SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
mass layoffs
Economic Populism Is the Key to Rust Belt Votes
A new study found that progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible.
Oct 08, 2025
Democrats know they have a problem with working-class voters but don’t agree on the cause. Commentators chalk Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss to high prices, an unusually short campaign cycle, or voter resentment against the possibility of having an African American woman as president. But the Democratic Party’s working-class woes have much deeper roots.
Many voters in key battleground states feel burned by decades of Democrats’ unrealized promises to improve the lives of working people, failure to reign in obscene economic inequality, and support for economically disastrous policies—from NAFTA to the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization—that led to the loss of countless jobs and futures in their states.
A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), with the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, uses a 3,000-person YouGov survey in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to test whether economic populism—tapping into resentment and insecurity from decades of corporate excess and bipartisan neglect—can win back voters who’ve turned away from the Democratic Party.
Let’s start with the good news. Economic populism is popular among Rust Belt voters—particularly when it explicitly calls out corporate greed and mass layoffs. Strong economic populism—as opposed to “populist-lite” messaging that acknowledges there are few bad apples in the otherwise healthy barrel of large corporations—was particularly popular among many of the groups Democrats have struggled to reach: working-class voters, voters without a four-year college degree, voters whose incomes are less than $50k per year, and Latino voters.
If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say.
But if economic populism is so popular, why did even the most stalwart Rust Belt economic populists—like former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown—struggle in 2024? The survey reveals that the Democratic Party label often drags the message underwater. When the very same populist message was delivered by a candidate labeled “Democrat” rather than “Independent,” support dropped by an average of 8.4 points—a gap that balloons into double digits in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, there’s no meaningful penalty. In races decided by a few points, that brand discount can prove decisive.
To identify the best path forward for economic populists, the survey next assessed Rust Belt voters’ top economic policy priorities. Across ideological lines, respondents prioritized policies framed around fairness, anti-corruption, and economic security. Proposals like capping prescription drug prices, stopping corporate price gouging, and reigning in political corruption were among the top priorities regardless of partisanship or class. Policies to raise taxes on the wealthy and expand access to good jobs also performed well.
A new proposal barring companies that take taxpayer money from laying off workers also polled surprisingly well—and held up under Republican attacks. The policy was popular even though respondents had never heard of it and it challenges corporations’ right to chase short-term profit at communities’ expense, putting it well outside the acceptable range of mainstream Democratic economic proposals. The policy directly channels Rust Belt communities’ resentment over decades of mass layoffs into a commonsense rule—“if you take from the public, you can’t harm the public”—while signaling a tougher, jobs-first stance than Democrats typically embrace.
Costly or abstract proposals—such as $1,000 monthly payments to all Americans or a trillion-dollar industrial policy for clean energy—as well as traditional conservative ideas like corporate tax cuts and deregulation ranked poorly overall, drawing only pockets of partisan support.
The survey results suggest two simultaneous paths to success for economic populists. In competitive districts where running as an Independent would do little beyond ensure Republican victory, a party hoping to win back the working class should rebuild the Democratic brand by running disciplined and bold economic populist campaigns around policies to reduce costs, create good jobs, and hold elites accountable. Candidates who show independence from donor-class priorities and build a track record as champions of working-class priorities can still make the “D” stand for something again.
In other contexts, however, economic populists should test independent campaigns—following the model of Nebraska’s 2024 Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. This should be strategic, targeting deep-red districts and states where running outside the Democratic Party won’t simply hand the race to Republicans, but there are many places where it could be viable. The study also finds majority support for creating an Independent Workers Political Association to back such efforts, with enthusiasm highest among non-college voters, young people, voters of color, and the economically insecure, and with meaningful support from Independents and Republicans as well.
In short, progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible. The most effective strategy is not mysterious: Speak plainly about who profits from layoffs and price gouging and focus obsessively on policies that put workers first. If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say. The path to victory in 2026 and beyond lies in giving voters a reason to believe that Democrats (and independent economic populists) have their backs while Republicans continue to cut workers’ benefits and do nothing to bring back jobs and dignity to long-suffering Rust Belt communities.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Progressives Organize 'Shutdown Showdown' to Defend Healthcare From Trump and GOP
"Republicans could end this Trump Shutdown today by passing a deal that averts the massive spike in healthcare costs," said a co-director of Indivisible. "They need to feel heat from their constituents."
Oct 02, 2025
Progressive activist groups and legislators have launched a new effort to pressure Congress to reach a deal to end the government shutdown that protects healthcare programs from brutal budget cuts.
The government officially shut down on Wednesday after Republicans refused Democrats' demands to reverse cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) spending from July's GOP megabill that, if allowed to go into effect, are expected to result in around 15 million Americans losing their health insurance coverage over the next decade.
On the first evening of the shutdown, over 18,000 people joined a conference call organized by a coalition of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, MoveOn, Working Families Power, and Indivisible. Also in attendance were Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and vice chair Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.).
"We know that we are already in a broken healthcare system in this nation," Frost told the thousands of attendees. "Not only do they not want to do anything to fix the problems we have, they are making it worse."
Video: MoveOn
"We want to reopen this shutdown government and restore healthcare back to the American people," Casar said. "But House Republicans are nowhere to be found. I'm here in Washington, DC, and those House Republicans fled on vacation."
The hosts urged attendees to call their Republican senators and make them aware of their responsibility for the shutdown and the loss of healthcare that millions of their constituents may soon face.
