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Chin Up: The Left Has a Bright Future
We can safely predict that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is doomed. What comes next for progressives and working-class politics will be much more interesting than what we've suffered over recent decades.
Jul 07, 2026
Historically, periods of widespread economic suffering have often seen a surge of left-wing organizing, and even notable victories. In 1789, desperation among the peasantry and urban working class helped catalyze the French Revolution. The 1880s and 1890s in the United States saw the Farmers’ Alliances and the People’s Party sweep the interior of the country, in a vast movement to overcome the exploitation and poverty of farmers and workers. During World War I, the miseries of the Russian peasantry and industrial proletariat provided the context for the overthrow of Tsardom and then, months later, the overthrow of an ineffectual parliamentary government. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw, in the US, the birth of the welfare state and the triumph of industrial unionism.
It is no surprise, then, that the suffering of a large proportion of Americans today is helping to bring forth a new left, which has lately been seeing electoral and policy victories. In just over a year, Zohran Mamdani has become a figure with national name-recognition, but it might not be long before more people have heard of Chris Rabb, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in Pennsylvania who is headed to Congress this year; Janeese Lewis George, a DSA member who is set to become mayor of Washington, DC.; Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez, New York leftists entering Congress; Nithya Raman, a socialist who might be the next mayor of Los Angeles; Melat Kiros, a socialist from Colorado who won her primary; Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist who may soon be the newest senator from Michigan; and others.
There isn’t anything like a French Revolution or a Russian Revolution on the horizon, but in the coming years, as the American economy continues to leave working people behind, it is certain that we’ll see more left-wing victories. By the 2030s, the stagnant center will be in dire condition, faced with a well-funded far-right and a left stronger than at any point since the 1960s.
What are the economic trends that forecast such an outcome? Some of them are almost universally acknowledged. Most obviously, inequality continues to skyrocket. Even before Elon Musk became a trillionaire—a fact, incidentally, that itself proves the insanity of American capitalism—the top 1% of American households owned 32% of all US wealth, about equal to the bottom 90% combined. America’s billionaires own more than $8 trillion. The income of the richest 1% averages to more than 100 times that of the bottom 20%. It is hardly surprising, then, that among peer countries, the US has the highest rate of poverty, the highest rate of infant mortality, and the second lowest life expectancy. Nor is it a surprise that a majority of Americans think a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, or that less than half of families were able to afford medical expenses in 2025.
The picture is clear. There are good reasons that Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist, is consistently one of the most popular politicians in the country. Mainstream liberal commentators fret that running leftist candidates may cost the Democratic Party votes, but such commentators are evidently far out of touch with voter sentiment. According to polls, three quarters of Americans think the country’s political and economic system needs major changes. The Democratic Party is viewed unfavorably by 59% of adults (not much different from the Republican Party’s 58%). Chuck Schumer, a veritable symbol of the centrist status quo, is disliked by 68% of voters. Left priorities like Medicare for All, a substantially higher minimum wage, strengthening unions, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increasing affordable housing, doing more to protect the environment, and cutting the military budget regularly poll well.
Far from the left’s ascendancy being a threat to the Democratic Party’s power, it is more plausibly seen as the best way to save the party. From Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders, populism, especially economic populism, is popular. It is a little odd, therefore, to see a party’s leadership consistently doing everything it can to harm its own electoral prospects, by trying to crush populist insurgents and suppress a populist message.
Longer-term trends, too, look good for the left. It isn’t often enough remarked that the US is in many respects in a situation comparable to that of the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression. The soaring inequality is one parallel, as is the soaring stock market. It has become commonplace to observe that the AI boom has features of a bubble. Another parallel is the extreme weakness of organized labor both today and in the late 1920s. Actually, the union membership rate in the private sector today, 6%, is even lower than it was in 1929, about 10%. The weakness of unions has contributed mightily to the stagnation or decline of wages among the working class, and thus to the low purchasing power of consumers. In the 1920s, a huge expansion of consumer credit, such as installment buying, was necessary to maintain the economy’s rate of growth, because millions of people simply weren’t making enough money to buy the things they wanted. Today, likewise, total household debt is at a record level, over $18 trillion.
In fact, the top 10% of earners now account for half of consumer spending—which is reminiscent of the late 1920s. The economy, therefore, faces serious problems of aggregate demand. Altogether, these are ominous tendencies. Particularly because one of the major priorities of the Trump administration has been to accelerate the transfer of money from working people to the rich, thus further shrinking aggregate demand in the long run. One method of doing so has been to reduce taxes on the wealthy while increasing them on the lowest-income households. Another has been to slash the social safety net, for example SNAP and Medicaid benefits, which causes low-income households to cut back on their spending. Attacking unions and laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers has been a third way Trump is harming the prospects of sustained economic growth. And the list goes on.
In short, it is virtually certain that in the not-too-distant future, very hard times are coming. Such times, of course, provide an ideal opportunity for left organizing and left politics. Millions of people will get “mad as hell” and they “won’t take it anymore.” A populism of class struggle will rise to the fore again, since it will resonate with people’s experiences and grievances. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats will continue to cultivate a new generation of left leaders, doubtless with ever-greater success. Far-right populism will probably see victories too, and it’s impossible to predict how the conflicts between left populism and right populism will play out.
But what we can predict is that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is doomed. The era of Clintonite centrism is passing, at long last. The future is much more interesting than that.
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Trump Is Acting Like Senator Joe McCarthy on Steroids
Trump is just following in McCarthy’s footsteps by launching his latest BIG LIE yet to firm up his shrinking base of Trumpy MAGA voters: that rising Democratic Socialists are the greatest threat to America.
Jul 05, 2026
After progressives, including self-described Democratic Socialists, won numerous primary victories in New York and elsewhere, President Donald Trump launched a whopper of a lie, even by his crazed standards. He declared that the “communist” Democratic Socialists are “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding…. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.” This comes after his November 2025 White House meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, where Trump praised Mamdani strongly, saying they would work together to make a better New York City.
Trump is singing a different tune now. He is like Senator Joe McCarthy on steroids, who in the 1950s smeared political opponents, activists, and others, falsely accusing them of being communists. Snarling Joe then maliciously exploited the post-war fear of the Soviet Union. Today, Trump is just following in McCarthy’s footsteps by launching his latest BIG LIE yet to firm up his shrinking base of Trumpy MAGA voters.
Look for Trump, an authentic fascist, to dittohead himself on his “communist” tirade. He knows that the pro-Israel, corporate Democrats are distancing themselves from the rising new progressive candidates who, if they’re smart, will make populist domestic demands that are heavily favored in the polls.
These Democratic candidates should push for a much higher minimum wage than the present frozen federal minimum of $7.25 per hour; full Medicare for All; restore corporate and super-wealthy taxation to the levels of the prosperous 60s; crack down on corporate crimes against consumers, workers, and the environment; and adopt the long-time Western European social safety net of childcare, paid worker and family sick leave, and paid vacations. A real child tax credit would cut child poverty nearly in half and would benefit over 60 million children. They should raise the Social Security taxes on upper-income people to pay for raising Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years.
Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.
Candidates should push to cut the bloated military budget, end hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, and direct the savings to public works and safety net services in the community, USA.
These changes have substantial left-right voter support because they are concrete improvements for all families who need and deserve such social benefit returns from the tax dollars they send to Washington.
There are other left-right supported reforms, such as public funding of campaigns; ending the gross, corrupt selling of our elections to the highest toxic profiteering bidders; ending military arms shipments to countries that violate human rights (already federal law but unenforced); and stopping Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, committed with US weapons and unconditional political backing, which violates five federal laws.
All these measures should be integrated into a heavily publicized “Contract for the American People” and turned into a daily vocal call for a commitment to this agenda by these candidates. The class message is that corporations, all created by government charters, should be our servants, not our masters, as the Kleptocratic Trump regime continues to balloon the Trump Dump.
Bolstered by support of such concrete commitments, Trump’s “communist bellowing” will look ridiculous and will be ripe for the sharpest of counterattacks, dragging the GOP’s wreckage out into the open by comparison. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Republicans will be hoisted by their own petard.
The real hurdle to this “Contract for the American People” are the corporate Democrats—indentured to the same Wall Street crowd and military-industrial Empire of war and vast profits. The chief corporate Democrats are the party’s leaders—Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. When asked by a reporter about impeaching Trump (the cruel, corrupt, violent, America-wrecking outlaw, using the White House as corporate-occupied territory to enrich himself), Jeffries replied, “I don’t want to get out ahead of that discussion.” What about getting ahead of Trump’s daily despicable efforts to destroy our democracy and wrecking America?
How about just representing the vast majority of the Democratic voters and about 60% of all polled Americans who think Trump is “a dangerous dictator” and want him impeached and removed from office?
Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.
If Trump does not steal the election with his many voter suppressions, redistricting, and other attempted usurpations of state election controls, he’ll work to paralyze a Democratic-run Congress. Jeffries and Schumer, to preserve their leadership, are susceptible to not rocking the boat and not fiercely rolling back all the Republican Party’s devastating enactments since January 20, 2025.
Let’s see if the incumbent and newly elected progressives know how NOT to marginalize themselves by pushing distractingly marginal ideas instead of showing just how popular the above components of this proposed Contract for the American People are with the voters.
These challenges should also focus on the growing drive for Impeachment around the country, which both Trump, Jeffries, and Schumer oppose (The Hill reports neither Jeffries nor Schumer have endorsed any of the removal efforts)—the latter two enforcing a “Now is not the time” policy. What smug insensitivity to the fears of millions of Americans hurting from Trump’s cruel decrees every day and night NOW!
Jeffries and Schumer are creating their own Achilles heels for emboldening their progressive Democrats to move to replace them in January 2027.
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So-Called 'Moderate' Democrats Must Stop Parroting Trump's Red-Scare Rhetoric
There is simply no reason for the corporate Democratic establishment to be doing the right-wing's work for them.
Jul 01, 2026
President Donald Trump used red-scare rhetoric to denounce the progressive winners in New York's Democratic primary last week as "godless communists." Rather than explaining that the progressives are not communists in the vein of the Soviet Union or communist China but social democrats in the vein of Scandinavia, a group of so-called "moderate" Democratic politicians piled on to Trump's red-baiting.
Two days after the primaries, this group of 15 corporate Democrats (let's just call them what they are) attacked the winning Democrats in an open letter drafted by Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York proclaiming, "we are capitalist, not socialist." In an interview with the New York Times, Suozzi added “that message from Tuesday is not the message that I embrace.”
It's one thing for corporate Democrats and progressive Democrats to debate policy differences between them during primaries. But once Democratic voters have chosen their primary winners, it's destructive to continue to attack the winners as some kind of semi-commies. The right-wing will do plenty of that. If they want to win a majority, Democrats shouldn't be piling on. (I would add that after the primaries and before the general election, progressives shouldn't be ideologically attacking moderate Democratic nominees as corporate dupes, either.)
It's ignorant and deceptive for moderate Democrats to declare they are "capitalist." What do they mean by "capitalist" anyway? The US, like every developed democracy, is a mix of capitalist and socialist. Are the "moderates" opposed to such "socialist" policies as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, free public education, anti-trust enforcement, and environmental regulation? If they are, they should say so. If they're not, they should stop declaring themselves as "capitalists" and denouncing "socialism."
Indeed, the Bernie Sanders-styled "democratic socialists" are not really socialists at all. They do not call for government ownership of the means of production. They are, as they largely identify, social democrats in the vein of Scandinavian countries and Democratic hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In a recent email to his supporters, Sanders wrote: "Today, we have unprecedented income and wealth inequality with the rich getting much richer while working families struggle to survive. We have a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaires to buy elections and undermine our democracy. Our health care system is broken and wildly expensive. We have a major housing crisis with 800,000 homeless and millions of families spending half their incomes or more on housing. People are deeply worried about the impact that AI and robotics will have on their lives."
What part of this message do "moderates" like Suozzi think Democrats should not "embrace"? Are they opposed to Medicare for All, higher taxes on billionaires, strong anti-trust enforcement, and tough environmental regulations? If they oppose such progressive policies, then should have the courage to say so and propose what they consider to be more "capitalist" policies. It they can't do that, then they should stop their red-baiting rhetoric which only helps MAGA.
Brad Lander, a self-described democratic socialist who beat self-described "moderate" Dan Goldman in the New York primary and will almost certainly be going to Congress, said that he hoped Democrats would “spend more time building a unified Democratic message” than on “factional infighting.” Lander made clear that voters "want to see people who fight harder for working families. And that should unify the Democratic Party."
"That’s not progressives versus moderates," added Lander. "That’s fighters versus folders.”
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Donald Trump Is the Biggest Failure in Recent US History
At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term.
Jun 30, 2026
Donald Trump is the biggest failure in recent US presidential history. With the nation’s 250th birthday coming up, here’s a quick comparison to other US leaders.
He single-handedly tanked the economy with high prices resulting from tariffs and the Iran War. Trump’s defunding government agencies and scientific research, along with hyperinflation, has created an impossible job market (the uptick of unemployment nearly one percentage point over the past few years obfuscates the real job market). He has also gone after a national core value, democracy, attacking free speech whether in libraries, education, or protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a clear symbol of his failed leadership: Trump tried to turn it blue for July 4th, but instead it became green with algae.
While LBJ oversaw an immoral, ruthless, and ultimately failed war in Vietnam, at least he passed civil rights legislation and poverty-reducing Great Society policies.
George W. Bush undertook a reckless war against Iraq; although unjust, one of the main objectives—to overthrow Saddam Hussein—was met, even if afterwards creating a liberal democracy failed miserably and, ultimately, led to ISIS ruling across swathes of the Middle East. Domestically, Bush governed during a recession in his first term that resulted from the dot-com bubble bursting, but he did not fundamentally attack the democratic core of United States, although the Patriot Act presaged the Trump era.
Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising.
Joe Biden oversaw the post-Covid period during which inflation costs, which rose under Trump I during the pandemic, continued to rise because of international supply chain bottlenecks and the Ukraine War. He also gave the green light to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a policy that Trump continued during his second term. However, Biden’s domestic policies and legislation included the forgiveness of student loan debt, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the latter of which included the largest investment in clean energy in US history.
Ronald Reagan conducted covert wars against Latin American governments and his neoliberal policies ultimately helped lead to Trump. However, his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty were instrumental in leading to the end of the Cold War.
Barack Obama, like Reagan, got into his own covert wars, through supporting Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War and expanding drone strikes. He also was responsible for creating chaos after his “leading from behind” regime change war against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Yet, domestically, he passed Obamacare, which led to an additional 17 million Americans having health insurance. He also helped pull the economy out of the Great Recession.
President Bill Clinton, a scandal-plagued presidency during the pre-9/11 era, oversaw a healthy economy, but represented the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism and “tough on crime,” “super predator” policies. While flawed and foreshadowing what was to come, he would not be considered a failed president.
Jimmy Carter, a leader during stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis, has been perceived as a failed president. While his handling of each problem could have been improved, he did not create stagflation, which came about from a mix of high oil prices and the Fed’s stimulative economic policies. His offering asylum and medical treatment for the last shah of Iran in the US was in line with US imperial policy. Despite his crimes against the Iranian people and the new Iranian government’s demand that he be returned to Iran to receive justice, Carter refused.
Lastly, Richard Nixon, the most corrupt recent American leader before Trump, authorized the burglary to increase his chances of winning reelection and, after a cove-rup, resigned in shame. He also expanded the failed Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos, though he had campaigned on ending the conflict. Yet, he created the Environmental Protection Agency and reestablished ties with China, though to do so turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s genocide against a nascent Bangladesh. Nixon did attempt to curtail democracy but nowhere near as systematically as Donald Trump has during his second term.
At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term. While campaigning to end both inflation and the Ukraine War, he has not ended the war and caused prices to skyrocket thanks to his tariffs and his immoral and illegal war against Iran. He has redirected taxpayer money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the US Agency for International Development (predicted to cause the deaths of 4.5 million children under 5 years old), and scientific and medical research to fund tax cuts for billionaires, expand the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by a factor of nine, and now seeks $1.5 trillion in Department of Defense funding (that’s $10K a year per taxpayer if divided evenly).
His Iran War caused about 3,500 Iranian deaths and 4,300 Lebanese deaths. While the US and Iran have a ceasefire, Israel isn’t abiding by it. As of this writing, Trump is still threatening the complete destruction of Iran, which is not ideal if you are honestly negotiating for peace.
From a US imperial perspective, the war has failed on every front: The Iranian regime is more powerful than ever; the Iranian population has largely gotten behind its government during the war; Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz now; Iran acts as a check on Israeli use of force in Lebanon; and the US bases, from which American forces retreated from during the fighting, may be closed in the Gulf countries and move to Israel. For those who relish in military victories, it is a loss for America.
Donald Trump may be up there as the biggest loser in history, but for now, it’s safe to say that he is the biggest failure in recent American presidential history.
There is an upside to utter failure though. While establishment Democrats have offered tepid criticism against Trump’s authoritarianism and immoral wars, progressives have made headway whether it’s the Mamdani-backed progressives winning their primaries in New York, Graham Platner winning the primary in Maine, or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)'s use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza. Even Tucker Carlson has condemned his past Islamophobia and vociferously condemns the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the decimation of southern Lebanon and Beirut.
Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising. Anti-Trump protests have broken record numbers and anti-ICE demonstrations at places like Delaney Hall are pushing back as strong as ever.
Surely, just before the 250th anniversary of the US, these are things worth celebrating.
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The Uncomfortable Progressive Case for Tom Steyer
Despite being a billionaire himself, Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.
Jun 02, 2026
California voters are clearly hungry for change. The real question now is whether Democrats are willing to confront the corporate interests and entrenched systems standing in the way of it.
That is one reason a growing number of progressives, labor organizers, climate activists, and anti-corporate advocates are rallying behind Tom Steyer despite longstanding discomfort with billionaire politics.
At first glance, that coalition can feel contradictory. Progressives have spent years warning, correctly, about the dangers of concentrated wealth and billionaire influence in American politics. Many still believe that billionaires should not exist in a healthy democracy.
So why are so many anti-corporate organizers increasingly rallying behind one now?
The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.
Because politics is ultimately about conflict. It is about who is willing to challenge concentrated power, which interests candidates are willing to confront, and whether they are prepared to pursue structural change instead of simply managing decline.
The question is not whether someone benefited from broken systems. The question is whether they are willing to confront the systems that produced their own power in the first place.
And increasingly, Tom Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.
That matters because California is not entering a traditional election environment.
Recent polling suggests Xavier Becerra is increasingly likely to secure one of the two spots in California's top-two primary. Whether voters like it or not, that reality changes the strategic conversation.
At a moment when voters are demanding structural change, Becerra increasingly represents continuity politics. He has struggled to articulate a meaningful critique of the status quo or explain what he would fundamentally do differently than Gavin Newsom.
The question facing many progressive voters is no longer simply which candidate they prefer. It is whether a candidate willing to challenge concentrated power, monopoly interests, and entrenched systems will make it into the general election at all.
That matters because Steve Hilton is running aggressively as an anti-establishment change candidate. If Democrats allow this race to become a contest between a candidate associated with continuity and a Republican claiming the mantle of disruption, they risk ceding the language of change to the right.
You cannot defeat a change candidate with a status quo candidate.
You need a competing change agent.
Steyer is increasingly positioning himself as one.
What makes this politically significant is not simply that he uses progressive rhetoric. Plenty of candidates do that. What matters is that he is embracing policies that directly confront concentrated wealth and monopoly power, including support for single-payer healthcare, a billionaire tax, breaking up utility monopolies, lowering energy costs, expanding public education, and building affordable housing at scale.
Those are not symbolic positions. They are direct challenges to entrenched systems of political and economic power.
And increasingly, many progressives believe the clearest indicator of that conflict is not who Steyer is. It is who is lining up against him.
When utility monopolies, fossil fuel interests, anti-tax billionaires, and major corporations begin mobilizing against the same candidate, voters should pay attention.
That does not mean progressives suddenly agree with everything about Tom Steyer or billionaire politics generally. It means many recognize that political alignment matters more than biography alone.
The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.
For many progressives, supporting Steyer is not about abandoning skepticism toward wealth or power. It is about recognizing that in moments of deep public frustration, the most important political question becomes who is actually willing to confront the forces making life increasingly unaffordable, unstable, and unequal.
That is the uncomfortable reality reshaping this race.
The question facing California voters is no longer whether the state needs change.
It is whether a candidate willing to fight for that change will still be standing when the general election begins.
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California’s Choice: The Progressive Path or Centrist Stagnation
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot.
Jun 02, 2026
Within national mythology, California is understood to be a progressive haven—with a ruling Democratic Party passing strong regulations, ever-higher taxes on the wealthy, and supporting unions to its heart’s desire.
Unfortunately, this is far from accurate. The Democratic Party may dominate California politics, but the wealthiest state in the union no longer leads the way with innovative laws and regulations, let alone serving the interests of working people, the poor, and the middle class.
Yes, California still has a progressive income tax, the nation’s highest gas taxes, relatively strong environmental regulations, and the world’s greatest public university system—but these are legacies of bygone eras. The story of the last 20 years of single-party Democratic rule is far less inspiring (unless you’re a Silicon Valley oligarch).
Now, as progressives are making significant gains across the country, revitalizing the Democratic Party in the process, the California party remains dominated by a caste of perennial incumbents committed to neoliberal centrism that, at best, generates incremental change.
Rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Once Democrats started winning supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, corporations and big money interests stopped wasting their time courting Republicans. They focused their lobbying on Democrats, and to great effect. California’s Democratic Party, and its leading figures, are more beholden to big business and wealthy donors than almost any state Democratic Party. This, in turn, means Democratic incumbents accrue huge campaign war chests for their re-election.
The result is a more conservative party, one that is out of sync with the electorate. Want evidence? Ask yourself how many members of the Squad have come from California? The answer, of course, is zero. Yet all public opinion polling shows that the California electorate is decisively more progressive than the national average.
It’s true that Reps. Ro Khanna and Lateefah Simon are Squad adjacent, and a few others are solid progressives—but given that California represents about 20% of the Democratic Caucus in the US House, the state’s delegation is on balance middle-of-the-road.
This disconnect—between the political beliefs of Californians and the policies supported by their elected representatives at the national, state, and even local levels—is a major barrier to the necessary transformation of the Democratic Party into a force able to vanquish the fascist-authoritarian GOP before it consolidates power and brings down the curtain on American democracy.
Simply put, the American public increasingly understands that the status quo ante of neoliberal policy, which has organized the country’s economy since the 1980s, produces one result: ever-increasing wealth inequality. The Democratic Party must break from the economics of the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic base and the general public want policies that boost the lives of working Americans, just as they want a sane foreign policy and an honest democracy. They want progressive policies.
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot. This will transform the largest state Democratic Party, bringing it back in sync with the sentiment of the state’s population so that it can lead in the development of a new 21st century social justice compact.
There are many progressive champions with a real chance of victory today—and in the general election runoff on November 3. To start, there is a clear choice at the top of the ticket: Tom Steyer for governor.
Steyer is one of three viable candidates, two of which will make the runoff. In the best circumstance, the two democrats, Steyer and Xaiver Beccera, will take first and second—a result that will translate into more Democratic victories across the state in November. However, MAGA-supporting Republican Steve Hilton still looks likely to disrupt that result. So, it’s essential to vote, and get everyone you know to vote for Steyer by 8:00 pm PT today.
Admittedly, it sticks in the throat to be supporting a billionaire, but the simple truth is that Steyer will pursue a transformative progressive policy agenda. In contrast, Xavier Beccera, who 20 years ago seemed a sincere progressive, long ago redefined himself as an establishment Democrat. Becerra is committed to maintaining Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies that have left California stranded with the nation’s co-equal highest poverty rate, an affordability crisis that makes New York City residents blush, and a pronounced failure to lead on environmental and social policies in the manner the world expects of California.
Tom Steyer, by contrast, supports a billionaire’s tax, meaningful living wage legislation, aggressive incentives to re-boost green energy production (and film production too), and, most tellingly, a single-payer universal healthcare system for everyone in the state. A top-two finish by Steyer will guarantee a powerful debate about the direction of the state over the next five months
Beyond the governor’s race, in nearly every US house district, state assembly, and senate race, and significant city and local elections, there are strong progressive candidates challenging the dominant California Democratic Party mainstream—many of whom are poised to advance to the November runoff. Still, it’s worth noting that this has been a very confusing election season due to redistricting (and the chaos of the governor’s race), such that down-ballot candidates have had a difficult time attracting adequate attention. But rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment. Please do the necessary research to learn who the progressives are in your district.
So far, it’s been a very good year for progressives—let’s continue the momentum tomorrow in New Jersey, Montana, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, and the largest state and soon-to-be truest bastion of progressive public policy, California.
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The Dems Must Adapt an Aggressive, Progressive Midterm Strategy
Despite positioning itself to the conservative center of the political spectrum in recent decades, the Democratic Party can yet build on its members' near universal call for a more muscular confrontation with Republicans and Trump.
May 25, 2026
The Democrat's 2026 midterm electoral strategy remains essentially the same as it was during the melted-down 2024 presidential election: Focus on President Donald Trump's obvious character flaws and failings rather than highlight the critical issues and offer progressive alternatives. Waiting for Trump to shoot himself in the foot is not a winning campaign strategy. Neither are abstract ideas about defending democracy and saving the nation from autocracy or fascism. Voters want practical approaches to everyday challenges of rising food costs, prohibitively expensive and inadequate health insurance, skyrocketing medical costs, exorbitant childcare and pre-K expenses, and spiraling energy pricing.
Since the last quarter of the 20th century, establishment Democrats and their leaders have slid so far to the political right that progressive, populist initiatives are undermined by fear of taxes and debt. The Democratic Party has allowed conservatives to label it as a party of spendthrift liberals and radical leftists rather than actually embracing a progressive agenda offering optimistic, creative, and constructive alternatives to the conservatives' agenda favoring the wealthy and corporations. Due to its conservative turn, moreover, Democratic leadership is decidedly reluctant to back progressive and politically aggressive Democratic candidates, as seen in the candidacies of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Graham Platner in Maine.
The political table has been so tilted toward conservative goals that the survival of the Democratic Party and popular elections itself are clearly threatened. Gerrymandering, opposing mail-in ballots, requiring stricter voter identification, confiscating state voting records and increasing the presence of security forces at polls are among the voter suppression tactics that conservatives are employing to rig the midterm and other future elections. The use of the military to confiscate ballots in the upcoming midterm elections is far from out of the question. Financing independent candidates to siphon off votes from Democratic ones is another ploy to be expected. To counter these anti-democratic tactics, Democrats must frame these challenges in practical personal terms—as corrupt means to prevent citizens from influencing policy, as ways to deny such popular initiatives as universal healthcare and control over other cost-of-living expenses. Complaining about the threat to democracy simply isn't concrete and personal enough.
Absent vociferous opposition to the conservative direction in international affairs, the Democrats also cede this critical ground to Republicans. This effectively facilitates the displacement of diplomacy by militarism as the principal approach to resolving global issues and conflicts. Without alerting and educating the American public to its profound and eminently dangerous military, political, and economic implications, the Democrats' influence here is essentially neutered. The present conflicts in the Middle East illustrate this point. Despite expressed public concern for supplying Israel with the munitions used against Palestinians in Gaza, the Democrats demurred from leveraging the removal of military support to promote a ceasefire and negotiated settlement. Neither did the party bring to the public's attention the US abandoning diplomatic negotiations with Iran in February, negotiations that were reportedly making progress on nuclear energy concerns. The combination of unrestricted military aid and disingenuous diplomacy fueled a regional war. This is a reality that must be made emphatically clear to American citizens.
Running against a personality cult and election rigging without offering hope for a better future through specific, concrete policy commitments effectively puts Democrats on the defensive and abandons the progressive populist movement in its own party.
Despite positioning itself to the conservative center of the political spectrum in recent decades, the Democratic Party can yet build on its members' near universal call for a more muscular confrontation with Republicans and Trump. One starting point is massive military spending. The disastrous domestic and global effects of US military campaigns and overall defense spending present Democrats with a historic political opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity the party must immediately take the offensive by highlighting the deleterious impact of unparalleled military expenditures. This campaign strategy can unfold in specific ways, drawing into high relief the connection between allocating vast resources away from social programs into military coffers.
First, levels of defense spending are inversely, and critically, correlated with spending for services that profoundly impact the quality of life of the vast majority of Americans. The proposed $1.5 trillion military expenditure for 2027—a 44% increase over 2026 and more than half of the total government budget—sequesters funding that could be used for domestic purposes, programs ranging from education, public health, housing, transportation, and social services to agriculture, science, and environmental protection. This comparison highlights the distorted priorities of the nation and directly relates to the jaundiced attitude toward the federal government and the disaffection of large swaths of American voters. It further counters the impact of disinformation and misinformation that aggravate divisions and suspicions fueled by negative propaganda and conspiracy rhetoric promoted by the Trump administration.
Second, heavy defense spending and military confrontation and conflict contribute to global economic and political instability beyond the devastating human suffering inflicted by military tactics and war. This course blazes a treacherous path that violates human rights and international law, fraying alliances and degrading the country's respect and reputation internationally. The escalation of military exchanges and strategies that Iran and the US are pursuing in the Strait of Hormuz signify not only the destructive international impact but also the extensive domestic economic stress it thrusts on Americans. The price of gasoline and its broad inflationary effect are prime examples. Defense spending drives up national debt with minimal social benefit. While military expenditure does provide jobs in the defense industry, a portion of savings resulting from limiting military spending can be used to retrain displaced workers for new high-paying employment in renewable energy and other industries the government could incentivize, industries where workers and their unions could be protected by statutory law.
Third, and amply illustrated by the militarized standoff in the Gulf of Hormuz, the Iran War is strengthening American economic competitors while splintering alliances with nations now losing confidence in US military and commercial relations. Fearful of the impulsive, unreliable posturing and military aggression of the Trump administration, countries in various regions of the world are forging commercial relations with China. Moreover, Beijing's massive investment in improving and producing renewable energy and its delivery—a strategic market position the current administration and its congressional supporters have ceded to the Chinese—is a wise and calculated enterprise. This investment displaces future scientific, technological, and commercial development in this country, further restricting employment and scientific investment in a growing sustainable energy source. At the same time, the progressive shift from oil and gas to renewable fuels may redirect international finance based in Wall Street to direct and indirect investment in economic expansion in China and in parts of the world that adopt and eventually depend on Chinese technology.
Last, the enormous investment in defense is not justified relative to defense spending worldwide. The US spends more on defense than the next six countries combined—three times as much as China and five times as much as Russia. With an over 40% boost in next year's military budget the disparity in military expenditures will even widen the military spending gap between America and other countries. Given the many social needs in this country and the military's aggressive engagement in projecting its power, enormous resources heedlessly dedicated to the military undermines quality of life across the nation and is simply unsustainable. Favoring diplomacy over military action, moreover, brings greater stability to international relations, reduces unnecessary military expenditures, and, in turn, can redirect funds to investment in international commercial relations to spur sustainable domestic economic growth.
As this brief examination of America's misplaced priorities demonstrates, the Democrats not only have clear opportunities to undermine the false narratives of the present administration and its supporters, they also have the public responsibility to do so. A similarly focused, analytical, and expansive argument may be made with tax cuts for the wealthy, with the severe personnel reductions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and elsewhere, and with myriad other issues. These campaign arguments should be, moreover, framed as national security threats.
Squandering such a political opportunity and advantage will weaken the party overall. It further undercuts the groundwork laid by local party members—through demonstrations and campaigns to increase voter turnout—by ignoring local calls for a more aggressive campaign strategy that directly challenges Republicans and offers sustainable social, economic, and environmental policies.
The party should not wait for a wave of nationalism to be ginned up in the wake of a specious “deal” with Iran or for an “October surprise” like the sudden discovery of funds to help pay Americans' medical bills. Running against a personality cult and election rigging without offering hope for a better future through specific, concrete policy commitments effectively puts Democrats on the defensive and abandons the progressive populist movement in its own party, sacrificing forward-thinking and future planning to backward-thinking and complacency. This is a losing proposition in the short-term and long-term future. It not only erodes the power of the vote but it will also alienate millions more Americans at a time when creative, constructive leadership and citizen engagement are imperative to meet the existential social, economic, and ecological challenges of the coming years and decades.
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'Hondurasgate': A Symptom of Deeper Crises in Honduras and a Warning for Latin America
If no-holds-barred measures were deployed in the Honduran elections, they might be anticipated on a much bigger scale, again with little restraint, when the prizes could be Latin America’s biggest economies.
May 25, 2026
Governance in Honduras shifted sharply to the extreme right within months of National Party’s Nasry Asfura taking office on January 27, succeeding the Libre party’s progressive Xiomara Castro. In November 30 elections, the National Party was trailing a poor third before US President Donald Trump threatened to end all aid to Honduras unless Asfura won. Even then, Asfura had only a wafer-thin plurality, which might well have disappeared had the electoral council not broken its mandate by halting the count before all the votes had been tallied.
Compounding this blatant interference, Trump announced just two days before the election that he was pardoning former Honduran President and National Party stalwart, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been extradited to the US and was serving a 45-year sentence for narco-trafficking. Corporate media treated Trump’s pardon as just a typically blatant political maneuver. Yet they have since largely ignored what appears to be a much bigger element of the same plot.
The Emerging Regional Offensive
The wider conspiracy has been revealed in a trove of leaked audio recordings, now dubbed “Hondurasgate.” The 37 recordings appear to show that Hernández—still in the US—is preparing a return to Honduran politics and, in league with Republican Party officials, is actively producing propaganda directed against progressive governments across Latin America.
Claims by Hondurasgate investigators that the recordings have been independently verified now appear to be at least partially substantiated by a separate investigation commissioned by Drop Site News. BBC Mundo recently interviewed Hernández and asked for his response to the controversy, but received no response.
The blatant US intervention exemplified by Hondurasgate may be an ominous foreshadowing of likely interference in the upcoming elections in Colombia (this month), Brazil (October), and Mexico (2030), all currently governed by progressives.
Shocking as the revelations are, Hondurasgate is symptomatic of a much more ambitious project to exploit Honduras and impose the “Donroe Doctrine” across the region. Whether or not the recordings are all genuine, the wider project is very much alive.
Power Consolidation Through Lawfare and Repression
Since taking office, Asfura wasted no time consolidating control over Honduran institutions. The elections left the Libre party with fewer than one-third of the seats in the National Congress, reverting to the historic pattern in Honduras in which the National and the Liberal parties—both neoliberal and subservient to Washington—swap power. This has enabled Asfura to move quickly against his enemies.
Marlon Ochoa, Libre’s representative on the electoral council and the first official to call out the electoral fraud, was impeached by Congress on fabricated charges, received death threats, and fled the country.
The sitting attorney general, also from Libre, was dismissed. The Supreme Court president was forced to resign, while other leading congressional members were impeached. Many of those kicked out of their jobs also had their US visas revoked.
“It is a political lawfare operation in which Honduran institutions are acting against the country’s own legal framework to eliminate political opponents,” wrote Diario RED. Carmen Haydeé López, Libre’s press officer, describes the moves as “state capture” by the ruling National Party.
Worse may follow: “If we have to kill people so we can have peace of mind, we’ll do it,” Hernández says in the Hondurasgate audios. Further, “If we have to resort to repression to control the country, we’ll do it.”
Far-right operative Roger Stone—a Trump associate said to have orchestrated Hernández’s pardon—even called for the US to kidnap Xiomara Castro and her husband, former president “Mel” Zelaya, “like they did with Maduro.”
Return to the Narco-State
These developments signal Honduras’ return to the corrupt and criminal neoliberal order that prevailed after the 2009 military coup and lasted until Xiomara Castro’s presidency in January 2022.
For most of this earlier period, Juan Orlando Hernández dominated politics, transforming Honduras into a “narco-state.” Over the years, he facilitated the trafficking to the US of at least 400 tons of cocaine, accepted huge bribes (including $1 million from Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán), and ran a regime marked by extreme violence.
The leaked recordings show Hernández expects a reconfigured judiciary to clear him of outstanding charges in Honduras. This would pave the way for his return and even to make a run for president again in 2029.
Rolling Back Social Gains and Imposing Austerity
In the meantime, Asfura has moved rapidly to dismantle the Libre government’s modest achievements. Castro had begun to invest heavily in a public health service that fell apart during the Covid-19 pandemic. Asfura halted construction of three hospitals her administration had partially completed. He also withdrew a popular subsidy for electricity bills benefiting 600,000 low-income families.
In the last few weeks, Honduras has witnessed widespread protests against the weakening of workers’ rights, a march organized by 30 campesino movements against legislation that strengthens the hands of big landowners, and student demonstrations over cuts in university budgets.
Another worrying hint of a return to the narc-ostate has been a sharp increase in homicides, extortions, kidnappings, and femicides. Violence peaked on May 21, with 24 violent deaths in two incidents: 19 peasant farmers murdered in a land conflict and five people killed in a gang assault on a police vehicle.
Cuts in public spending and attacks on the rights of the 60% of Hondurans living in poverty constitute Asfura’s austerity program. But Asfura’s and Hernández’s aims are for a much wider transformation of the country.
One of Castro’s reforms was to declare illegal the private model cities or “ZEDEs,” which Hernández and his predecessor initiated in the face of community protests. Asfura has reversed her decisions, thus neutralizing huge pending lawsuits filed against Honduras by the libertarian investors in two ZEDEs, Próspera and Morazán. US investor and billionaire Trump adviser Peter Thiel is a key figure behind Próspera. The congress is now exploring how to promote more of these libertarian “states within a state” that ride roughshod over the rights of local communities.
Militarization and Reassertion of US Hegemony
Another payoff for Trump in return for Hernández’s pardon is the promise of a second US military base in Honduras. Because of its strategic position in Central America, the US already has the huge Soto Cano base, which Castro threatened to close. Soon, according to Marlon Ochoa, the US will install another base on the island of Roatán, further strengthening Washington’s naval domination of the Caribbean.
If built, it will be part of a wave of US militarization in the region, with a strengthened base in El Salvador and US troops newly deployed in Panama.
Another dramatic change is the restoration of close ties with Israel. During Castro’s presidency, Honduras (along with Colombia and Nicaragua) was one of Latin America’s fiercest critics of the Gaza genocide. Hernández, when president, had close links with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who (according to the Hondurasgate recordings) had "everything to do" with Hernández’s pardon.
This month, Israeli President Issac Herzog embarked on a diplomatic tour of Central America, stopping in Panama and attending the inauguration of Costa Rica’s new President, Laura Fernández. While in San Jose, Herzog met Chile’s new right-wing President José Antonio Kast and Honduras’s Nasry Asfura who, despite his Palestinian ancestry, identifies as a Christian Zionist. Asfura’s administration is part of a broader regional trend in which Trump-aligned governments (such as Bolivia’s) restore ties with Israel that were severed by their predecessors.
Asfura is reportedly planning legislation to encourage investment by US and Israeli AI firms. Honduras’s abundant water resources and renewable energy infrastructure would be central to such projects. Yet several of these developments have proven highly controversial with rural communities, including the notorious hydro project which led to the murder of Berta Cáceres.
Testing Ground for the “Donroe Doctrine"
Gerardo Torres Zelaya says that “Honduras is not an isolated case: It is a testing ground for a new offensive against our democracies.” Torres Zelaya, a former vice minister in Castro’s administration, believes that what is at stake is not just the outcome of an election, but progressive Latin American governments being subjected to offensives that “no longer operate according to traditional rules.”
He adds that the region now faces hybrid warfare, strategically combining disinformation, economic coercion, criminal networks and, if required, military force. Trump’s intervention in Honduras raised the stakes further when compared with previous electoral interference. Yet even that was soon surpassed by the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
In March, Trump assembled his regional allies in pursuing his “Donroe Doctrine” to create the “Shield of the Americas.” Nasry Asfura was there, of course, along with his opposite numbers in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama.
The blatant US intervention exemplified by Hondurasgate may be an ominous foreshadowing of likely interference in the upcoming elections in Colombia (this month), Brazil (October), and Mexico (2030), all currently governed by progressives. If no-holds-barred measures were deployed in the Honduran elections, they might be anticipated on a much bigger scale, again with little restraint, when the prizes could be Latin America’s biggest economies. Hondurasgate signals that Trump will not act alone; his accomplices will be the 12 members of his “Shield of the Americas.”
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Establishment Democrats Still Don't Get Why They Lost in 2024
No amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies.
May 20, 2026
As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.
To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.
Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)
If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.
Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.
At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.
His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.
Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."
He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."
Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.
Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.
When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. "The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn't big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base." He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace "economic populism with teeth."
Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.
This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden's administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza hurt the campaign "but not in the ways people think." He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden's support for Israel (and Harris' inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a "giant, rotting fish around [the campaign's] neck."
This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.
Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless war all rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.
Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.
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What Progressives Want for Mother's Day: Affordability and Family Reunification
"To really honor Mother's Day, we must fight for our government to pass policies that actually help mothers and families," Sen. Elizabeth Warren said.
May 10, 2026
Progressive leaders and organizations celebrated US Mother's Day on Sunday with calls for policy changes that would make life easier for families.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pointed out that issues of affordability make mothering—and celebrating mothers—more difficult.
"Despite the average family paying 20% of their income on childcare in 2025, [President Donald] Trump has said, 'It's not possible for us to take care of daycare,'" Warren posted on social media, referring to remarks the president made last month in which he claimed that the federal government could not afford to fund childcare, Medicare, and Medicaid because it needed the money for warfare.
"To really honor Mother's Day, we must fight for our government to pass policies that actually help mothers and families," Warren continued.
"If this country truly valued mothers, our politics would reflect it."
In a separate post, the Massachusetts senator listed several items, from cakes to coffee to flowers, that had gone up in price during the second Trump administration.
"Here's everything that's more expensive this Mother's Day under Donald Trump," she wrote.
Here's everything that's more expensive this Mother's Day under Donald Trump:
Fresh cakes and cupcakes: up 5.2%
Fresh sweetrolls, coffeecakes, doughnuts: up 3.6%
Bananas: up 5%
Citrus fruits: up 2.7%
Coffee: up 18.7%
Candy and chewing gum: up 10.6%
Indoor plants and flowers: up…
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 10, 2026
Progressive political action group Our Revolution also called for a more robust social safety net for Mother's Day.
"If this country truly valued mothers, our politics would reflect it," the group wrote. "Universal childcare. Medicare for All. Paid family leave. A living wage. Affordable housing. Strong public schools. A four-day work week. Reproductive freedom."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who founded Our Revolution, wished a happy Mother's Day to his wife Jane and all other mothers, calling for both national and global stability.
"Let us continue our push for a world where all mothers can raise their families without the threat of war, with economic stability, and where their rights are protected," he wrote.
Other lawmakers focused on mothers who are separated from their children due to immigration detention under the second Trump administration, which resumed the practice of family detention after it had largely been abandoned under President Joe Biden.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) spent Saturday preparing donations for Immigration and Custom Enforcement's (ICE) Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Decatur Township, Pennsylvania.
"This Mother’s Day I’m thinking of the moms and mother figures unjustly detained at Moshannon who would rather be at home with their babies," she wrote on social media.
This Mother’s Day I’m thinking of the moms and mother figures unjustly detained at Moshannon who would rather be at home with their babies.
Yesterday we packed and sent off buses with donations for them. It’s the least we can do. pic.twitter.com/EocSX6kzrY
— Rep. Summer Lee (@RepSummerLee) May 10, 2026
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) encouraged followers to donate to Each Step Home, which works to reunite immigrant families and support and release children in immigration detention.
"This Mother's Day, I'm thinking of Trump & ICE's cruel treatment of mothers & traumatization of children. No mother, no child, & no family should be detained—but that's exactly what's happening in Dilley, TX," she wrote, referring to a family detention center reopened by the second Trump administration and run by private prison company CoreCivic.
This Mother's Day, I'm thinking of Trump & ICE's cruel treatment of mothers & traumatization of children.
No mother, no child, & no family should be detained—but that's exactly what's happening in Dilley, TX. pic.twitter.com/NeyB4gVIJo
— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) May 10, 2026
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), meanwhile, shared the story of Isidoro González Avilés and Norma Anabel Ramírez Amaya, who were released from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detention on Friday and reunited Saturday with their son Kevin González, who has terminal cancer.
Kevin, who was born in the US and raised in Mexico, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer during a visit to the US, as CNN reported. His parents attempted to travel to the US to visit him before he died, despite having previous immigration infractions, and were detained. The family was finally able to reunite in Durango, Mexico.
Isidoro González Avilés y Norma Anabel se reunieron este sábado con su hijo Kevin en Durango, México, luego de ser liberados por el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional el viernes.
Kevin, quien nació en Estados Unidos, pero se crió en México, tiene cáncer de colon en etapa cuatro… pic.twitter.com/K341mAlOFU
— N+ UNIVISION (@nmasunivision) May 10, 2026
"My heart is full seeing the images of Kevin and his family reunited," Ramirez wrote. "Our community made this moment possible. As we celebrate Mother's Day, let’s remember all the mothers still separated from their loved ones by DHS. For all the families that have not been reunited yet, we continue the fight."
In a separate post, she added, "To all those who are grieving loss, family separation, and the impacts of genocide and war this Mother's Day, we see you. You are not alone."
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