, and a “job guarantee” that would ensure a job for every worker who wants one doing the work that is necessary to protect the climate and create a more just society. Since then, inequality has exploded and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to eliminate millions of jobs and turn millions of others into excruciating daily oppression. The Green New Deal 2.0 will expand the jobs programs proposed by the Green New Deal, ensure that there are good jobs for those affected by AI, and empower workers to organize and act collectively on the job.
Affordability: Rising prices for the necessities of life are a crucial concern for working people today. The Green New Deal 2.0 will address this from the start by replacing fossil fuels with far cheaper fossil-free energy, reducing the price of everything that uses energy—that is to say, everything. It will also make massive investment in energy-conserving housing, food production, and other necessities of life that will both protect the climate and reduce the cost of living. It will tax the rich to reduce inequality and provide resources for the 99%.
Human Needs: The Green New Deal specifically addressed the unmet needs for housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities of life as part of the transition to a climate-safe society. Recent bills in Congress have proposed Green New Deals for housing and education. The Trump administration has devastated all aspects of our already inadequate social provision and is taking aim at what’s left. The Green New Deal 2.0 will establish new systems of social provision that empower local communities while providing the resources necessary to meet individual and social needs.
Justice and Equity: The original Green New Deal resolution proposed to use its programs to “promote justice and equity by preventing current and repairing historic oppression” of “indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Today the further degradation of all these groups is being actively promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters in all spheres of life. The Green New Deal 2.0 will use resources, policies, democratic processes, and law to reverse both historic and new forms of injustice and inequality.
Democratization: The original US Green New Deal was defeated in large part by the inordinate wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry and its power base within both Republican and Democratic parties. Since then, the Trump administration and the forces of plutocracy have further degraded our democracy and empowered the billionaire class. The initial US Green New Deal resolution called for “ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal 2.0 will rebuild democracy from the bottom up. That includes establishing democratic institutions at the grassroots and establishing genuine political equality for all people. It will also extend democracy within workplaces and the economy. Donald Trump has greatly expanded the role of government in the economy for the worst of purposes, to enrich kleptocrats and war contractors. The Green New Deal 2.0 will utilize that expansion of powers to provide planning and investment to serve the common good.
Constraining Corporations and Technologies: The original New Deal of the Great Depression aimed to control the anti-social behavior of “malefactors of great wealth.” The startling growth of hyperscale data centers controlled by a handful of tech billionaires has forced new attention to the need to constrain corporations and their technology. To realize its objectives, the Green New Deal 2.0 will have to go far beyond previous green new deals in halting the anti-social behavior of today’s malefactors of great wealth, the corporations they control, and the destructive technologies they are seeking to impose. It will need to implement the “precautionary principle” that forbids introduction of new technologies until they are proven safe. More broadly, it will need to make the actions of private economic entities accountable to the public and those they affect.
Global Cooperation: Neither the climate nor the economy can be fixed at a purely local or national level. The growing chaos of the global Polycrisis, with its breakdown of international cooperation, has led to a collapse of climate protection, proliferating warfare, economic chaos, and an inability of any nation to provide security and well-being for its people. The Green New Deal 2.0 will treat a worldwide Green New Deal as a common project of the world’s people and will make cooperation among movements and nations a primary part of its local and national programs. It will promote mutually managed international trade in the interest of protecting the climate and the world’s people rather than either economic nationalism or unconstrained globalization.
The elements of the Green New Deal 2.0 will rapidly improve the lives of workers, communities, and ordinary Americans. The Greentech Revolution will not only retard climate devastation, it will reduce pollution and reverse soaring energy costs. Putting millions of people to work addressing human and environmental needs will not only provide quality employment but rapidly expand provision of food, housing, medical care, public safety, and other necessities of life. Rebuilding democracy from the bottom up will offer protection against the agressions of authoritarian government and promote our ability to control our common life.
By itself the Green New Deal 2.0 won’t quell the global Polycrisis. But working with other forces it can begin to constrain Polycrisis dynamics while also starting to transcend them. The rapid reduction in burning fossil fuels and the transition to fossil-free energy can slow and eventually reverse the destruction of the Earth’s climate. The reduction in inequity and injustice, the meeting of social needs, the provision of full employment, and the constraining of corporate power all address the inequality promoted by right-wing policies and the Polycrisis. The drive for international cooperation can help begin to bring war making, war crimes, nihilistic geopolitics, and global plunder under control and start to develop an alternative world order.
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Democrats, Please Take Note: Peace Is Good Politics
The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.
Nov 05, 2026
Voters across the United States were loud and clear on Tuesday in their historic drubbing of Trumpism. The election was a decisive rejection of Trump's war on Iran and its staggering costs at home. While savoring their victory and the historic opportunity to restore America's constitutional order, the Democrats should take the anti-war message of the election to heart, because they suffered the same verdict two years ago, when voters rejected the Biden administration's wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Last week Israeli voters rejected Netanyahu's reckless wars, and European voters are also rejecting parties that prolong the Ukraine War. The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.
On election night Trump conceded to Fox News, "I think a part of it was Iran." The next day Vice President JD Vance was far blunter, posting on X: "The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.... everyone knows why we lost." In the AP Voter Poll, about 60 percent of voters said the decision to use military force against Iran was wrong, and about 90 percent called the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote.
The war and the cost of living were of course utterly intertwined. Gasoline prices, around $2.80 per gallon before the war began on February 28, had risen by about 55 percent by mid-May and reached a monthly average of $4.43 in September. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed from below 4 percent before the war to above 5 percent in the autumn, and the Pentagon sought more than $200 billion in supplemental war funding. Every family with a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card balance suffered from the war.
Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy.
The first duty of the new Congress is to restore its constitutional authority over war and its power of the purse to ensure that US forces are not sent back into combat in Iran or anywhere else on the whim of a president and the behest of domestic or foreign lobbies. Trump must of course refrain from restarting the war, which was never remotely necessary or justified. Remember that on February 28, the day the US and Israel launched the war, Oman's foreign minister, who was mediating the U.S.-Iran talks, had said that a deal was within reach.
The Democrats should not imagine that the anti-war lesson applies only to Republicans. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because voters held the Biden administration responsible for the costs of its own wars. The energy shock that followed the escalation of the Ukraine war in 2022 drove up inflation, and gasoline topped $5 per gallon for the first time in June 2022. Biden twice rejected negotiations that could have ended the conflict: in December 2021, when his administration refused to negotiate on NATO enlargement in response to Russia's draft security treaty, and in April 2022, when the Istanbul talks were abandoned at the behest of the US and UK.
The Gaza genocide also cost the Democrats directly. Among Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, 29 percent named ending Israel's violence in Gaza as the main factor in their decision, the most frequently cited issue. The party's voters have moved far ahead of its leaders. A New York Times/Siena poll in May 2026 found that roughly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US military and economic assistance to Israel.
Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy. On October 27, after Israeli wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Netanyahu lost his majority. Similarly, European leaders who have tied themselves to open-ended war in Ukraine are being rejected by the voters. Only 10 percent of Germans are satisfied with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the lowest rating ever recorded for a German chancellor. Emmanuel Macron's approval fell to 15 percent in October. In Bulgaria, Iliana Iotova, who favors dialogue with Moscow, won the presidency on November 1 with more than 58 percent of the vote.
A key upcoming key test for the Democrats will be Ukraine. They must stop their party's typical Russia-bashing and instead support a diplomatic end to the war.
As a start, the Democrats should remember why the war started. In 1990 the United States assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." The Clinton administration broke that promise. In 2008 the Bush administration pushed through the Bucharest declaration that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members of NATO," despite Ambassador William Burns's warning that this was the brightest of all red lines for Russia. In 2014 the United States backed the coup against Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, as the leaked Nuland-Pyatt call made clear. In April 2022, when negotiators in Istanbul came close to a peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality, the US and UK actually intervened to block the agreement. Today 75 percent of Ukrainians support negotiations with Russia to end the war.
The Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars.
In view of these causes of the war, I have recently set out a straightforward diplomatic framework for peace in Ukraine that would end the war. NATO would end its eastward expansion. Ukraine would adopt permanent neutrality on the model of Austria in 1955. An armistice line would be drawn, with both sides renouncing the use of force to change it. Ukraine would pursue membership in the European Union as a permanently neutral state. The Democrats should support such a diplomatic approach. It’s what can end the war, save Ukraine, and win the backing of both the Ukrainian and American people.
Most importantly, the Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars. The new Democratic majority should quickly reassert the constitutional authority of Congress over war and peace, champion a negotiated peace in Ukraine, end support for Israel's wars, cut the military budget, and redirect the savings toward lowering the cost of living and repairing the public finances.
These positions are not only right but are good politics. For the Democrats to win the White House in 2028, they should become the party of peace. Better yet, both parties should become parties of peace and conduct the 2028 campaign on which party will best address America’s needs for decent jobs, affordability, healthcare, housing, a safe environment, and quality education.
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If This Is a Wave, We Made It: Why the Midterms Were About Us, Not Them
We may feel as if we have woken up to a different country after election day, but we have not. We woke up just as we did the day before to a country in which the collective is fighting for justice and equity relentlessly, strategically, and with love.
Nov 05, 2026
What is this strange feeling washing over millions of us this week? Is this relief? Is this joy? Is it disbelief that our collective voice could not be stifled despite the best attempts of the wealthy and the corrupt? We wake up to a very different world than the one that we woke up to on election day.
We have the very first openly gay man senator ever elected.
We have the first Black woman governor ever, and she is 1 of 5 Black governors elected, making it the first time that multiple Black governors will serve at once. Until now, each previous Black governor served alone, they were the only Black person in the room.
We are part of a long lineage of dreamers and resisters and creators. We voted. And that is only one small action in a large toolkit of creating more just worlds for all.
We have the first Native American woman governor ever.
We have a senator-elect in Texas who speaks of a politics of love. James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, named what his campaign had to overcome in his acceptance speech:
We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million, more than any senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, smear campaigns, foreign bots, and AI deepfakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment. The death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.
We have a Latina governor in Texas for the first time, defeating a governor who has been more complicit than anyone in creating a brutally hostile environment toward immigrants and academic freedom. Abbott’s immigration policies led to the erosion of safety and human rights such as when police officers are allowed to question a person’s immigration status during a routine traffic stop, encouraging racial profiling. His Senate Bill 17 increased state censorship and widespread self-censorship, resulting in a devastating erosion of academic freedom. Harming one of the greatest riches this country has: our excellent higher education system.
We have Ohio’s first woman governor who won even after a deeply personal attack featuring her own estranged mother put forth by the Trump-promoted and backed opponent.
We have the first Native American woman US senator senator in Minnesota.
This was the very first midterm in which a single person gave more money in donations than any other person has ever spent on a single election cycle (with the exception of billionaire Mike Bloomberg who funded his own run for the presidency in 2020). The world's richest man donated a stunning $474 million, of this $168 million went toward the aim of defeating Talarico, who took no corporate PAC money and was only funded by individual donors.
The first Muslim senator was elected despite some of the most vitriolic racist attacks lodged at him and having his primary opponent choose to blow up her political career by betraying every value she ever indicated to hold by backing the Trump-favored Republican opponent.
The list of names could continue, but there is a risk to narrowing the story to the name in the headline. After all, each of these people was carried by thousands and even millions of people organizing, refusing, resisting, and caring.
It is no wonder if we feel as though we have woken up to a different country than the one we woke up to on election day. But I want to argue that we have not. We woke up just as we have woken up the day before and the one before that, and so on to a country in which the collective is fighting for justice and equity relentlessly, strategically, and with love.
There is some data to back these seemingly unnecessarily hopeful words. The early vote exceeded the 2022 midterm early vote by 9 million. This brings to mind a well-known psychological concept known as learned helplessness. The studies that led to this theoretical framework are devastating in their cruelty. Dogs were shocked while standing on a platform. And at first, they tried to get away from the painful bursts but were not given an opportunity to do so. Eventually, even when an escape was a possibility, when the door was open, they no longer even tried, they simply gave up and accepted the torture.
Even with the egregious misuse of the Justice Department, the assault on the checks and balances in our government, even with the wealthiest man in the world aiming to disempower the voters and buy elections in order to maintain his privileges. Even with the gerrymandering in many states that aimed to dilute Black political power. Even with voter intimidation by the federal government. Even with all of this, the country challenged Martin Seligman's original theories on learned helplessness. We do not lie down and accept the shocks. We are not biologically wired to quit when the stressors feel out of our control. Years after the original study in 1967, Seligman and Maier revisited learned helplessness in 2016 and concluded that passivity is not learned; instead, what is learned is a sense of agency, as that is something we build and learn together. Of course, as often happens, the research simply confirmed what the community already understood.
As we struggle to find the right words to describe what happened—is it a tsunami? Is it a firestorm? Is it a repudiation? What should the Democratic Party do next?—I want to offer my perspective as a critical social psychologist. Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Jesuit priest and University of Chicago-educated social psychologist who was assassinated by US trained unit of the El Salvadoran army on November 16th, 1989. In a few days it will be the 37th anniversary of this execution. He provoked transformative questions about the discipline of psychology itself and is regarded as one of the founders of the subdiscipline of liberation psychology. One of his core claims was that fatalism, a feeling that the story is already written so we might as well give up, is not actually natural to people. This is produced by systems. And an election like this shows us when fatalism can crack, as people reclaim their power. As we refuse to become pawns of the corrupt and the greedy. With that, what is the answer to what the Democratic Party needs to do next? Marin-Baro’s legacy reminds us that the party’s job is to follow the collective, not lead it.
We look at our neighbors who are being targeted for cruel deportations by bypassing due process despite their meaningful contributions to our communities, and we say, we stand with you. We look at our neighbors, like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were murdered because they refused to hide at home when their neighborhoods were under attack by masked bullies, and we grieve them with an act of radical love, which is always action. We look at our universities that are being stripped of academic freedom, becoming a tool of those in power and the state, and we say we believe in the power of education and that it is worth fighting for. We look at each other, and we know that we are being told a story that does not make sense. You, my neighbor, have never been my enemy. You have always been my keeper. We belong to each other.
Following the midterms, it is not so much that the world has changed; it is simply that we see the world more for what it has always been. Nothing has changed. The lens, smeared with lies, has been cleared somewhat with this election. We have communities who show up day after day after day for one another. They demonstrate that hope is not a soft feeling but a fierce warrior emotion that is produced by action. Mariame Kaba says it best: Hope is a discipline. We are part of a long lineage of dreamers and resisters and creators. We voted. And that is only one small action in a large toolkit of creating more just worlds for all. So is this a big blue wave? Well if it is, we created it. It is not crashing over us. We are in this water. And yes, resistance can be joyful. So come in, splash around. The water is warm. Let’s keep making waves together.
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Bernie Sanders: Winning the Midterms Is Not Enough. Here's What We Must Do
The American people understand that the economy today is rigged and that we cannot continue the ‘same old, same old’ establishment politics and establishment policies.
Nov 05, 2026
On Tuesday, Trump told us to vote as if he were on the ballot. And that is exactly what the American people did.
Together, we stood up to authoritarianism and a president who does not believe in the Constitution or the rule of law. And we won.
With Democratic control over the Senate and the House, we will now—finally—be able to hold Donald Trump accountable.
The American people have had enough. They are demanding real change and bold policies that will dramatically improve their lives.
That is a big deal. But as important as it is, it is not enough. We have got to do more.
Whether we like it or not, we are living in an unprecedented moment in American history where our country faces extraordinary crises. We cannot and must not run away from them when Democrats assume power in January.
These crises must be dealt with.
It is no secret that in the United States and all over the world, people are giving up on democracy. Now, why is that?
And the answer is that—all over the world, not just in America—working families are struggling to put food on the table and pay for basic necessities while the very richest people become much richer. And, throughout our country and in many other countries, ordinary people are saying, ‘Does their government even know that they exist?’ Or are elected officials too busy worrying about the needs of the rich and the powerful?
This is an American issue, but, in fact, an international issue.
And in my view, the American people have had enough. They are demanding real change and bold policies that will dramatically improve their lives.
In the richest country on Earth, the American people want a government that stands for working families, not billionaire campaign contributors. And that is not just Bernie Sanders talking.
According to a recent AP poll, 80% of registered voters want either “complete and total upheaval” or “substantial change” in how this country is run. And that includes 97% of Democrats, 90% of independents, and 58% of Republicans.
In other words, the American people understand that the economy today is rigged and that we cannot continue the ‘same old, same old’ establishment politics and establishment policies.
The American people want change. Real change. And the midterm election confirms just that.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean and the issues that we have got to deal with.
In our country today, income and wealth inequality has reached unprecedented levels. The top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. In my view, that is insane. And I think that’s how most Americans feel.
Democrats, when they gain control, in January, of the House and the Senate, cannot ignore this grotesque inequality. We must take on the greed of the very, very rich and their incredible wealth.
We must enact a 5% wealth tax on billionaires so that we can provide every working-class family in the country, a family of four, with a $12,000 direct payment.
And that means a Democratic Congress must pass a wealth tax on billionaires.
At a time when billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers or nurses, we must enact a 5% wealth tax on billionaires so that we can provide every working-class family in the country, a family of four, with a $12,000 direct payment. In other words, if you’re a working-class family of four, that’s $3,000 for every man, woman, and child—$12,000.
Furthermore, with that tax on billionaires, we can build 7 million units of low-income and affordable housing, we can make public colleges and universities tuition-free, and we can provide universal free child care for 13 million children. That is what a wealth tax on billionaires can do.
But taxing the oligarchs means more than just taking on their wealth.
It means ending their stranglehold over our political system.
Elon Musk and his billionaire friends have poured a record-breaking $2 billion into the recent election. That is absurd.
The American people want Congress to overturn Citizens United, abolish super PACs, and establish public funding of elections. Democracy must mean one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections.
But it’s not just massive income and wealth inequality that we have to deal with or a corrupt campaign finance system.
In America today—as everybody knows, and I get the same response wherever I go in this country—everybody understands that our healthcare system is broken. It is dysfunctional. And it is wildly expensive.
We spend almost twice as much per person on healthcare as any other major country. Yet, despite that huge expenditure, more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Over half a million people go bankrupt each year because of medical debt. We pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. And tragically, more than 60,000 Americans die unnecessarily every year because they cannot afford medical care.
How cruel is that?
Yes, we must repeal the $1 trillion in cuts Trump made to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to prevent 15 million Americans from losing their healthcare. Yes, we must restore ACA tax credits to stop the outrageous premium spikes for 20 million Americans, but that is nowhere near enough. Healthcare must be considered as a human right, not a privilege. That means passing Medicare for all legislation now supported by 66% of the American people.
As an immediate first step, Democrats must lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 down to 55, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and guarantee universal healthcare coverage for every child from birth through age 19. All of this can be accomplished with 51 votes in the Senate, through the reconciliation process.
But it’s not just income and wealth inequality that we have to deal with, or a corrupt campaign finance system or a dysfunctional healthcare system. We must deal with artificial intelligence—the most transformational technology in the history of humanity.
In America today, big tech oligarchs are spending trillions of dollars on artificial intelligence and robotics with virtually no regulation.
Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers, must pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.
This revolutionary technology will transform the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country and around the world. Left unchecked, AI and robotics will destroy tens of millions of jobs, devastate our children’s mental health, eviscerate our privacy rights, drive up electricity rates, strain water supplies, and transform warfare.
If AI becomes smarter than human beings and escapes human control, it will also pose an existential threat to the very existence of humanity. We cannot allow a handful of big tech billionaires to become even richer and more powerful by ramming this dangerous technology down our throats.
Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers, must pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.
And by the way, I might mention that in the election, in dozens of communities throughout our country, citizens voted for a moratorium on the construction of data centers. In other words, a moratorium on data centers is exactly what the American people want.
But my friends, it is not just oligarchy, a corrupt campaign finance system, a broken healthcare system, and uncontrolled AI.
In America today, while the very rich get richer, 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions work long, long hours for incredibly low wages. That must change.
A job must lift people out of poverty, not keep them in it.
The $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage is a starvation wage. Democrats must raise it to a living wage of at least $20-an-hour and make it easier for workers to form unions by passing the PRO Act. A job must lift people out of poverty, not keep them in it.
Further, in our country today, one-third of our seniors are struggling economically, and more than 20% are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year. Nearly half of older Americans have no retirement savings and no idea how they will retire with a shred of dignity. Meanwhile, Elon Musk pays the same amount into Social Security as someone earning $184,600 a year. That is absurd.
By applying the Social Security payroll tax to all income above $250,000, including capital gains and dividends, we could increase benefits by $2,400 a year, lift millions of seniors out of poverty, improve cost of living adjustments, and keep Social Security solvent for generations without raising taxes on the bottom 91% of Americans.
We must also restore the traditional pension plans corporate America took away so that every worker can count on a guaranteed income in retirement.
That is what a Democratic Congress must do.
Let me be clear. In America today, we spend more on the military than the next six nations combined. Despite massive waste, fraud, and abuse, the Pentagon has repeatedly failed independent audits and cannot account for trillions of dollars in spending. Adding insult to injury, Trump has dragged us into an illegal and unconstitutional war in Iran that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
We must end this disastrous war.
We must cut off all funding for the genocidal government in Israel.
And we must substantially reduce military spending.
Instead of pouring $1.1 trillion into a bloated Pentagon and never-ending wars, a Democratic Congress must build the best public education system in the world with no teacher earning less than $60,000 a year.
We are fighting to give hope to the American people—to allow them to understand that their government can work for them, can address the crises that they face, and will pay attention to the needs of the men, women and children in our country who are struggling, and not just the very, very wealthy campaign contributors.
And let me touch on one more subject that Democrats must deal with.
Since Trump took office, ICE agents have shot American citizens in cold blood, have broken down doors to arrest people, and have sent five-year-old children to detention centers. These actions are not only immoral and disgraceful, they are unconstitutional.
Democrats must immediately rein in the $75 billion Republicans gave Trump to fund his domestic army. Instead of ICE agents terrorizing communities throughout the country, we must finally move to comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship for the undocumented.
Let’s be clear: All of the policies I have just discussed—and more that I have not mentioned—are not radical.
They are precisely what a strong majority of the American people want.
So we are in a moment in American history where a lot of folks are losing faith in democracy. They are struggling every day just to stay alive while, at the same time, billionaires have more money than they can spend in a thousand lifetimes and are getting richer and richer all of the time.
What we are talking about now is not only the need to fight for economic justice.
We are fighting to give hope to the American people—to allow them to understand that their government can work for them, can address the crises that they face, and will pay attention to the needs of the men, women and children in our country who are struggling, and not just the very, very wealthy campaign contributors.
That is, in my view, what Democrats have got to do when they assume power in January.
We can do it. We must do it.
And I look forward to working with all of you to make sure that it happens.
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Lessons from Dan Osborn’s Defeat in Nebraska
Even the strongest individual candidate cannot substitute for the patient work of building an independent political movement.
Nov 05, 2026
Dan Osborn, the independent candidate and former local union president, once again came within a few percentage points of winning the Nebraska US Senate seat. (He lost by 6.7% in 2024 and the same again this year.) He mounted an impressive challenge, but he couldn’t close the gap. Why? And what does his defeat tell us about the future of independent working-class politics?
Wouldn’t Osborn have done much better if he ran as a Democrat?
The anti-Trump Blue Wave created key red state Senate Democratic victories as it tore through Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and maybe even Mississippi. But, it hit the shoals in North Dakota where the Democrat lost by 20.7 percent, by 18 percent in Oklahoma, and by 30.4 percent in Wyoming. The wave also didn’t reach the rest of the South and border states.
It would be prudent to lay the foundation for an independent party that would be overtly committed to take on corporate power, runaway inequality, and job insecurity.
So, it is not at all clear that a Democrat would have outperformed Osborn in Nebraska. Nevertheless, there are several lessons from Osborn’s defeat worth considering.
1. Running for the Senate is a big deal.
Anyone running for the US Senate against a Republican in a very red state is going to face a wall of money. There are only a handful of genuinely competitive Senate races every two years, and enormous sums flow into them. Osborn was up against $37 million—about $40 per voter—the most ever spent on a Senate race in Nebraska.
It would be nice to think money doesn’t matter, but when the sums are that enormous it does. Money buys advertising, organization, visibility, and an increased ability to define a candidate, as well as to define the candidate’s opponent. Overcoming those advantages is extraordinarily difficult.
2. Running for the Senate is a big jump.
I can’t think of anyone who has gone directly from serving as a local union president to being elected to the US Senate. That’s a hell of a leap, and Osborn deserves enormous credit for attempting it.
But it raises a question: Why not first run for a less demanding office, build an organization, establish a political record, and develop a broader base of support? Why not Congress or the state legislature?
We can second guess all we want, but there’s no guarantee that a smaller race would have been easier for Osborn. And sometimes political opportunities don’t wait. Especially because building political power takes time, which means the odds were stacked against Osborn from the start.
3. Was he really an independent, or a Democrat in disguise?
Everyone knows the Democratic brand is in terrible shape in Nebraska, as well as in much of red America. We did a survey that shows how much. Running as an independent, for Osborn, made considerable sense. But according to the New York Times,
“more than half of voters — 55 percent — say they see Mr. Osborn, a union leader, as more of a Democrat than anything else. Just one third of voters say they consider him to be an independent.”
And, of course, the Republicans spent millions hammering away at that perception throughout the campaign.
To make matters worse, a leaked recordings captured Osborn privately expressing views that were far more liberal from the more cautious public positions he took during the campaign on issues like the border wall, transgender people, and ICE.
Whether or not voters agreed with the positions on those issues he’d taken in public, the episode created a credibility problem. It reinforced the Republican argument that Osborn was really a Democrat hiding behind an independent label.
This points to a larger problem: An independent candidate running alone must convince voters that his independence is real if he’s going to avoid negativity of the Democratic brand in red America.
4. There is no substitute for building an independent political organization, step by step.
Osborn could be labeled—or mislabeled—a Democratic shill precisely because he was an individual candidate. He did not represent a political organization with a record of independence from the two major parties. He had no established movement behind him to demonstrate what that independence meant. As an individual, it was all on him.
Compare that with the Nonpartisan League, which prospered in North Dakota during and after World War I. It had a coherent platform, including the public ownership of grain elevators and the establishment of a publicly owned bank. (The public Bank of North Dakota still operates today.) In a few years, the League recruited tens of thousands of dues-paying members and ran candidates for local and state offices.
It was never about one person. It was a movement and a political organization. The verbal gaffes or vulnerabilities of any individual candidate could not bring down the entire effort.
Building that kind of organization takes longer than trying to produce a dramatic political breakthrough from the top down. It’s not impossible for one individual to pull it off—Osborn has come remarkably close—but relying on one candidate makes the entire effort vulnerable to that person’s mistakes, inconsistencies, or political liabilities. (Consider the Dem’s experience with Graham Platner in Maine.)
It was never about one person. It was a movement and a political organization. The verbal gaffes or vulnerabilities of any individual candidate could not bring down the entire effort.
An organization built around a clear platform is much stronger over the long run. It can explain, over several years and through many different candidates, what it means to be independent of the two major parties. Its record, membership, and collective work become the proof of its independence, and it becomes much more difficult to dismiss the entire organization as a Democratic front.
5. Osborn’s race shows why we need a long-term vision for a new working-class party. Or will the Democrats again become the party of working people?
The alternative to running as an individual is the creation of a new political organization of working people—one that is fundamentally different from the Democrats and the Republicans.
But why bother? Aren’t the Democrats now positioned to fight for powerful pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage, facilitating labor union organizing, and putting price controls on pharmaceutical and food cartels?
Let’s hope so. But, it’s just as possible for the Democrats with narrow victories in purple districts to call for moderate policies to secure their positions and maintain the support of their wealthy donors. Although we might see a slew of investigations to uncover corruption and the Epstein files, there may be little movement on the most basic economic protections for working people.
And the Democrats still do not have the support of a majority of voters without college degrees, according to exit polls.
Therefore, it would be prudent to lay the foundation for an independent party that would be overtly committed to take on corporate power, runaway inequality, and job insecurity. It would fight for good jobs, decent wages, strong unions, and support for communities where working people can thrive.
Osborn’s campaign demonstrated that an independent working-class candidate could mount a serious challenge in a red state. His defeat should not obscure that achievement.
But it would also have to welcome working people with a range of social and cultural beliefs, including people who might not feel comfortable with the progressive left. That doesn’t mean abandoning basic principles of fairness, equality, and justice. It does mean recognizing that working people will not agree on everything, and that a successful political organization must be broad enough to unite them around their common economic interests.
Most important, it must be a party of and by working people. Its members—not wealthy donors, not political consultants, not a handful of prominent leaders—must shape its platform, choose its candidates, run its campaigns, and recruit new members. It must be an organization people actively participate in, not simply a label they vote for every few years.
Dan Osborn’s campaign demonstrated that an independent working-class candidate could mount a serious challenge in a red state. His defeat should not obscure that achievement. But it also reminds us that even the strongest individual candidate cannot substitute for the patient work of building an independent political movement.
We need to move beyond the search for the next Dan Osborn. We need to build a political organization that can produce hundreds of them.
Let’s hope Osborn’s remarkable effort helps lay the foundation for that movement.
(For more, please see A Party of Our Own.)
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The 'Blue Wave' Means Nothing if We Don't Stop the National Defense Authorization Act
As taxpayers, we are funding our own endgame, but we don't have to.
Nov 05, 2026
Tuesday night's election results proved that a majority of people in this country do not want war and genocide. Polling overwhelmingly showed that the war on Iran was one of the biggest motivating factors in voting. So why are we about to give the very people voters rejected an unprecedented $1.5 trillion budget to continue their reign of death and destruction? Why are we going to allow Congress to hand over the largest war budget in human history to weapons manufacturers and AI tech billionaires who work at the behest of known war criminals?
In the next few weeks, Congress is set to pass what should be viewed as the deadliest piece of legislation of our time—the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—or the country's defense budget, as it is more commonly known. Its potential passage is setting US taxpayers up to be the funders of their own demise by giving carte blanche to a department of war criminals and their humanity-destroying techno-fascist friends with an obscene $1.5 trillion treasure chest to control, murder, oppress, and destroy the planet as we know it.
Sounds a bit hyperbolic? Not if you look at their past and what they are openly saying now, as a prologue.
If you were watching a summer blockbuster and the main characters were handing over their hard-earned money and essentially their trust to the person you know is going to assassinate them in the final act, you would be screaming at the screen, "Don't do it!"
To understand why this war budget is a catastrophic time bomb, you first have to understand what it actually funds. Under the guise of providing national "security" and protecting "democracy," the annual Pentagon budget does little of both. Instead, the budget, which consistently fails its financial audits, is a mechanism to funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of weapons manufacturers, who make the very weapons that murder men, women, and children and destroy the planet. Well over half of the discretionary budget each year goes directly to private contractors.
Between 2020 and 2024, the Pentagon designated roughly $2.4 trillion out of $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending to private industry. But hey, at least those private companies are providing much-needed jobs for America's workforce, right? Well, not so fast.
According to the Climate and Community Institute, employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades: from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred even as Pentagon budgets rose 22% over the same period. Meanwhile, the industry's top recipients of military contracts, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing, pay their CEOs a combined salary of almost $100 million a year. They are literally making a killing off the killing of others.
And now, not only are we draining our pocketbooks for weapon company CEOs, but we are also subsidizing tech-overlords whose recent main objective is to move jobs and agency away from the working class to robots, as well as use that very technology to mass surveil those who oppose it. The Pentagon is requesting an unprecedented $58.5 billion this year for an artificial intelligence program. This program is already responsible for the February 28 Minab School massacre that murdered at least 156 schoolchildren and staff.
Even more frightening, the money for that deadly program is set to go to the most insane lineup of anti-worker villains, including Sam "bad things should happen to benefit AI" Altman; Peter "if you're evil, you're not bad" Thiel; and Elon "AI will make jobs irrelevant" Musk. They're openly telling us they don't need humans anymore. Meanwhile, they are building their bunkers so that when the United States military finally plunders away all the resources around the world, they can survive.
Why are we handing the military $1.5 trillion to do all this? As it stands, US taxpayers are already paying $116.43 million every hour for war and terror. That's more than $4,000 in weapons and war costs for the average taxpayer last year alone. Both figures will likely double, since the Trump administration's request tops former President Joe Biden's already bloated $1 trillion. Meanwhile, nearly 30% of people have to finance groceries, and 45,000 people will likely die because they lack health insurance or access to affordable healthcare.
If you were watching a summer blockbuster and the main characters were handing over their hard-earned money and essentially their trust to the person you know is going to assassinate them in the final act, you would be screaming at the screen, "Don't do it!"
But that is exactly what is happening right now, and in fact, many are screaming.
Polls consistently show that Americans are moving away from a war-centric approach to foreign affairs. Almost two-thirds of people in the United States disapprove of President Donald Trump's war on Iran, and 60% disapprove of the US-supported genocide in Gaza. Similarly, 59% of voters believe the proposed $1.5 trillion Department of Defense budget is too high, and 3 in 5 voters (58%) prefer directing government funds toward domestic priorities like healthcare rather than military or war spending.
The voices are there, but most of those with the power to stop it aren't listening or are too invested in the war-industrial complex to care. Which begs the question: How can we even call ourselves a democracy, much less its defender, when we, the people, seem to have no agency outside of voting and the majority's demands are ignored?
This administration, as did previous ones, proudly ignores what the majority is begging for: an end to the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine; an end to the war on Iran that was started for no reason and is currently sustained through the administration's pompous arrogance; an end to Immigration and Custom Enforcement's reign of terror across the United States; an end to the AI-data center boom that is chipping away at our humanity and livelihoods; and reinvestment into the things that will actually keep us safe, such as healthcare, housing, and climate justice.
Make no mistake, the $1.5 trillion set to go to Pete Hegseth's war department is not funding our security; it is funding our endgame and stealing from our lifelines. If passed, it will be nearly impossible to undo the damage that will come. We all must unite around this—healthcare workers, environmentalists, teachers, journalists, students, veterans—and make democracy actually work for the people before it's too late. We have to let those we elected to work for us know that this is a red line that humanity cannot afford to cross.
History shows that public pressure can influence policies. Our collective voice can change this country's trajectory—if we mobilize now. We don't have to fund our endgame; we can say no. Join us in DC November 10-13 as we demand our country stop funding war and start funding life.
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The 2026 Election Gives Winners a Mandate to Act Big on Climate
Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed the most corrupt, pro-fossil fuel, anti-environmental administration in US history. Last night, voters overwhelmingly rejected those priorities and demanded a total system reset. It's time to deliver.
Nov 05, 2026
Where does Tuesday night’s historic election leave the climate movement? The answer is on the cusp of a huge opportunity—if we know how to seize it.
Two of the issues that voters cared about most in this election—energy prices and corruption—present climate advocates with the perfect framework within which to push exactly the sort of bold agenda we need for this moment in the climate fight.
Let’s take energy first. Above all else, this was a gas prices election. It’s hard to imagine the sort of Democratic blowout we saw last night if gas and diesel prices weren’t the highest they’ve ever been for any election day in US history. The same is true for electricity bills. While not as mediagenic as the price ticking up on the pump, utility bills were top of mind for voters. No surprise considering the impact that they have on a family’s bottom line: it’s easier to cut back on miles driven than the need to light and heat your home.
From utility reform, to new investments in public transit, to rapidly scaling up renewables, Democrats have a mandate to roll out a historic clean energy package that will cut costs and pollution at the same time.
In response, Democrats up and down the ballot made energy affordability a core campaign issue. On Tuesday, voters rewarded them for it. In election after election, Democrats who spoke clearly and passionately about the need to drive down rates, hold big utilities accountable, and build more clean energy won overwhelmingly. The same was true for energy cost-related ballot initiatives, like in Michigan, where over 80% of voters supported an initiative to ban their utility from making political donations that many rightfully saw as bribes for politicians to keep rates high. Down ballot, Democrats also won important seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the Arizona Corporation Commission, and the Texas Railroad Commission, which all have crucial decision-making roles in those states when it comes to prioritizing renewables over fossil fuels.
These wins set up Democrats at all levels to embrace the most ambitious and sweeping clean energy affordability agenda possible. Voters are demanding that politicians drive down rates, and building more clean energy is the fastest and cheapest way to do it. From utility reform, to new investments in public transit, to rapidly scaling up renewables, Democrats have a mandate to roll out a historic clean energy package that will cut costs and pollution at the same time.
But voters want more than just affordability—they want accountability. Corruption emerged as a major issue in this election, from President Donald Trump and his family’s self-dealing, to Big Tech’s backroom deals to push AI data centers, to Big Oil’s profiteering off the War in Iran and invasion of Venezuela. People are rightfully furious at a system that they see enriching a small circle of billionaires (including all those Big Oil CEOs) at the public’s expense.
That anger is the rocket fuel Democrats need to pursue an aggressive agenda that goes after Big Tech, Big Oil, and other corporate polluters. In Congress, that should look like an aggressive oversight agenda to investigate the corrupt dealings between the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry. From the sale of our public lands, to the attack on our environmental regulations, to the outrageous profits Big Oil and Trump personally has raked in because of the war in Iran, there is plenty for Democratic-led committees to sink their teeth into.
But oversight isn’t enough. Democrats will also have to show that they’re willing to take these corporations head on. That means doing everything they can to stop the massive build-out of AI data centers, which have become the largest new source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, along with their other harms. It also means taking immediate action to rein in the massive profiteering oil companies are engaged in right now—just days before the election, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies announced they’d made a combined $56.2 billion in the last quarter, or $611 million every day. When the new Congress convenes in January, they should pass a permanent Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax that would send the majority of those profits back to the public and ensure prices aren’t allowed to spike like this again.
Voters’ desire for affordability and accountability also provides fertile ground for politicians of all stripes to throw their support behind the growing Make Polluters Pay campaign, which is demanding fossil fuel companies pay their fair share for growing climate damages. As Tuesday’s election was taking place, people across the Southwest were still grappling with the impacts of record-breaking flooding, which has wiped away bridges and homes across the region and made getting out to vote that much harder. The costs of the damage in New Mexico alone could be as high as $300 million. State leaders should fully embrace the push for climate superfund bills, like those passed in Vermont and New York, which would force the oil and gas companies most responsible for the climate crisis to pay into funds to offset the costs of climate disasters and invest in resiliency, as well as squash any attempts by the industry to pass “big oil immunity” bills which would grant them a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Above all else, we need our politicians to act—and act big. Now isn’t the time for small thinking or convoluted triangulation and half measures. Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed the most corrupt, pro-fossil fuel, anti-environmental administration in US history. Last night, voters overwhelmingly rejected those priorities and demanded a total system reset. Our job now is to do everything we can as a climate movement to help deliver on that vision in the most sweeping way possible.
For a new generation of Democrats looking to make a name for themselves as champions of working people, this is an obvious place to start. From making polluters pay to getting every American access to cheap, clean energy, we know what needs to be done in the years ahead—it’s time to go out and fight for it.
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Trump's Endless Lies, Deceit, Cruelty, and Corruption Comes Crashing Down
The Democratic wave is an opportunity to expose the machinery of corruption—and demonstrate that even the most powerful political organizations are not beyond accountability.
Nov 04, 2026
The much-anticipated U.S. midterm elections—so consequential, in fact, to President Donald Trump that he promised Americans $5,000 in cash if Republicans prevailed—have drawn to a close. As of writing, the much-discussed “blue tsunami” has become a political reality: Democrats have seized control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, delivering a stunning repudiation of a president whose second administration has been nothing short of disastrous.
The political ramifications are immense. Although Democrats lack the two-thirds Senate majority necessary to convict and remove Trump following impeachment, they will soon possess something they have been deprived of for two years: the institutional power to investigate his administration, subpoena witnesses, compel testimony, and expose the inner workings of a political machine that has operated with extraordinary impunity.
It is difficult to imagine that they will not exercise it. It is also not particularly difficult to understand why the American electorate delivered this verdict. By nearly every reasonable measure of basic governance, the second Trump administration has been among the most catastrophic in modern American history.
A man who repeatedly escapes accountability may eventually conclude that accountability itself is impossible.
The administration's disastrous war with Iran, coupled with a worsening cost-of-living crisis, has alienated millions of Americans. According to national exit polling conducted by SSRS for NBC News and other major news organizations, 74% of voters considered the war a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote. Nearly nine in ten identified the cost of living as a significant electoral consideration.
Yet these failures represent only part of the story. There is also the administration’s systematic degradation of the institutions upon which American constitutional government depends: its efforts to transform the justice system into an instrument of personal and political power, its contempt for institutional independence, and its extraordinary solicitude toward powerful figures implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Altogether, these are symptoms of something considerably more serious: the gradual transformation of republican government into a personalist political order, in which the distinction between the public interest and the private interests of those who wield power becomes increasingly difficult to discern.
Despite the electoral repudiation, Americans must endure another two years of this presidency. A Democratic Congress will almost certainly frustrate Trump’s ambitions to enact further major legislation. But we should not underestimate his capacity to inflict considerable damage through the powers of the executive branch, nor should we assume that electoral defeat will produce moderation in a man who has spent his political career treating accountability as a personal affront.
For more than a decade, the American people—and particularly our youth—have been presented with an extraordinary moral spectacle: the apparent demonstration that crime does, in fact, pay. But it does not merely pay. Under the appropriate circumstances, it can catapult a man to the highest office in the United States and, consequently, to the summit of global political power.
It can insulate the powerful from accountability for the most grievous forms of misconduct. It can transform public notoriety into political capital, criminal convictions into badges of persecution, and the very institutions designed to administer justice into instruments for frustrating it.
As I have witnessed through my own investigative work in Kentucky, even allegations involving the gravest crimes can become entangled in political relationships, institutional failures, and networks of influence that discourage scrutiny. The lesson communicated to ordinary Americans is that justice is not a universal principle but a privilege distributed according to one’s position within the prevailing social hierarchy.
That truth is negotiable. That social standing depends less upon one’s character than upon one's capacity to cultivate powerful patrons, command attention, and impose a preferred narrative upon others; in other words, on which narcissist can demonstrate the most supply. This is the logic of a social contract that is fraying, if not already approaching rupture.
History offers numerous examples of political societies arriving at such a condition. Rarely have they emerged without undergoing some painful process of moral and institutional rejuvenation. I believe, however, there is good reason for hope.
For all its apparent strength, corruption contains the seeds of its own destruction. The habitual liar gradually loses his relationship with truth. The manipulator comes to perceive every human relationship as a contest of domination. The corrupt official, accustomed to treating public institutions as extensions of his private interests, eventually loses the capacity to distinguish legitimate authority from personal power.
Consider Trump, who has spent decades treating reality as something to be managed through the fabrication of narratives. For much of his life, this strategy has worked. But therein lies the problem: A man who repeatedly escapes accountability may eventually conclude that accountability itself is impossible. He mistakes the temporary weakness of institutions for their permanent incapacity to act.
I have observed something remarkably similar through my investigative work in Northern Kentucky, where I have spent years examining allegations of political corruption, organized criminal activity, and institutional misconduct. What has become increasingly apparent is that even the most entrenched political organizations possess vulnerabilities arising directly from the mechanisms that make them powerful.
Indeed, their greatest strengths can become their greatest weaknesses. Money becomes evidence of illicit proceeds. Coordination becomes evidence of conspiracy. The suppression of information becomes obstruction of justice. Pressure exerted upon witnesses becomes intimidation. And seemingly isolated instances of corruption, examined collectively, may reveal an organized criminal enterprise.
This is the fundamental asymmetry of corruption: The organization that once derived its power from secrecy, coordination, and mutual protection may discover that those same characteristics expose its members to collective legal liability.
The same principle applies to the Trump administration. Its political strength has depended upon personal loyalty, narrative control, and institutional intimidation. Yet under rigorous scrutiny, these relationships may become sources of extraordinary vulnerability, and, as they say, there is no honor among thieves.
The congressional investigations Democrats can now initiate will not automatically restore the rule of law. But they present an opportunity to reconstruct the factual record, expose wrongdoing, and, where evidence warrants, pursue accountability.
The stakes extend considerably beyond Trump himself. The great danger of his presidency has been the normalization of a political culture in which truth is an inconvenience, justice an instrument of factional struggle, and public office an opportunity for private enrichment. These kinds of habits do not disappear when an election is lost.
Today, the American people have now delivered an important political verdict. What remains is the considerably more difficult task of recovering the moral and institutional foundations of our republic.
Yet we need only look around us to recognize that these political arrangements are neither invincible nor permanent. We have witnessed the defeat of the Bolsonaro political dynasty in Brazil, the collapse of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year hold on power in Hungary, Israel’s growing international isolation following its devastation of Gaza, and Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression.
These struggles are far from over, and their outcomes are by no means assured. But everywhere we look, political orders built upon intimidation, deception, and the presumption of impunity are encountering resistance.
While our friends around the world are disillusioned, sometimes even furious, with what Americans have permitted to happen in our name, I suspect that much of this anger comes from something deeper: a profound disappointment in what they know we are capable of becoming.
They expect more of us, and we should expect more of ourselves. Today, the American people have now delivered an important political verdict. What remains is the considerably more difficult task of recovering the moral and institutional foundations of our republic.
That requires more than defeating one man or one political party, but confronting the corruption that has flourished around us, restoring our relationship with truth, and remembering that self-government means we have a collective responsibility to maintain the rule of law. The opportunity is now ours, so we had better get our house in order.
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