They also singled out certain Senate Democrats, such as Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (Nev.), who voted to advance the GOP's continuing resolution despite the lack of benefits on healthcare, for "siding with [President] Donald Trump."
"We can do this," said movement organizer Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson. "We can put the pressure on that forces the Democratic Party to have a backbone and the Republicans to prioritize people over profit."
The groups have dozens of events planned over the coming days as part of what they have called the "Shutdown Showdown" campaign, including rallies and demonstrations outside the offices of Republican lawmakers.
“Trump and congressional Republicans control a federal government trifecta; they are responsible for ending the shutdown," said Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible. "We don’t know how long this shutdown is going to last."
He said Republicans "need to feel heat from their constituents to actually sit down and negotiate with the Democrats. That’s where we come in.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Ideology of Artificial Intelligence
The AI hype is essentially propaganda, the main purpose of which is to accelerate layoffs, to fuel financial speculation, and to divert investment and resources toward a new jump into the abyss by economic and political elites.
Jul 29, 2025
Models of computerization and automation have been developed for over 80 years. A certain sense of the healthy embarrassment led most people involved in these researches to avoid calling it "Artificial Intelligence." In keeping with the spirit of our times, the new techlords Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos have poured hundreds of millions into social media, academia, and the press to promote the "Artificial Intelligence" hype and normalize this expression. But their ideological project is not innovative.
AI refers mainly to text synthesis machines (and to a lesser extent, image and pattern analysis and classification machines for "autonomous" cars and deepfakes). These machines are incapable of producing new information; they don't "think" about what they're writing, using only the probability of what will be written next, according to the databases they've been programmed with. As such, there is no imminent awareness or a new entity that wants to destroy us like James Cameron's Terminator. The AI hype is essentially propaganda, the main purpose of which is to accelerate layoffs, to fuel financial speculation, and to divert investment and resources toward a new jump into the abyss by economic and political elites.
AI's main appeal for the general public isn't even the probabilities that build generally coherent texts and lists, but the language enhancement phase, a new coat of paint that produces an almost human language. They call it "Artificial Intelligence," but the real name is Large Language Model. The most famous models are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and MechaHitler (Grok).
Considering the disastrous state of information on the internet today, language models are already suffering from a kind of Mad Cow Disease. Just as cows in the 1990s got sick from being fed bone meal and meat from other cows, so language models are degenerating as they are programmed based on data from the internet, where there is already so much data produced by other language models, in particular ChatGPT, that errors can swell to the point of incomprehensibility. Just as Mad Cow Disease contaminated humans, AI is definitely contaminating us.
The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at the expense of those who work.
The promises that the techlords and politicians who have joined the AI hype have for us are generally false—the good as well as the bad. Language models are not going to end humanity or replace essential tasks in societies and do away with useless work. They are actually creating precarious, underpaid, and hidden work, among other things for the people who have to check that the answers given by the models are in polite language and not like Elon Musk's MechaHitler calling for Jewish genocides and mass rapes. This in no way means that there aren't already millions of people being fired in the hype that ChatGPT or another language model may eventually replace them. In many cases people are then rehired for less pay afterward.
Today's language models don't produce knowledge beyond what is already inside the databases that programmed them. We hear climate deniers claim that language models will solve the climate crisis, but this is redundant. Models based on scientific texts and decades of climate negotiations know how to solve the climate crisis, which has been public knowledge for decades—we need to end the fossil industry in the very short term so solve the climate crisis. Anything else is the ideology of collapse that has been embraced by capitalists. Models based on pseudoscience and random content taken from the internet will spew out garbage in response to any prompt. If what goes into the programming of the models is bad, what comes out can only be bad. So, the point is not that an AI will become too intelligent and wipes us out, the point is that there is no intelligence involved.
But this hasn't prevented language models from being used widely, with unknown and private algorithms, managing huge amounts of data. It is guaranteed that there will be misinterpretations of data and requests that will cause irreparable damage (in health, in criminal data, in energy systems, in the allocation of social benefits, as has already happened in several countries). There will be no one to blame for the consequences, as the billionaires who spread AI outsource their responsibility for all this with the backing of the political elites.
The dissemination of language models on a large scale corresponds to an ideological project of the technolords, selling the idea that humans are just organic versions of computers, reduced strictly to what they can produce. In capitalism, the main promise of AI is the abstract possibility of making a series of jobs redundant or unnecessary. The point is not even to make them redundant or unnecessary, but simply to create the illusion that they can open the door to laying off millions, without even having to prove how AI would replace those people. It's the eternal return to "increasing productivity," replacing labor with technology in theory. To install this ideological project on a large scale, widespread data theft and the end of privacy would have to be normalized, with surveillance systems and permanent punishment for the poorest. This has nothing to do with a great technological advance or any global awareness nonsense. The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at the expense of those who work.
The scale of the ideological project based on "Artificial Intelligence" is catastrophic: firing hundreds of millions of people working in health, education, justice, science, art, public services, and the press with the vague promise of automation to substitute their work. This ideological project would also entail a massive expansion of data centers and network infrastructure, skyrocketing energy and material needs in the midst of the climate crisis. Techlords and the deluded politicians who support them care little if AI language models fail to replace most of the jobs they have already started to destroy. The techlords' doctors will still be people, just like their teachers, lawyers, and information services. For most of the world's population, what could be expected from such a project is more poverty and an incomparable degradation of any public and private services, handed over to automated parrots built with databases contaminated by other automated parrots.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular